Paul Justin: Promising Future Snuffed Out By Peyton Manning

Paul Justin could have been the one to save the Colts, if not beaten to the punch by the team drafting Peyton Manning.

Welcome back to my Sports Passion Project, where I’ve been known in the past to get quite a lot of pleasure out of calling bad players good.

I wrote an article about how JaMarcus Russell was really good. I called Josh McCown failing to get a nine figure contract the biggest snub in NFL history. I went on a tirade defending my opinion that Kirk Cousins, despite having thrown nine INTs in his previous four starts, was still pretty good. There are more examples. I need not name them all. I’m just proving the fact that I really like injecting some positivity into situations where there isn’t very much to go around, but come on.

Paul Justin?

Who is Paul Justin?

I’d like to note from the very beginning that he is not Justin Paul, a hockey player who played from 1996-1998. He is also not Justin Paul the music composer. He is also not Justin Paul the professional wrestler, who made it as high as ECW for a house show or two in 1997. He is also not Dr. Justin Paul, a faculty member at the Indian Institute of Management, well known business school.

All of these people were also active in the late 90s, which made researching this article extremely difficult, but none of them are Paul Justin.

Paul Justin is an NFL QB, who was drafted in the seventh round of the 1991 Draft to the Chicago Bears. He did not make the roster, but was at least kept as a scout team QB for the 1991 season, before being cut outright right before the beginning of the 1992 season.

This is an extremely bad start to a career.

Paul had actually been rated somewhat highly after an impressive junior season in 1989 at Arizona State University (shout out

Griffin Olah

), but after dislocating his non-throwing shoulder in the third game of his senior season in 1990, he regressed sharply, seeing a decline in every individual statistic, and in the Sun Devil offence as a whole, as the team regressed to a 4-7 record (down from 6-4-1 in 1989) in 1990, and Paul’s draft stock plummeted as a result.

The seventh was not the final round of the draft in 1991. It was barely halfway through, as the draft had twelve rounds in those days, but being picked 190th overall meant the same thing in 1991 as it means now. The league is not high on you. Nowhere near as high as they used to be.

This leads us back to 1992, where Paul has just been cut from the Chicago Bears.

This is a bad sign for an NFL career. There’s almost no sign worse. If you’re a QB who cannot catch on even with the Chicago Bears (who kept a man named Will Furrer over Paul to be the third string QB), it means that it’s likely time to begin considering other options, but Paul did not want to give it up. He wanted to keep fighting to be an NFL player.

With no offers forthcoming from any other team for the 1992 season, Paul went and played professional flag football, which is actually what put him on my radar to begin with, given all the modern discussion about the rise of flag football. He parlayed his flag football success into a contract with the Arizona Rattlers of the Arena Football League for 1993.

He did fine in this chance to play tackle football again. A WR for the Rattlers won the Arena League MVP for 1993, which signals to me that their QB was doing something right, but his statistics of 55.9% completion, and 45 TDs to 15 INTs are not exactly blowing the lid off, by 1990s AFL standards. It’s not the 64.7%, 79 TD, 14 INT season that Kurt Warner was able to pull off in 1997, for instance.

Nevertheless, Paul’s performance did turn enough heads to get him another shot in the orbit of the NFL for 1994, being brought in for a look by the Indianapolis Colts, but once again he failed, falling out of the NFL again after being cut by the Colts, who decided to go with Browning Nagle and his second round draft cache over the journeyman Paul Justin.

Once again, being cut so late in the process (as part of the final round of cuts, just like 1992) left Paul with nothing for the whole 1994 season. The Arena League season (which ends in August) was already in the past. Paul could go play flag football again, but what would be the point of that?

At this point, it really began to look like the ride was over. Four years as a professional football player is further than anybody thought he would make it. It wouldn’t be that bad of a thing for Paul to give himself a pat on the back, call it a good try, and use his contacts from being a three year starter at ASU to find a real job. That is exactly what most players would’ve done in this situation, but not Paul Justin.

He still was not ready to give it up.

The Indianapolis Colts threw Paul a bone in the 1995 offseason, sending him to play for the Frankfurt Galaxy, a team in the developmental World League of American Football (which would later become NFL Europe), as a representative of the Colts. This was likely just to get the bonuses from the NFL that came from sending a player, in an effort to get the brand new for 1995 WLAF off the ground, but there’s a reason the Colts sent Paul specifically.

They’d had him in their camp last year, but stuck with Browning Nagle over him, likely due to optics more so than anything else. Even in 1995, it’s tough to cut a second round pick to keep Paul Justin, but in the 1995 offseason, the Colts lost both of their backup QBs to the newly invented free agency. To fill this void, they traded a first round draft choice to Tampa Bay for QB Craig Erickson (a story I briefly discuss here, and will discuss in great detail sometime in the future), but the third QB position was laying wide open. They wanted to see if Paul had what it took.

Initially, the answer was a resounding no, as Paul could not even start in NFL Europe, but after the Galaxy started the WLAF season just 1-3, as the offence exploded in a 45-22 win in week one, but was largely silent for the next three weeks, scoring just 12, 14, and 20 points as the team dropped to 1-3 under original starter Jim Miller, this gave Paul the chance he needed.

In a European-style league where the only playoffs were a championship game, meaning only two teams made it, beginning a season 1-3 was close to a death sentence, which likely would’ve also been a death sentence for Paul Justin’s NFL dreams, but the difference was obvious with Paul playing QB. The Frankfurt Galaxy exploded, scoring 188 points in the final six games (31.3 per game), and winning five of them, including a clutch victory over the 7-0 Amsterdam Admirals in a game that was absolutely crucial to Frankfurt’s playoff chances.

In the end, Frankfurt snuck into the second spot in World Bowl III with their 6-4 record, behind league MVP Paul Justin, and won the championship 26-22. This second half offensive explosion finally got Paul noticed, so in 1995, for the first time in his professional football career, he would occupy an active roster spot, as the Colts’ third QB.

As we know, the 1995 Colts would choke on the first round pick they traded for Craig Erickson, going all the way to the AFC Championship game with Jim Harbaugh as their starting QB. They would come close to winning that game also, with a lead at the two minute warning, but ultimately would fall just short.

I say ‘the Colts’ because this article is about Paul Justin, and he had almost no part in any of that. He did start one game in 1995, but threw only 13 passes in that game, and threw only 36 passes in the whole season. This is a fortuitous amount of action for a third QB, and the culmination of a years long journey for Paul, but not an amount of action that’s worthy of stopping to speak about.

What I want to talk about is Paul Justin’s performance in the two years between that miraculous AFC Championship game appearance, and the Colts’ drafting of Peyton Manning first overall in 1998.

There are two full seasons that happen between these two occurrences, but if you talk to a Colts fan, it’s as if the intertwining two years don’t even exist. The team makes the AFC Championship, almost wins it, and then are instantly miserable enough to draft Peyton number one, who makes it all better again. Generally, this lapse in memory is not such a bad thing. Even though Colts football was played in the interim, it didn’t feature too much that couldn’t be missed or has to be remembered. However, there is just one thing that gets buried in all this. One name that I think could’ve been a starting calibre talent in the NFL, if not kicked out of a good Colts situation in favour of Peyton Manning.

His name is Paul Justin.

I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say that Paul Justin started seven career games for the Indianapolis Colts, one of which I have just completely glossed over in 1995. That only leaves six career starts left over the course of two years in 1996 and 1997. How much can a man prove in that little time?

Let me show you.

The first substantive playing time Paul gets during the 1996 season is in week one against the Arizona Cardinals. In the two minute drill, starting QB Jim Harbaugh takes a big hit throwing an incomplete pass to Marvin Harrison. He’s got to come out of this game that the Colts are leading only 7-6, and it’s all on Paul Justin to operate the two minute offence.

Jim had gotten the team all the way to the Arizona 42. As Paul comes in on second and ten, the first thing he does is take an 11 yard sack to make it third and 21 back on the wrong side of the 50 again, but the second thing he does is complete a 30 yard pass to Marshall Faulk that digs his team out of the bad situation he’d gotten them into. Not much more happens from here, but this throw is enough.

Paul sees no more action for the rest of the day, as Jim comes back for the second half, but this drive did get the Colts three key points in a game we only go on to win by seven. Since the hole Paul got the team out of is one he dug in the first place, he only generates 0.12 total EPA in his nine plays, 0.01 EPA/Play. That’s nothing special, but it’s also not negative. In an era where it was common for backup QBs to embarrass themselves in spectacular fashion, Paul did not do that, and he’s going to continue not doing that.

From here, we see Paul settle into the traditional backup role (in the 1990s) of making blowout losses look slightly less bad, so the starter doesn’t have to do it.

For the first instance of this, we fast forward to Paul’s next playing time, which is in week eight of the 1996 season, against a New England Patriot team that’s going to win the AFC this year. They have mopped the floor with the Indianapolis Colts, meaning Paul comes into the game with seven minutes left, losing by the score of 27-9.

Jim Harbaugh has just been sacked really hard by Willie McGinest, and that’s what it takes to convince Colts coach Lindy Infante that this is enough. On third down and 13, in goes Paul Justin. His pass does draw an illegal contact penalty to get the team out of the hole, but on the very next play, a completed pass is fumbled by Aaron Bailey. The ball is recovered by the Patriots, which eliminates any chance of an Indianapolis comeback.

Paul’s got the backup mentality though. Every play is an audition. He will never quit trying. After the Patriots run three times and punt the ball back, Paul comes back onto the field with six minutes left playing like a crazy person. He completes eight passes in a row, with nothing except a single sack in the middle of it all to dull the momentum.

Unfortunately, a tripping penalty on a converted third down in the red zone means this drive has to see fourth and five at the New England 12 yard line, which is where Paul throws his only incomplete pass, and once again this was his only real chance to score. He will come back onto the field with seconds remaining, and gain 33 more yards on the one play that remains, but in the end the score remains 27-9 as the clock strikes zeroes.

Six weeks ago against Arizona, I spoke of Paul simply not generating negative EPA. This time, against a defence that is not particularly good, but is at least good enough to get carried to the Super Bowl by the Patriot offence, Paul stormed right down the field on his only real chance to do so, generating 3.96 total EPA in the 13 times he touched the ball, for 0.305 EPA/Play.

Not bad at all.

Paul Justin accounted for almost as many net yards in this game as Drew Bledsoe did (142 for Drew, 110 for Paul), despite touching the ball only 13 times. He generated 3.96 total EPA on a day where the Colt pass offence as a whole generated -1.78, so that tells you how well Jim Harbaugh was able to deal with this exact same Patriot defensive attack. You may say that these are just garbage time numbers, but Jim Harbaugh got plays while trailing 27-9 in the fourth quarter too. How come his were so bad, but Paul Justin’s were so good?

Just a question.

We repeat this same song and dance in week 11 against the Miami Dolphins. The score at the beginning of the fourth quarter is 37-6 in favour of Miami, so Jim Harbaugh and Dan Marino are both out of the game. We get a fourth quarter battle between the 1995 Colt backups. Paul Justin vs Craig Erickson, and in this small sample battle between the two, Paul proves that the Colts kept the right guy.

A 37-6 comeback in one quarter is not possible, but after getting the ball at his own 35, Paul has the Colts at the Miami goal line within three plays. A 16 yard completion, 12 yard completion, and 21 yard completion get us straight to the Miami three yard line, whereupon the ball is taken out of Paul’s hands. We run three times in a row, all of which fail to score. Paul is allowed to pass the ball only on fourth down, and it falls incomplete.

Once again, a fantastic drive has failed to actually score any points. Once again this is not Paul’s fault, but on our next drive, at last Paul finally gets to throw his first career touchdown pass, to make the score 37-13.

Imagine the mixed feelings here.

Put yourself in Paul Justin’s shoes. At this point in time, you are 28 years old. You’ve been rejected by more teams than you can count. You’ve gone through the Arena League (where you were not the league’s best player, and did not win MVP). You’ve gone through NFL Europe (where you came within a half game of missing the playoffs altogether). You were out of football altogether just two years ago.

Now here you are. You’ve come all the way back. You’re on the NFL football field, where you’ve always wanted to be. You’ve finally thrown your first touchdown pass. Everything you’ve ever dreamed of has finally come to you, but when you look up at the scoreboard, it still reads that same cold, unforgiving, 37-13.

Anticlimax isn’t the word for it. Nobody dreams of their first career touchdown coming in these circumstances. There is only one first. Not everybody’s first can be great, but I suspect the first touchdown passes of very few careers are less great than Paul Justin’s.

In the end, Paul has generated another 3.76 total EPA on another 16 garbage time touches (0.232 EPA/Play) in Miami, which is not bad at all, especially considering the game had been 37-6 for a while even before the start of the fourth quarter, and once again Paul outperformed Jim Harbaugh, even if only comparing the meaningless snaps both took. This time, Paul actually managed to outgain Jim, despite touching the ball for only one quarter.

I wonder if Paul ever thinks back on this afternoon in Miami. There is only one first touchdown pass after all. It just seems a bit heartbreaking to have it be so meaningless to the final outcome of the game.

However, the world is about to make up for this slight.

The Indianapolis Colts are a fringe playoff team in 1996, just like they were a fringe playoff team in 1995. Currently, in the aftermath of that week 11 blowout loss to Miami, plus a thrilling win over the New York Jets that Paul took no part in the following week, the Colts find themselves part of a four way tie for the AFC’s final playoff position, tied at 6-5 with all of the Miami Dolphins, Houston Oilers, and San Diego Chargers.

This means that as we go to New England to face the eventual AFC champion New England Patriots again (the Colts are in the AFC East at this time), this is a crucially important game for us. It’s not one we can afford to lose. Unfortunately, with Jim Harbaugh and the first team offence out there, the team falls behind 17-3, when one of the worst possible outcomes happens.

Jim gets leg dived, and cannot get up.

This was legal in the 1990s, for reasons that I will never understand, and as Jim’s plant leg bends in a manner other than which nature intended, it looks as if Paul Justin is going to be the man for the rest of the season. That turns out not to be the case, as once everything is diagnosed, Jim is going to be out two games (plus this one) with a strained MCL. This is not as bad as it could’ve been, but when you’re a really fringe playoff team like the 1996 Indianapolis Colts, two weeks is all it takes to tank the whole year.

Paul cannot do anything to come back from 17-3 down. Although he ties his 26 minutes of the game, the Colts lose 27-13, dropping to 6-6, and all of a sudden, the playoffs look a long way away.

Thankfully, the Dolphins and Oilers also lost, dropping to 6-6 with us, but the Chargers did not. They are now 7-5, and with our head to head loss to them in a game Paul did not play, that means we are now a game and a half behind them, with no head to head matchup remaining. This means that from 6-6, the Colts are basically going to have to run the table to have a chance at a playoff position, while hoping for some help from San Diego, and they’re going to have to do it with two of those four games being started by Mr. NFL Europe, Paul Justin.

For the first game of this stretch, we catch a bit of a break. It is against the 9-3 Buffalo Bills, but for this week 14 matchup, there is no Jim Kelly, meaning we get to see a QB matchup, in a game crucial for the playoff positioning of both teams, of Paul Justin (second career start) vs Todd Collins (fourth career start). Todd was actually the QB when the Bills beat us back in week six, a game Paul did not play in, so the Bills come in as favourites, likely under the assumption that the crushing 90s Bills defence would have no issues dealing with Paul Justin.

We’ll see about that.

The Colts begin this game struggling to pull the trigger. On the first drive of the game, Paul is allowed to touch the ball just twice. Both are completions to Marshall Faulk, for 37 total yards between them. The rest of the work is handled by just handing the ball to Marshall conventionally, as we grind our way down the field for a 7-0 lead.

Our next offensive touch goes for the same approach, but is much less successful. It’s three Marshall Faulk runs and a punt. Due to the grinding nature of our first drive, that’s already the end of the first quarter, and Lindy Infante has seen enough of this.

Lindy is a masterful offensive coach, who will be pulling the strings in the background of this whole process. While most coaches in the 1990s would be content to keep bashing their head against the wall trying to run through this Buffalo defence that nobody has been able to run through for almost ten years, not Lindy Infante.

Lindy Infante actually cares to play good offence, and as such, this is driving him nuts.

He has already seen what he needs to see out of Marshall Faulk. For the whole second quarter, it will be Paul Justin or nothing, as of the 19 offensive plays for the Colts in the second quarter, 17 of them are throws. Regrettably, there’s a lot of nothing, as only six of these throws are actually caught, and we get just two first downs in the quarter, as Buffalo spends their time pulling a 10-7 lead on us.

This will not do.

I’m writing this article to big up Paul Justin, but I’m just trying to claim he was a starting level talent that never got a real chance. I am not claiming he’s good enough to defeat the 90s Bills passing on every single play. We’ve seen that in great detail in this second quarter, as Paul looked a bit out of his depth at times, so to begin the second half, Lindy decides he ought to try going back to Marshall Faulk again.

The first play of the second half is a handoff to Marshall for a five yard loss.

That’s enough of that. Back to passing.

Paul completes a 19 yard pass to blocking TE Marcus Pollard to dig the Colts out of the second and 15 hole, completes an eight yard pass to Faulk to get the team to third and two on the next series, which a handoff to Marshall converts, and an 18 yard run on first and ten by Cliff Groce (and not Marshall Faulk) gets the team into field goal range. The attempt is blocked, but at least our offence is back rolling again. It’s still a primarily pass driven offence today, but at least we’ve come with a bit more balance out of the half.

The next series does go pass, pass, pass, punt, but the following one continues where we left off with the first one of the half. The big play is a 38 yard ball to Sean Dawkins, as we wind our way all the way inside the Buffalo ten yard line, ultimately stalling there and kicking the FG that ties this game at ten on the first play of the fourth quarter.

From here, nobody can move the ball at all. Buffalo can barely move the ball three inches, meanwhile our three fourth quarter drives are killed by an exceptionally badly timed false start penalty, a drive killing sack, and an unbelievable punt on fourth and three from the Buffalo 43 in a tie game with 58 seconds left. I was praising Lindy Infante earlier, but if that’s not the epitome of scaredy cat NFL coach, I don’t know what is.

After waving the white flag, and unnecessarily conceding overtime, the Colts are rewarded with yet another Buffalo punt, and you can tell which facet of his offence Lindy Infante believed in just by looking at the overtime play calls.

Pass, pass, pass, pass, pass.

OT begins with five passes in a row, at which point we were at the Buffalo 33, so ran the ball to get it on the correct hashmark, and kicked the FG to win this crucial game 13-10.

This is one of the oddest backup QB performances I’ve ever seen.

Paul played adequately, generating -0.016 EPA/Play, which is less bad in the 90s than it is now, but his coach treated him like he was Johnny Unitas, asking him to drop back to pass 45 times, in essence putting the game in Paul Justin’s hands, saying the team will not win unless he plays well. The Colts do this to their starting QB Jim Harbaugh as well, whenever Lindy gets fed up with ineffective rush plays (which he does from time to time), but it’s interesting to me that even with the backup QB in there, Lindy felt no compulsion to stick with Marshall Faulk. None at all. That tells me something about what Paul’s coach thinks of him.

Lindy Infante thinks Paul Justin can do it.

To be fair to Lindy, he did do it. We’ve defeated the 9-3 Bills. They will not be getting a first round bye, largely because of this loss, and with the benefit of a San Diego loss, we are back into a tie for the final playoff position again, which leads us into Paul Justin’s final start of the 1996 season, a special occasion here on this publication.

For a Thursday night matchup in week 15 of the 1996 NFL season, our 7-6 Indianapolis Colts host the 8-5 Philadelphia Eagles, in what I’m calling the Sports Passion Project ‘One More Chance’ Bowl, as it features two NFL QBs from the 1990s whom I think it’s a crime never got a real chance at being NFL starters.

I’ve talked about 1996 Ty Detmer before, and how I think it’s a crime he never got a real NFL chance afterwards. I’m discussing Paul Justin right now, and I never knew in a million years that these two stories were going to collide.

This matchup is great for the purpose of revealing that there are multiple ways to succeed in the NFL. Ty Detmer is thin, small, and relies on his lightning quick release to get things done at the NFL level. Paul Justin is tall, thick, and takes forever to wind up and throw, relying on one of the biggest arms I’ve ever seen to do damage.

This time, the strong and the powerful win out over the small but wiry.

Almost all of Paul’s damage is done on the first three drives, as the first sees Paul have to touch the ball just three times, accounting for 63 yards on these three touches as the Colts score easily to open up the scoring with a 7-0 lead. The second is a three and out, but the third is another wildly successful drive, which includes one of my favourite football plays of all time.

On a third and eight around midfield, Paul throws one of his absolute lasers into the arms of Brian Stablein, a kick return specialist who’s going to finish his NFL career with 77 total receptions. He’s not a real receiver, and when he turns and runs with the ball, he gets absolutely piledriven into the brutal RCA Dome AstroTurf by Brian Dawkins, and as Dawkins tries to stand over him menacingly, like he would do to so many receivers over his Hall of Fame NFL career, Stablein simply gets up and celebrates, too excited by the fact that he’s just converted one of the only first downs of his career to be worried that he’s just taken the hit of a lifetime, or that the man who just gave him that hit is still standing there, trying to intimidate him.

This is a sidebar, but this is why I love digging into the NFL’s history like this. I just watched Paul Justin and Brian Stablein clown on Brian Dawkins. Who else has ever said that sentence?

In the end, this promising drive is held to a FG, and it’s even worse than that, as Paul’s hand comes down on a helmet completing a pass to Sean Dawkins, dislocating some fingers on his throwing hand. He stays in the game temporarily, but you can tell the difference. He is markedly worse after this play than beforehand, completing only six of his 13 passes after the helmet, compared to eight of ten before the helmet, and coming out of the game altogether at halftime, because his first half performance had been enough to garner his team a 23-3 lead.

Like I said, the Eagles were 8-5 coming into this game. They still had vague chances of a first round bye in their own right, behind a very good replacement QB in Ty Detmer. This was not an easy opponent, but Paul Justin ripped them to shreds, to the tune of 0.337 EPA/Play, and that’s with better than half his touches being hindered by dislocated throwing hand fingers.

The Colts win this one easily, 37-10. Combine this with losses from all the teams chasing us, and Paul Justin has not just maintained our playoff position, but solidified it. When Jim Harbaugh left, this was a team one game out of the final playoff position. When he came back, this had become a team with a one game cushion for the final AFC wild card position, and thank goodness for that, because Jim would indeed lose one of his starts.

This would not be all for Paul’s 1996. He would get one drive in the playoff game as well, in his traditional role of trying to narrow the score in a very wide blowout loss, but he did not score any points, and that’s the end of his 1996 season.

In his 129 plays of action, Paul generated 0.1 EPA/Play flat. Not bad at all for a backup. My CPOE projection (which is currently proprietary, but I will release eventually) has him at about -0.6, and his ANY/A for 1996 is 6.13. If we do some rounding up because Paul played in 1996, this 0.100, -0.6, 6.13 stat line looks very similar to 2024 Matthew Stafford (0.118, -0.7, 6.59).

129 plays is a small sample. No doubt, but I’m willing to go with it in this case, because it’s an extremely difficult small sample. Paul’s season did begin with nine plays against the 1996 Arizona Cardinals, who are extremely bad, but after that, he did not touch the ball against a team with a losing record. The clear majority of his plays came against teams that finished the 1996 season with ten wins or better, and only once did Paul play against a team with a negative defensive SRS. That team is the Philadelphia Eagles, and Paul torched them.

This leads me to believe that in a bigger sample, it’s not unreasonable to expect Paul’s numbers to trend upwards instead of downwards.

That notion leads us into the 1997 NFL season.

We know what’s going to happen at the end of this season. The Colts are going to select Peyton Manning with the first pick in the 1998 draft, crushing any dream Paul may have had about being the starter in Indianapolis, but he still has the 1997 season to sell himself to other teams around the league.

The starter is still Jim Harbaugh, as the Colts think they’re going to be competitive again at the start of the year, but as soon as the first game of the season, that begins to waver, as with the score sitting at 17-6 with 2:43 left in the week one game against the Miami Dolphins, Lindy has already seen enough of what Jim Harbaugh can do.

With 2:43 remaining in the game, here comes Paul Justin.

Dropped into another situation where a comeback is virtually impossible, behind nine points with 2:43 to go, and no timeouts, Paul does what he does, trying his best to do what he can with the untenable situation. This time, it comes close to paying off in a big way.

Paul gets the team as far as the Miami 14 yard line, before being forced to settle for a FG to narrow the score to 16-10 with 1:15 left on the clock, and on the second possession, he gets the Colts all the way to the Miami 25 before finally running out of time, falling just short of completing a miracle comeback. Just like last season, Paul has managed 2.19 total EPA in the astounding 15 touches he managed to squeeze into the final 2:43 of this football game, good for 0.146 EPA/Play, but every last bit of it is meaningless to the final outcome, although this time it came perilously close to being different.

Perhaps if there had been just 20 more seconds on the clock, we could’ve had one of the most legendary comebacks in NFL history on this day, but since there weren’t, nobody remembers the name Paul Justin.

As the season continues, so does the incredibly odd usage pattern. The next time Paul sees the field is week four against Buffalo, when he gets dropped into one of the most nauseating situations in the history of the league, and told to fix it.

Early in the second quarter, the Colts scored a touchdown to go up 26-0, and from then on, all Paul Justin can do is watch as his teammates give up touchdown after touchdown, and quit scoring points altogether, coughing up the 26-0 lead. By the time we get to 1:15 of the fourth quarter, the score is 37-29 Buffalo, and the game is basically over. The Colts do have the ball, with one final chance to tie this game, and Jim Harbaugh gets it started off well, completing a 22 yard pass to Aaron Bailey, but uh oh. Flag on the play.

It’s a roughing the passer penalty, and Jim is not getting up. He’s not going to be able to do this.

For the second time in a row, Paul is being thrown into a divisional game, cold turkey, and being told to go win it. This time, the duty of preventing this game from being remembered as the worst collapse in the history of the Indianapolis Colts (as of 1997) falls squarely on his shoulders. Jim Harbaugh made this mess. Paul has to go clean it up.

Does Paul look good on this drive? No. It’s an ugly two minute drill, but with a 17 yard completion to Aaron Bailey, and a 20 yard pass interference penalty, in conjunction with the good work Jim Harbaugh did to get the drive going, he gets the team inside the ten yard line, and from there, just throw the ball to Marvin Harrison. Not much can go wrong when you do that.

When the ball falls into Marvin Harrison’s arms with 14 seconds left on the clock, it looks as if all the Indianapolis Colt fans can breathe a sigh of relief. It still requires a two point conversion, with the score now reading 37-35, but our chances now are infinitely better than they were just one minute ago. However, when Paul looks to go back to Marvin again with the two point pass, Marvin is mugged by Kurt Schulz.

I would love to use a different word, but the live commentators used the word ‘mugged,’ so I’ll stick with that. It’s clear and obvious that Marvin is being held before the ball even leaves Paul’s hand. He’s in the process of being tackled before the ball gets there. That’s two fouls, yet neither of them were called.

It’s hard for me to believe that on an end zone play, no official was looking at Marvin Harrison.

It’s moments like this that make people think the league is rigged. Everybody in the world knows the ball is going to the best young receiver in the game, except apparently for every single one of the officials, who decide that the fifth biggest comeback in NFL history is going to stand, no matter what. The Colts are not given a true chance to even try a two point play, and we lose, 37-35.

People get on the Chiefs for having the referees on their side, but if you want to see a true instance of the referees deciding who the winner of a football game is going to be, watch this two point conversion play. There is no clearer example in league history that I’ve seen. I’m not calling the league rigged, but I am stating clearly that NFL officials had a clear bias against Marvin Harrison, that they would maintain for years, and did not mind costing the Indianapolis Colts a fair chance to win this football game in order to enact that agenda.

This horrible collapse and defeat at the hands of the Buffalo Bills is remembered symbolically as when the competitive Colts of the mid 1990s died, so that they could be entirely reborn under Peyton Manning, but nobody remembers that Paul Justin almost stopped it. He came within an official electing to actually do his job of wiping one of the biggest comebacks in league history out of existence, and interestingly enough, if the Colts win this game, there is no Peyton Manning. No Ryan Leaf either, which likely means no rookie QB at all for the 1998 Indianapolis Colts. The Jim Harbaugh bridge is burned in 1997 for non-performance reasons, so he would’ve been gone too, anyways.

What could that have meant for Paul Justin?

It’s another interesting thought, and an example of a football application of the butterfly effect. Perhaps if that referee just blows the whistle, Paul Justin is starting for the Colts in 1998, and where would we all go from there?

Nevertheless, we’re on the trajectory that we’re on. No butterflies here. We enter the bye week 0-4, and coming out of it for week six sees Paul get more significant action, but for once, it is not good action. It actually looks like a reverse of what we’ve been seeing for most of the duration of this piece. Jim Harbaugh’s numbers in his 17 touches are fairly solid, but when he comes out at halftime, and Paul goes in for the second half of a game that the Colts had still fallen behind 13-0, he does not do as well.

He does play better than Neil O’Donnell plays for the Jets, narrowing the score to 16-10, winning his half of football, and once again coming within 25 yards of winning the game outright, but he does it with a quite bad -0.107 EPA/Play on his 35 touches. Like I said, this is better than Neil O’Donnell was able to do, but outplaying Neil O’Donnell is not a terribly difficult thing to accomplish, especially in the post-Pittsburgh years.

This is just a bad day all around. As far as our story goes, Paul Justin has just played the worst game of his NFL career, and as far as the season goes, we are now 0-5, with a starting QB who is clearly hobbling, and in fact will never be the same as he once was. This theme continues into week eight, against Buffalo again.

Jim is not great, but not awful on a day where Lindy Infante uncharacteristically refuses to throw the ball very much, but again he has to come out in the third quarter, leaving Paul to go at it the rest of the way. Paul generates 0.477 EPA/Play, and scores on both of his possessions, but it doesn’t matter, as Buffalo kicks the game winning FG as time expires, and the Colts lose.

At least Paul is often being given chances to affect the final outcome of these games in 1997, but it feels like it’s all for nought, as no matter what he does, the Colts lose. That is the one constant for the Indianapolis Colts in 1997. We lose. Generally, we lose because of our bad offence, which as of week eight has yet to generate positive EPA in a game.

This is not any slight to Paul Justin. Individually, he has generated positive EPA three times already, and had the Colts in position to win all three games, if something had just gone our way, and even in the Jets game (where even Paul played quite badly), he still had us in position to win, if just something could’ve broken our way that got us only 25 yards further.

This is the story that nobody remembers, the one that paved the road to Peyton Manning. The Colts are not that bad. They are quite bad. Don’t get me wrong, but not first overall pick bad. Largely because of Paul Justin’s late game cleanup work, the Colts have lost five one possession games already, as an 0-7 football team. The San Diego Chargers (the other team in the Peyton Manning sweepstakes) are going to play just five one possession games over the course of the year. The Chargers are worse than we are. There’s no simpler way to say it, but in week nine, when we go to San Diego to play the Chargers, it certainly doesn’t look that way.

In the interim, after the Buffalo game but before this one, Jim Kelly had made fun of Jim Harbaugh being injured all the time on TV, and Jim had punched him in the face in response, breaking his hand in the process. The Indianapolis Colts will withhold Jim’s pay over this, deeming it a non-football injury. The two sides will never forgive each other, and will part ways at the end of the year, but that’s a story for another time.

For right now, Paul is thrust into the starting position, on the road in San Diego with one day’s notice, and my article is backed into the corner of having to explain away why this man I’m working so hard to hype up struggles so badly against the worst team in the NFL.

It’s really bad. I’m not going to sugar coat it. For the last season and a half, Paul has done a fantastic job coming into the game in relief of the oft-injured Jim Harbaugh and not embarrassing the team or himself, but this game is embarrassing. It’s not just embarrassing for Paul. It’s embarrassing for everybody. The rush offence is even worse than the pass offence, getting just 31 yards out of their 16 tries.

This forces Paul Justin, on his worst day as a pro, to drop back to pass 44 times. The result is just as bad as you’d expect, -0.229 EPA/Play in a blowout loss to the San Diego Chargers. The Colt offence has just played their worst game of the year so far (measured by EPA/Play) against the third worst defence in the NFL. That is not a good look for Paul Justin, nor is his next start against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, where he comes out of the game after just four plays, due to more dislocated throwing hand fingers after coming down on another helmet, and the Colts generate positive EPA as a team for the first time all year with third string QB Kelly Holcomb under centre, against the voracious Tony Dungy Buccaneer defence.

None of this makes any sense. What do you mean the backup QB generated positive EPA against Tampa, and it wasn’t even Paul Justin? How is that possible? Make it make sense Mr. Sportswriter.

Believe me. I’m trying. The only way I can bring some semblance of normalcy back to the proceedings is to tell you that the Colts still lost, falling to 0-9 on the year, and that in week 11 against Cincinnati, without both Jim Harbaugh and Paul Justin, the Colts get brutalised by the 2-7 Cincinnati Bengals, becoming the beginning of the Boomer Esiason retirement tour for the ages (hey! We know that story).

What began the season as a credible football team, that just kept losing their one possession games, has devolved into a comedy of errors. In the loss against Cincinnati, Kelly Holcomb broke his left wrist. Jim Harbaugh’s hand is still broken. Paul Justin is trying to heal, but throwing hand fingers are not a thing that you want to mess with.

This leaves the distinct possibility of having to go into the week 12 matchup against the defending Super Bowl champion Green Bay Packers without Jim Harbaugh and without Paul Justin and without Kelly Holcomb, a situation that would surely be an unmitigated disaster. For a team who is already 0-10, it’s hard to make things even worse, but playing the Green Bay Packers starting Gino Torretta at QB (a man with a career completion percentage of 31.3) would make it worse. I assure you.

That can’t happen.

Both Jim and Paul practice in the week leading up to the Green Bay game, but both are late decisions. Gino Torretta is not a real decision though. Everybody knows that one of these two men is going to play. In the end, it’s decided that Jim Harbaugh can’t go. Paul Justin can, leaving the former flag footballer staring down the biggest challenge of his life.

Paul Justin has started five NFL games. In one of those starts he threw just three balls before messing up his fingers again. Throw that one out. There’s been a lot of mop up duty involved, but all things being included, he’s touched the ball 288 times in his NFL career. They’ve been mostly productive touches, and mostly against good teams, but nothing prepares you for starting a game against the 1997 Green Bay Packers.

They are not near the quality of the 1996 team that blitzed the league and easily won the Super Bowl, but everybody thinks they are. This team will be 11 point favourites in the Super Bowl against a Denver Bronco team that’s also one of the best of the 1990s decade. Such is the perception that these Green Bay Packers possess.

We’re fighting that with Paul Justin.

The public notices this in a big way, as this Packers vs Colts game features the second biggest home underdog of 1997, behind only a Saints vs 49ers game that had its own weird injury circumstances, but to give you a truer scale of the challenge that we’re facing, there was no wider spread against the home team in 1996. There was no bigger home underdog in 1998. It’s not until the expansion Cleveland Browns play the 14-2 Jacksonville Jaguars in 1999 that we find another home underdog wider than this, and if we ignore expansion teams (because the Colts are not an expansion team), we have to wait all the way until it oddly gets beaten twice on the same say on December 17, 2000.

Yeah.

This is a big challenge. A full 13 point underdog at home is something that some franchises have never been in their history. It gets undermined because it was bested in its own season by the New Orleans Saints actually having to start their fourth QB against the SF 49ers, instead of our barely avoiding having to do that, but in 1996 and 1998 this would’ve been the largest home underdog of the whole year.

All of this on a man with five career NFL starts.

Let it not be said that this is a trap game for the Packers, because they’re ready to play. They’re down the field like a shot to open the game, and we’re behind 7-0 before two minutes have elapsed. We’re the Colts. We can’t play offence like the Packers can, but we can play some good offence with Paul in there.

An eight yard pass interference penalty, 20 yard completion to Marvin Harrison, and 11 yard completion to Marvin Harrison are enough to get us to the Green Bay 30, and kick a FG to narrow the score to 7-3. Within one minute, Dorsey Levens has broken off a 52 yard touchdown run. We are now down 14-3, and I’m beginning to see why we’re 13 point home underdogs.

It’s only been eight minutes. There is 6:52 left in the first quarter, but the general atmosphere is that of hopelessness. The Colts always lose, even in the best of circumstances. How on Earth are we going to be able to overcome this?

One yard at a time.

We can’t score in one play like the Packers can, but we do score in seven of them. Five of those seven are Paul Justin passes, and right as the Packers cross into our territory in response, our defence finally gets to Brett Favre, sacking him, ripping the ball out, returning it for a touchdown, and oh my God we have a 17-14 lead.

The strip sack happens on the first play of the second quarter, so we are nowhere near out of the woods yet, especially when a Packer three and out is squandered by missing our FG try that we get as a result. No problem though, as Brett Favre throws a pick six on GB’s next possession, but then responds to himself with another touchdown for the correct team.

There have been 21 minutes of football played, and the score is 24-21. Brett Favre is credited with four TDs already. Two for the Packers and two for the Colts, but credit Paul for taking advantage of opportunities when they’re given. The Colts have scored every time we’ve touched the ball as well.

That streak ends right now, and it ends in a brutal way, with Paul doing his best Brett Favre impression, taking a strip sack of his own, giving the Packers the ball on our 31, which makes it quite easy for Brett Favre to find his fifth touchdown of the day, making the score 28-24, but Paul is at least able to use the final four minutes of the half completing all but one of his six pass attempts en route to kicking a FG that narrows the score to 28-27 as we go into half.

28-27.

That is one of the wildest halves of football in NFL history. This is already the Colts’ best offensive game of the season, and it’s only been a half. It’s already the best game of Paul Justin’s NFL career, and it’s only been a half, but we are still losing. This is the one inescapable, unassailable fact of life with the 1997 Indianapolis Colts. The football Gods clearly want Peyton Manning here. You can do whatever you want to get the final result, but you will lose.

We’ve had bad ref calls, last second field goals, QB injuries. We’ve allowed Trent Dilfer to score 31 points on us. We’ve allowed Stan Humphries to score 35. We’ve even allowed the washed up backup Boomer Esiason to become the best QB in the league again on our watch. We have done everything in the book on the way to the end result, but we have always lost.

It seems like that’s continuing yet again today. We’ve failed to score once in the whole game so far, but that one time is enough. We’re losing.

It looks even worse when we don’t score to open up the second half, punting the ball away for the first time all day. This looks bleak, as our defence still cannot stop Brett Favre conventionally, but another interception in Colt territory will do, getting us the ball back with another chance to take the lead. We still can’t find the endzone, but we find enough yards to allow another FG try, which nets us a 30-28 lead.

This offence is not like it was in the first half. Everything is taking a little longer this time around. By the time the Packers kick a FG to take back a 31-30 lead over us, we’re into the fourth quarter already. With 12 minutes to go, this field goal trade is becoming a little bit intimidating. With our penchant for finding a way to lose, it seems inevitable that Brett Favre will find a touchdown on one of these tries.

We have to pre-empt him.

Our resulting drive is absolutely perfect. It runs six minutes off the clock, and gets us the touchdown that we need. There’s not even an incomplete pass on it, and we also convert the two point try to take a 38-31 lead with six minutes to go. The euphoria over this fourth quarter lead does not last long, but I don’t think anybody is truly surprised when the Packers have found the end zone within one minute to tie the score at 38 again, and we find ourselves in a familiar situation.

Despite not starting many of the games, by and large it’s been Paul Justin staring down these end of game situations for the Colts, which means by and large he’s been the one failing them. Two times this year he’s been in position to go down the field and win the game in the final seconds. Two times he’s failed, coming up about 25 yards short of the game winning touchdown both times.

This time, he doesn’t need a touchdown. This time, Paul needs seconds more than he needs points. The Packers have scored on possessions shorter than one minute three times today already. Any time remaining is too much time remaining. What the Colts need is perfection. We need to run off every millisecond of the 5:19 remaining in this game, and we need to score points. If we can do that, we can win.

We can actually win.

The drive gets off to a great start, with Paul throwing one of his trademark laser beam passes (seriously, the arm strength on this guy is off the charts) for 27 yards to Ken Dilger. The next play is an 18 yard pass to Marvin Harrison, meaning we are inside the Green Bay 30 in one minute, but we have to slow down. Lindy Infante realises this too, and takes the ball out of Paul’s hands altogether. First and ten from the 30 is a Zack Crockett run that goes nowhere. Second and ten from the 30 is a Marshall Faulk run that goes nowhere, and all of a sudden Paul has been placed into a really difficult situation.

It’s not even the two minute warning yet. If we fizzle here, and kick a FG, there’s very little doubt that the Packers are going to score back on us. That means maybe OT. Maybe worse. It wouldn’t surprise me if, just for a second, Colt fans were beginning to wonder whether they’d found their way to lose this game.

Not today.

Third and ten sees a perfect pass on a perfect route to Sean Dawkins, right on the first down marker and not one inch further. As he crumples to the turf, people begin celebrating. Something I’ve not had a chance to say over this whole process is that Paul Justin is very visually emotional. Teams take on the personality of their QB, so the Indianapolis players erupt when they get this first down. From the body language, it’s as if we’ve won the game already, but we have not. Not even close, because after first down makes the Packers waste their first timeout, second down sees the worst possible outcome.

A holding penalty.

Not just a ten yard penalty, but also a stopped clock. This knocks us back to second and 19 from the 29, and we’re right back into the same situation we were in before. Even if the Packers get this ball with 1:30 remaining and no timeouts after we kick a FG right here, is there any doubt that they will score on us? Wasting their timeouts makes the ‘OT’ much more likely than the ‘worse’ in the dichotomy I presented earlier, but I don’t want to go to an overtime with the Green Bay Packers. We’re the Colts. We will lose an overtime with the Green Bay Packers. I want to win this game right now.

So does Paul Justin.

Somehow, on second and 19, on the most crucial play of this football game, and of the Indianapolis Colts’ season, the Packers leave Ken Dilger entirely uncovered. Paul does not blink, and fires the ball as quick as he can get it out. Ken sits down at the one yard line, and when the Packers don’t get their timeout off until 1:22 remains in the game, it begins to dawn on everybody.

It’s over.

We’ve actually pulled it off.

The Colts have actually won.

We come out in the victory formation to run the clock down to three seconds, and on the final play of the game, Cary Blanchard kicks the 20 yard FG that makes it official. The 0-10 Indianapolis Colts have defeated the defending champions, by the final score of 41-38.

There is a famous clip of Darren Sharper from the 1997 Super Bowl yelling at his teammates: ‘We are playing the Indianapolis Colts!’ as part of a speech he gave on the sideline as the Packers were falling behind in that game. Most people see that clip, see that the Colts finished with three wins in 1997, and assume that he was simply putting down the Denver Broncos, but we see now that this is not true.

The Packers (on defence) got owned by the Indianapolis Colts. We’ve just seen it. This game is what Darren in that NFL Films clip is referring to. This game was so traumatizing to Darren Sharper that as his defence was getting ripped to shreds by John Elway in the Super Bowl, the first thing he thought to yell at his teammates is that they were letting John Elway do what Paul Justin did to them.

This game made an impression on the Green Bay Packers, and why shouldn’t it? Allowing a QB to drop 0.493 unadjusted EPA/Play on you in 1997 is an extremely bad defensive performance. There are not many performances this good in 1997, and to have one at the same time Brett Favre was dropping 38 points on you on the other side?

There was not going to be any stage bigger than this for the 1997 Indianapolis Colts, or for Paul Justin. There was never going to be any playoff pressure or Super Bowl pressure or anything like that. For a team like this, a regular season game against the defending champions is their big moment. This is the most national attention either Paul Justin or the 1997 Indianapolis Colts were ever going to get, and they shined brightly under the pressure.

Thank goodness they did, because the NFL is a cruel place.

In the wake of the fantastic Green Bay performance, Paul Justin is finally rewarded with everything he’s ever wanted as a football player. He’s named the unconditional starting QB for the Indianapolis Colts. Jim Harbaugh is healthy enough to play for week 13, but it doesn’t matter. He’s the backup now.

For about 11 plays.

In his first game as an undisputed NFL starter, Paul was doing great against the Detroit Lions, generating 3.64 total EPA in his 11 plays, for 0.331 EPA/Play. He was still losing 12-7 of course, due to an all-time great Barry Sanders game on the other side. These are the 1997 Indianapolis Colts after all. Losing is virtually guaranteed, but this was still only the second quarter. There could’ve been comeback potential.

There will be no comebacks today. Instead, we find the end of Paul Justin’s saga, in exactly the same place we found the beginning.

Just like Jim Harbaugh getting leg dived gave Paul his first real playing time way back at the start of this saga in 1996, on Paul’s 11th and final play of this game (a nine yard completion to Sean Dawkins), there’s a nasty leg dive, and our man cannot get up. He gets carted straight off the field, and straight onto the injured reserve. Without the man whom they had finally decided was their best QB, the Colts lose this game in humiliating 32-10 fashion, and they just keep losing, eventually losing enough games to finish the season with the very worst record in the league, parlaying that failure into selecting Peyton Manning with the first overall pick of the 1998 NFL Draft.

So ends the saga of Paul Justin.

He will never take another snap for the Indianapolis Colts.

He was the undisputed starter for 11 plays.

In the end, we got to watch him for just 285 plays of action over the course of the 1996 and 1997 NFL seasons. Over these 285 plays, which is still a small sample, but is between 50% and 60% of a season in the days where QBs touched the ball a lot less, he generated 0.093 EPA/Play, on a projected CPOE of positive 0.6, with an ANY/A of 5.83. Earlier, I said that if we do a bit of rounding, we could compare Paul’s 1996 to Matthew Stafford’s 2024, but 1997 improved his stats such that I don’t need any rounding at all to compare Paul Justin’s 1996-1997 (0.093 EPA/Play, 0.6 CPOE) to 2024 Bo Nix (0.09 EPA/Play, 0.6 CPOE).

Bo Nix in 2024 was a starter for a Denver Bronco team that won ten times, and likely should’ve won more than that. I’ve talked a lot about how much potential I believe Bo Nix has, and here’s Paul Justin, putting up these numbers in a sample big enough to mean more than nothing in the mid 1990s, with better than half of those plays coming on one of the worst teams in the NFL in 1997.

It’s not as if I’m saying the Colts made the incorrect choice to choose Peyton Manning over Paul Justin. I just wish that there never was that option. Paul built enough value for himself throughout this process that the Colts were able to trade him for a fifth round draft choice (more than Justin Fields got traded for) to the Cincinnati Bengals in the 1998 offseason following the retirement of Boomer Esiason, and enough of that value remained that the Bengals were able to trade him for a seventh round draft choice the following year, as Paul Justin almost got to be the starting QB for the 1999 St Louis Rams when their starter Trent Green went down with injury.

Imagine history with Paul Justin as starting QB for the Greatest Show on Turf.

He was the backup for that team, and did win a Super Bowl ring in that capacity, coming close to a second in 2001, but once all was said and done, following the leg dive in Detroit, Paul Justin threw just 77 further NFL passes. That’s crazy to me. How could nobody think that this guy, who had just put up Bo Nix numbers over the course of two seasons, was ever worth a look on the field again?

In 1996 and 1997, Paul Justin was a starting calibre QB option. No question about it. If the numbers I’ve given already haven’t been enough to convince you, here is a whole page full of them. Maybe one of them will do it.

I hate that the leg dive happened, which cost Paul his chance to prove that even if he was never going to start in Indianapolis, he could at least start somewhere else, and as far as it relates to Paul Justin, I hate that Peyton Manning went to Indianapolis, which robbed Paul of a chance to run it back for a third time there.

Paul was a late starter to begin with. His starting prospects didn’t have time to be stranded for a year in Cincinnati and then a year in St Louis. It was over after that. Nobody else was willing to even give him a look as a starter. His pro career ended in August of 2001 with another gruesome knee injury, a shockingly quick and quiet ending to somebody who had made so much noise in Indianapolis not very long beforehand.

This is the type of career that makes me sad. Somebody who clearly had the talent, but never truly got the chance to show it.

It’s not Paul’s fault the 1997 Colts were so bad. What if Jim Harbaugh had been just as injury prone, but went .500 in the games he started, like he did in 1996? Then what happens for Paul Justin? Green Bay still happens. So does the leg dive, but with the team finishing with five or six wins instead of three, he probably would’ve gotten another shot in Indianapolis to at least see what he had coming back from knee surgery, but with the way everything worked out, there was just no chance.

Indianapolis had no choice but to replace him with Peyton Manning, and once removed from the only NFL environment he had ever been a part of, Paul was never able to climb as high on the totem pole as he was in Indianapolis, Bo Nix numbers or otherwise.

I’m not trying to tell you that Paul Justin would’ve set the league alight if allowed to continue unabated. He was never going to win an MVP award or anything like that, but could he have been a starting QB for a playoff level team in the 1990s? I certainly think he could have. This is especially true if he could have had the continued privilege of playing alongside Marvin Harrison, who would quickly develop into the NFL’s best receiver in the years ahead.

None of that happened for him. He got leg dived in Detroit. Indianapolis did draft Peyton Manning, and nobody ever thought about Paul Justin again. There is no movie about Paul Justin coming from his couch to the flag football field to the Arena League to the NFL football field. No grandiose tales about the life and times of Paul Justin.

Until now that is.

You’ve just read 11000 words about Paul Justin.

What do you think about him, and about all the others like him, who showcased great stuff when they were allowed to showcase it, but simply weren’t allowed to showcase very often? I think it’s sad. It’s sad because he and his family didn’t get the starting QB money that I believe his talents deserved. It’s sad because his elite performance in the NFL game of the year in 1997 has been entirely forgotten. It’s sad because nobody remembers the name Paul Justin.

That’s the very question I began this article with.

Who is Paul Justin?

Now you know.

Thanks so much for reading.