Shane Stafford`s One Mistake
Andrew Mason
Saturday April 27, 2002
For 59 minutes and 13 seconds, the game was his. Even though he’d started just two Arena Football League games before receiving the full-time starter’s job in the wake of John Kaleo’s ACL injury, Stafford was poised, efficient and accurate. He’d completed two-thirds of his 36 passes, had averaged 7.5 yards per attempt and had allowed three teammates to amass more than 50 yards in receptions apiece.
There was no reason to believe things would turn against him as the Storm faced third-and-5 from the San Jose SaberCats’ 6-yard-line with a deadlock on the scoreboard and 47 seconds on the game clock. No possible reason to foresee that in 13 seconds, a nearly perfect night that would have heralded his arrival as a bona-fide AFL passer would go horribly awry.
No reason for disaster. No inkling of a game-shattering mistake. But it happened anyway.
Such is life for a young quarterback. Mistakes can – and will – happen, whether a passer takes his baby steps as a starter in front of 70,000 in an NFL stadium or in front of over 11,000 in the Ice Palace.
But when they happen with so much at stake, when the mistake is an ill-advised short pass into traffic that San Jose’s Bob McMillen turned into a 46-yard interception return to give the SaberCats a 61-54 win, they can become the kind of colossal albatross that will require a month of great performances and wins to undo in the minds of the home fans.
It’s doubtful most will recall the way Stafford capably incorporated Lawrence Samuels, Melvin Cunningham and Carlos Johnson into the offense in a manner that recalled the mid-to-late-1990s trio of Samuels, George LaFrance and Stevie Thomas. Or how he effectively turned rollouts into completions, or how he converted six of eight third-down plays in the game’s first 59 minutes. Or how he posted a night as efficient as John Kaleo’s in Week 1, demonstrating no drop-off from the injured 9-year veteran.
No, most will remember that one throw that brought back tortured memories of Trent Dilfer slinging ill-advised short passes into heavy traffic just past the line of scrimmage.
Stafford will have other opportunities. Some day, he might make Storm fans forget about this defeat as he takes his place among the Storm’s strong quarterback lineage, and some day, he’ll have games where a solitary mistake means nothing, taking place in the second quarter with a two-score lead.
But on this night, Stafford made one error at the worst possible time.
Andrew Mason was at the Tampa Bay Storm`s first home game on June 1, 1991 and has followed the game ever since. While in college, he served as content editor and co-founder of The Storm Shelter, a Web site which covered the Tampa Bay Storm on the Internet from 1996-99. He also volunteered with the team`s media relations department in 1998 and currently contributes to ColoradoCrush.com. He's covered the NFL for various on-line outlets since 1999.
