How Titans' Kevin Dyson, Rams' Mike Jones became friends after 'One Yard Short' Super Bowl 2000

Yahoo

05-02-2025

Kevin Dyson found a friend in the lowest − and most unlikely − of places: The 1-yard line inside the Georgia Dome.
His name is Mike Jones.
Dyson, a former Tennessee Titans wide receiver, and Jones, a former St. Louis Rams linebacker, met there briefly and suddenly on Jan. 30, 2000, during the final play of Super Bowl 34 in Atlanta.
Four seconds left on the game clock: Dyson caught Steve McNair's pass just inside the 4-yard-line and lunged toward the end zone.
Three seconds left: Jones dragged Dyson down, his hands wrapped around Dyson's legs. The ball in Dyson's right hand was three feet short of the goal line and, potentially, a tie score.
Two seconds, one second, no time left: Time ran out, along with the Tennessee's hopes of a Super Bowl 34 victory, as Dyson lay on his back on a play later dubbed both "The Tackle" and "One Yard Short."
At the time, neither Dyson, who three weeks earlier scored the winning touchdown in the "Music City Miracle" playoff game against the Buffalo Bills, nor Jones knew how much they had in common. Nor that they would become friends a few months later.
Save for the day after the game, Dyson didn't watch the final play of Super Bowl 34 again until 3½ months later.
He was in St. Louis — with Mike Jones.
The two broke down the final series together as part of a story done by "The Sporting News."
"I can say we're friends," Jones told The Tennessean. "For how that game ended, you would think we'd be mortal enemies.
"If Kevin Dyson didn't do what he did with that return (in the "Music City Miracle"), they wouldn't even have been in the Super Bowl."
"Just kind of talked through it, the process of what we were both thinking at the time," Dyson said. "Over the years we have, somehow, some way, maintained contact."
Three to five times a year, Jones said.
"The wound's healed," Dyson said. "It healed a long time ago."
Jones, perhaps more than most, understood Dyson's plight, understood being on the other side of a heartbreaking, last-second defeat.
A little less than 10 years earlier, on October 6, 1990, Jones was a running back and a senior captain for Missouri. The Tigers fell to Colorado 33-31 that day in the infamous "Fifth Down" game, when the soon-to-be national champion Buffaloes scored victory on the last play after officials erroneously awarded them an extra down.
"I wasn't even on the field for the fifth down," Jones said. "How ironic. We win the game on the last play to win the Super Bowl, and we lose to the national champions that year down in Columbia, two hours from St. Louis."
The Titans scrimmaged the Rams in Missouri the season after the Super Bowl meeting. Dyson went into it with a "chip on his shoulder," but, thanks to Jones' words during a joint interview, left having released "that quote, unquote anger."
"Mike's just a good dude. To hear how humble he was about it," said Dyson, who, like Jones, coached after he retired from the NFL. "He said it could have gone any way and he just happened to be the one that made the play.
"That's how sports is. I've been on the other side of that (with the "Music City Miracle"), and I never thought about being on the side that I was on, what someone in that position is going through, and how they felt they may have let their team down."
Paul Skrbina is a sports enterprise reporter covering the Predators, Titans, Nashville SC, local colleges and local sports for The Tennessean. Reach him at [e-mail] and on the X platform (formerly known as Twitter) @paulskrbina. Follow his work here.
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This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Super Bowl 34: Tennessee Titans WR Kevin Dyson friendship with Mike Jones