Wide receiver Marques Colston's ill-fated illegal forward pass was a fitting end to the New Orleans Saints' sloppy divisional round loss at Seattle.
What inquiring minds wanted to know after the game was whether Colston was freelancing or simply failed to execute a plan.
As it turns out, it was the latter.
"It's a play that we worked on," Colston said, via ESPN. "Obviously, it's not an ideal situation, but the ball came out. And obviously the throw didn't go the way I would have planned. But, it happens."
Coach Sean Payton acknowledged that he probably should have waited one more play to call for the lateral.
"We'd kind of seen something on tape, Marques has got a pretty good arm," Payton explained. "You know, hindsight, (it was) a play where he could have caught it, stepped out and then maybe (we throw) a Hail Mary to the end zone. But it was a play we had put in a week and a half ago. ... So, yeah, he wasn't freelancing."
Down by eight points with less than 10 seconds remaining and no timeouts left, the Saints were facing long odds even if Colston had stepped out of bounds. The failed lateral was not the reason his team lost the game.
*The latest "Around The League Podcast" broke down all four divisional round games and looked ahead to a monster conference championship weekend. *
