Ahead of the Washington Commanders’ 23-20 wild card win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, there was a lot of talk about all of the “firsts” the organization was experiencing — Washington’s first time securing at least one win over each of their three divisional opponents since 2015; its first playoff berth since 2020; and the first time quarterback Jayden Daniels would take the field in the playoffs, period.<\/p>\n
Despite being seasoned players, even veterans can have firsts in the postseason, too. One that has largely flown under the radar is linebacker Bobby Wagner’s first career playoff fumble recovery.<\/p>\n
With Tampa Bay on their 15-yard line with a four-point lead in the fourth quarter, quarterback Baker Mayfield intended to hand the ball off to wide receiver Jalen McMillan on a jet sweep, but things didn’t go to plan for the Buccaneers.<\/p>\n
Although it’s unclear whether it was a botched snap or a miscommunication on the timing of the handoff between Mayfield and McMillan, the ball ended up loose and Wagner immediately pounced on the fumble to recover it for the Commanders.<\/p>\n
“I saw there was a fast motion, and I was kind of bumping toward the motion, and then I saw him [McMillan] fumble it and saw the ball on the ground,” Wagner said of the play in his postgame press conference. “I knew we needed that ball, so I made sure I got it instead of him [Mayfield].”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ahead of the Washington Commanders’ 23-20 wild card win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, there was a lot…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":187562,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2077],"tags":[211,7,1806,6,1805,704,250,2597,2596],"class_list":{"0":"post-187561","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tampa-bay-buccaneers","8":"tag-buccaneers","9":"tag-football","10":"tag-football-news","11":"tag-nfl","12":"tag-subsection-news","13":"tag-tampa-bay","14":"tag-tampa-bay-buccaneers","15":"tag-tampabay","16":"tag-tampabaybuccaneers"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187561\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/187562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}