Stanford WR Francis Owusu Made an Era-Defining Catch

Say it’s the 1930s, and you’re not taking no guff from no one. When the soda shop closes down, and all of your pallies have to finish whitewashing the fence before supper, you head to the old dusty lot behind Mr. McEwan’s apothecary. There, you find a dusted up pigskin sitting all by itself. You pick it up and start to drop your arm onto the track of a throw and you imagine the most incredible play that could possibly happen. Suddenly, you have a vision of Francis Owusu catching an insane pass behind the back of his defender. Right?

It’s hard to say that the Stanford wide receiver’s catch is timeless, per se. We’d love to believe that football has always been a realm of infinite possibilities, but quite simply, what Owusu did was surely a byproduct of an evolution in the game. Not that our capacities as human beings have changed over the past century or so; we’ve come to meet what is possible within the parameters of the sport. Perfection, after all, isn’t a line but, rather, a constantly shifting limit.

Owusu saw that limit and told it to go F itself. What we witnessed last night was an indelible shift in the game’s vernacular. Sure, we’ve all seen Tyrone Prothro’s catch, but that seemed like a quick instinctual move. I’m not going to say that there was no instinctive spark within Owusu—there obviously was—but you couldn’t help but get the impression that the man knew exactly what he was doing, the way he pinned the ball and cradled it with his left hand.

We are now stepping into an era of behind-the-defender’s-back intentionality. Coming soon to back lots near you.