There were a couple times, as the miracle was happening, that Head Coach Steve Mohr ’76 figured, okay, this is fun, this is goofy, but this is not going to actually work. It was October 27, 2007, and the Mohr’s football team, the Trinity University Tigers, were engaged in what he now describes as “a giant game of keep-away” against their Division III opponent that day, the Millsaps Majors, down in Mississippi. Trinity—a small liberal arts school in San Antonio, Texas—had begun the play with two seconds left in the game and the ball on their own 39-yard line. They were behind, 24-22. They needed a touchdown, but they were too far away to throw a Hail Mary pass. So the quarterback threw a short pass across the middle, a receiver caught it, and when he ran into a Millsaps tackle, he lateraled the ball to a teammate, who then lateraled it to a third teammate, who then threw it behind his back—blind—to a fourth teammate, as Millsaps gave chase. And now the clock was at zero, and Mohr watched from the sidelines as his players kept inching closer and closer to the end, to catastrophe, almost going out of bounds, just barely avoiding the Millsaps jerseys.
But they didn’t get tackled and didn’t run out of bounds, and the laterals kept popping—fifteen in all, between seven Trinity players, lasting sixty-two seconds. And when the final lateral landed in the hands of wide receiver Riley Curry, who sprinted the final twenty-five yards and dove across the goal line, it ignited a media storm for tiny Trinity University. A tape of the play made it onto ESPN that night. Since then, two YouTube clips of the play have collectively been viewed more than a million times; TIME magazine chose what has become known as “The Mississippi Miracle” as the top sports play of 2007.
Mohr has been coaching in Division III for 32 years, but he was as astonished by the play as everyone else. “Everyone always asks me, did you practice it?” he says. Of course, the answer is no. “It’s a one in a million chance, it really is. Nobody in the world’s ever going to see anything like that again, probably for a long time.” Mohr and his players have set up a website, TrinityMiracle.com, with links to all their press coverage and Tigers swag for sale (T-shirts, bumper stickers, coffee mugs)—and, of course, the original YouTube video. “It’s amazing,” Mohr says. “You see it, you’ll be amazed.”