Chad Pennington Leads Dolphins to Victory at The Meadowlands

Dolphins cornerback Jason Allen runs around like a mad man outside of the visiting locker room at the Meadowlands, high-fiving his teammates as they run in the locker room while he screams, “Get your hat! Go and get your hat!”

Allen is already wearing his grey AFC East Championship hat, just minutes after Miami’s 24-17 win over the Jets.

“Ain’t nobody believe in us!” he yells.

The true star of the game has yet to arrive, but soon Allen runs into the locker room shouting, “He’s coming! He’s coming!” The “he” is quarterback Chad Pennington.

“C - D!” he hollers as Pennington jogs into the locker room after hugging Allen. “Get your hat!” 

On the other side of the stadium, Brett Favre sulks into the Jets locker room. Although he isn’t sporting a grey championship hat, he is nevertheless feeling quite gray.

“I’m sure everyone is going to say he’s old, washed up and gray,” Favre says at the press conference. “Maybe they’re right.”

Even a win wouldn’t have made a difference for Favre’s Jets. While Miami needed the victory to secure a playoff bid as the AFC East titleholder, it was a tad trickier for New York. They needed a win and they needed either New England to lose at Buffalo or Baltimore to lose at home against Jacksonville.

News of the Patriot’s one o’clock game win quickly spread throughout the Jets locker room, but there was still hope Baltimore would lose their contest, which started the same time as the Jet’s 4:15 match.

Things seemed hopeful in the first quarter when the crowd of 79,454 cheered as Baltimore's score was blasted on the big screen, with the Jaguars up 7-3. But things quickly turned bleak once the Ravens started scoring, 10-7, then 17-7, then 24-7, then 27-7, none of which were coincidentally—or rather purposefully—shown on the Meadowlands big screen.

“I pretty much figured it out when they showed the score in the first quarter and we didn’t see it again for the rest of the game,” Jets tight end Chris Baker said after the game. “It wasn’t too hard to figure out.”

Things were awkward from the start on Sunday—there was Cyndi Lauper’s nasally butchering of the National Anthem, the humid 65 degree but gloomy winter weather, Pennington uncomfortably yet emotionally hugging Jets players before the coin toss, and Jets fans launching hundreds of brown napkins in the air in place of confetti on the first score—as if they hadn’t prepared to celebrate at all.

Perhaps playing for dignity is overrated. And by the second half, the only thing the Jets were playing for was Favre’s dignity. Pennington was playing for a playoff bid and revenge against the team that discarded him after eight seasons—whether he’ll admit it or not.

When asked if he felt at home being back at the Jet’s stadium, where some fans still cheered the quarterback, Pennington diplomatically responded, “Well, I appreciate Jet fans. They’ve been good to me for eight years.”

But even if Pennington remained tactful, his teammates were eager to speak for him.

“They promised him he was the guy and then all the sudden they cut him,” said Dolphins linebacker Akin Ayodele. “So to come down and get redemption, the whole team was happy for him.”

Pennington went to a team with the worst record in the NFL and led them to be the first team to make the playoffs after a one-win season.

“When we started off 0-2, people were saying we were who they thought we were, but we believed the whole time that we could get it done and we got it done,” defensive end Kendall Langford said. “It ain’t about how you start, it’s about how you finish.”

Like Pennington said after the game, maybe it was all meant to end with the Jets.

“I just had a funny feeling that it would, I really did,” Pennington said. “It shouldn’t and couldn’t happen any other way. That’s the way it works out, especially in the game of football. I just had a feeling that if we could take care of business, especially late in the season, that it would come down to this last game and it did.”

But Pennington isn’t the only one getting revenge against doubters.

“When everybody heard I was a Miami Dolphin, they told me they weren’t going to watch my games because they didn’t want to waste their time,” wide receiver Brandon London said. “I’m rubbing it in everybody’s face now. I just got 35 texts. Don’t say good job. Don’t say nothing. I’m going to rub it in your face (first), then I’m gonna let everybody tell me good job.”

One person who hadn’t gotten a chance to check his text messages between the cheers and hugs from teammates was Pennington.

“I’m scared to look,” he says glancing around at his teammates celebrating. “I’ve been so blessed to be around such a good group of guys where they accepted me from the get-go, brought me in. I just wanted to be a part of what we were trying to do here and I’ve just been blessed, I really have.”