MIAMI // The reject quarterback without a club, finds work with the worst team in the league and leads them on a remarkable revival, culminating in a showdown championship decider against the very team that discarded him. It reads like a cliched film script, but today when Chad Pennington leads the Miami Dolphins out against the New York Jets, at the Meadowlands stadium he called home for eight years, the drama will be very real.
At stake is the AFC East divisional title and a place in the play-offs. The Dolphins just need to win; the Jets need to win and hope that other results go in their favour. The New England Patriots are tied with the Dolphins at the top of the division and are favourites to go through if Miami trip up. The Dolphins' rise from the ashes of last season's 1-15 campaign has been a story of great coaching, renewed ambition and determination and, in the case of Pennington, the dogged refusal to be written off.
Pennington was initially just a footnote in the story of Brett Favre's move to the Jets from the Green Bay Packers - the unglamorous, steady quarterback who had to make room for one of the NFL's greatest, making one last push for Super Bowl glory. When he ended up with the Dolphins, still piecing themselves together under new coach Tony Sparano, he was seen by many as at best a stop-gap solution in a transitional year of rebuilding - at worst a reject with a weak throwing arm.
Instead, Pennington, 32, has enjoyed the best season of his career - throwing for 3,453 yards, a better record than Favre's this season. Pennington, widely liked in Miami due to his unassuming and modest manner, does not talk of payback or revenge and refuses to draw comparisons with Favre, but he knows there is something of the fairytale about today's game. "As only fate would have it, this is how sports always works out, so this situation doesn't surprise me. I pretty much banked on it. It's a good thing and I'm excited about it; the whole team is excited about having the chance to be able to have one shot into the play-offs," he said.
"That's what you work so hard for the whole season, to get to this point to have an opportunity to play an extra game." Few though would have predicted that the Dolphins, a ragged outfit, outclassed all last year, would so quickly transformed. But Pennington said he never gave up hope. He said: "If you don't have those expectations for yourself as an individual, especially as a quarterback, you don't believe you can help change a team and lead a team to victory, you really don't have any business being behind a centre.
"I didn't know exactly what to expect, I think our whole team, we really didn't know what to expect from ourselves. At the same time, we expected ourselves to play well, we expected a lot out of ourselves and we expected ourselves to be successful. "Are we shocked that we're here? No, not at all because we've worked extremely hard and we've talked about this opportunity and this position for quite some time now."
* Reuters
