2 TDs in 10 seconds? Jeremy Chinn left no doubt who the NFL’s best rookie on defense is
No one has ever been happier about seeing a “Double Chinn” appear than Carolina Panthers fans were in the third quarter Sunday of Carolina’s eventual 28-27 loss to Minnesota.
That’s because, in 10 extraordinary seconds just after halftime, Carolina Panthers rookie Jeremy Chinn should by all rights have won himself the NFL’s Defensive Rookie of the Year award.
On back-to-back snaps at the start of the third quarter against Minnesota, Chinn scored consecutive touchdowns.
Yes, two TDs in a row, in 10 seconds, sandwiched only by a kickoff through the end zone.
“It was fun,” Chinn said. “It was exciting. I haven’t scored a touchdown since high school so that was cool, getting back in the end zone.”
Scoring on consecutive plays from scrimmage is extremely hard to do as an offensive player. For a defensive player, it’s so rare that no one could find a case of it ever happening before in the NFL. This was like a soccer goalkeeper scoring twice on back-to-back punts, or a pitcher hitting back-to-back grand slams, or a golfer making two holes-in-one in the same round.
The TDs were later overshadowed by Carolina’s nasty fourth-quarter collapse. Somehow, Chinn scoring 12 points by himself still wasn’t enough.
But they shouldn’t be overshadowed, because they were NFL rarities of the highest order.
On the first play, with Carolina trailing 10-7, Panthers defensive tackle Zach Kerr blasted Minnesota quarterback Kirk Cousins with a bull rush up the middle. Chinn was more of a “right-place, right-time” guy on this one, as the Carolina safety/linebacker scooped up the ball and scored from 17 yards out for Carolina’s first defensive TD of the year.
Chinn then showed his athleticism with a leaping spike of the football over the goalpost.
Minnesota got the ball back after a Joey Slye kickoff out of the end zone and ran a safer play on its next snap — a handoff to star running back Dalvin Cook. He was quickly stuffed for a 4-yard gain, but his legs were still churning.
“I got to the pile a little late,” Chinn said, “and he was already wrapped up. So I went for the ball and ripped it out. I think it ended up bouncing off somebody’s leg and landed right in my hands, so I just took off with it.”
Unlike the first play, the second one was closely reviewed, and it seemed for a time it might be overturned. But no, Cook had lost the ball before he had gone down, and Chinn had indeed swiped it and scored from 28 yards away.
Chinn became only the third player in NFL history — and the first since 1948 — to score two touchdowns in a game on two separate fumble recoveries.
Lest you think that’s all Chinn did, he also led the Panthers with 13 tackles. He came into the game with the NFL lead among all rookies in tackles, but he didn’t have a lot of splashy plays to put on his list of reasons why he should be the DROY.
Now he has two.
The eventual loss also threw two buckets of cold water on the whole afternoon, which is a shame for Chinn’s sake, because now he will always have to remember that what may end up being the finest individual game of his NFL career came in a loss.
The Panthers’ defense was bad on the first and the last drives of the game, allowing long touchdown marches in each case. In between, they played decently and held Cook to only 61 rushing yards and zero touchdowns, although Minnesota kept standout defensive end Brian Burns mostly in check and Cousins passed for 307 yards and the game-winning TD.
Carolina had one last chance, but Slye badly hooked a 54-yard field goal try in the last six seconds.
“We just have to finish,” Chinn said. “I feel like I say that all the time, but we can’t let our opponent breathe. We’re playing good as a defense and we’ve just got to keep it going and put the nail in the coffin.”
No Panther defender had ever scored two touchdowns in a game before, let alone in 10 seconds.
Not Julius Peppers. Not Luke Kuechly. Not Sam Mills. Not anybody.
Chinn’s feat seemed set to inspire all sorts of great headlines. I even ran an in-game Twitter poll after the second TD asking which of these four potential headlines (several of them crowd-sourced) that fans believed would be best:
Double Chinn; Chinn Music; Chinn-sanity; Chinn, Again.
Double Chinn won by a landslide.
And if Chinn keeps playing like this, he’s going to win the DROY award by a landslide, too. As he should.
