Marques Colston was told by coaches to throw lateral at end of game

Hey, do you remember how the playoff game between the New Orleans Saints and the Seattle Seahawks ended? You know, with New Orleans Saints wide receiver Marques Colston attempting a ridiculous lateral across the field as opposed to merely stepping out of bounds and giving the Saints one final shot at the end zone?

Yeah, turns out that was planned.

Head coach Sean Payton revealed after the game that Colston wasn’t just improvising:

"We’re probably maybe a play early from [needing to call] it, but with no timeouts … We’d kind of seen something on tape, Marques has got a pretty good arm. You know, hindsight, [it was] a play where he could have caught it, stepped out and then maybe [we throw] a Hail Mary to the end zone. But it was a play we had put in a week and a half ago, prior to this game, which was a deep throw to Marques and then across the field to Cadet. So, yeah, he wasn’t freelancing (ESPN)."

If Colston had completed the lateral to running back Travaris Cadet, it would have gone down as one of the greatest plays in NFL history. He didn’t, though, and now us armchair quarterbacks get to spend a week pretending we could have somehow done better. So, uh, everybody wins?

[Source: ESPN]