P.J. Williams figured the moment he’d waited for the whole game just wasn’t coming.
Having played the Tom Brady version of the Buccaneers more than any other team has—the Saints faced them twice in the regular season, then again in the playoffs last year—showed New Orleans a few things. And in those three games, one was that Tampa Bay had built in the sort of crossing routes that leveraged the legendary quarterback’s accuracy, and the open-field talent of the receivers around him to take the ball on the move and go.
So the Saints had a robber coverage in for points of the game that allowed Williams to float, feign that he was dropping into the deeper part of the field and follow Brady’s eyes to the ball. Problem was, until the fourth quarter, the Buccaneers had adjusted to New Orleans’s desire to take away the middle.
Then came second-and-10, Buccaneers’ ball from their own 25, down 29–27. Brady needed just a field goal to give Tampa full control of the NFC South race heading into the bye.
The quarterback took a deep drop out of shotgun, planted, hitched and decisively let it go right to Chris Godwin—and, unbeknownst to Brady himself, Williams as well.
“Really all day, we’ve been looking for those in-cuts and they didn’t do a lot of that all game,” Williams said over the cell, from the Saints’ postgame locker room. “So we knew definitely in crunch-time situations they was gonna do that, and I was a free player, just reading the quarterback. And then he took me right to the ball, and it was there, man. It was the play that we were waiting for pretty much all game—and a play that I was planning to steal from the jump.”
Williams laughed and said, “When you see that ball coming to you, man, there’s no better feeling than that. It’s a crazy feeling.”
Williams’s eyes got big, his hands went up and he burst past Godwin and teammate Chauncey Gardner-Johnson to the ball, and flew right down the right boundary with it. One stutter-step past Leonard Fournette, and one more burst past a slew of Buccaneer linemen, and the NFC South race was on again.
The Saints didn’t win the Super Bowl last year, like the Bucs did. But they did win the division, as they had the three years previous, too. And even with Drew Brees now spending his Sundays in a studio, they weren’t about to let go of their reign over the South so easy.
Williams’s pick, sealing the Saints’ 36–27 win, was just one thing proving that on an afternoon over which the Bucs were served plenty of reminders.
