Chiefs’ long-snapper James Winchester offers example, and inspiration, after gaffe
Since joining the Chiefs in 2015, long-snapper James Winchester had hurled the ball back to Dustin Colquitt for punts, field goals and point-after attempts 753 times without a glaring glitch — and almost always seamlessly — when the Chiefs lined up from the Tennessee 29-yard-line with 1 minute, 27 seconds left Sunday.
The dynamic had come to seem so automatic that it would be easy for anyone watching to forget these are men, not machines, and that each play is its own event no matter how many thousands of times it had been rehearsed over the years.
Then ... this one went wrong. A miscommunication led to an early and low snap that surprised Colquitt and ultimately resulted in an intentional grounding penalty. That gave the Titans the ball at their 39-yard-line and proved to be an escape hatch for their stunning 35-32 rally.
In the aftermath, Winchester felt shock more than anything else and “kind of buried my head in the sand for a couple of days.”
“No one’s exactly perfect, but we try to be — that’s just part of our job,” he said Thursday. “And when it’s not perfect (and) when it happens in a key moment, it feels like the world’s falling down on you a little bit.”
But we didn’t seek out Winchester to belabor that point, which we’ll note again was just one of a zillion things that undid the Chiefs in the final moments that day.
We turned to him because he’s a prince of a guy, a thoughtful man who has a healthy perspective on life and the world. We thought he might have something to share about moving ahead after a moment of regret.
Because regrets and mistakes are something we all experience (albeit most of us less publicly) … unless you live in constant denial or without a conscience.
As usual, Winchester had some words to live by for your consideration — words coincidentally delivered on the eve of the third anniversary of the murder of his father, Mike, a Southwest Airlines supervisor at Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City.
“You just understand that when adversity strikes, it’s one foot in front of the other, keep going, you know?” he said. “We lost our dad three years ago tomorrow, so, unfortunately, our family has been through harder times. So you learn from that, and, I think, a lot from Dad and his teaching.”
That teaching included the Christian faith that enabled Winchester to not hold anything against the disgruntled former Southwest Airlines employee who killed his father, the former University of Oklahoma punter who encouraged his young son to keep working on long-snapping to have in his back pocket.
It was a skill that the younger Winchester pulled out as a walk-on at Oklahoma and led to his NFL career.
Most of the time, the underappreciated work he does is performed in relative anonymity. But he learned right away about the attention that comes with anything gone awry in this gig.
And how to be accountable for it and own it but also not be further defeated by it.
His nervous first snap at OU was with a slick ball that went errant in a 57-2 win over Tennessee-Chattanooga that otherwise would have been a Sooner shutout.
“It was pretty embarrassing, but it was, ‘You live, you learn, that’s life,’” Winchester said in a 2017 interview with The Star. “A coach in college would always say, ‘You’re only as good as your next play.’ That’s true. You can let that one define you, or you can move forward with it.
“There were some valuable lessons there and it pushed me to get better and continue to perfect my craft, and I’m still doing that today to try to get better.”
He’s still informed by that mindset. And driven by the passion to be a great and reliable teammate to a locker room of people he loves and perform for coaches and an organization and fan base for which he’s grateful.
“My job is to serve on this team: to serve Dustin, to serve (kicker Harrison Butker) and help us win ballgames,” he said. “So when that happened, obviously you’re very disappointed.”
He shouldn’t be any more immune from criticism than anyone else, he figures. And in this grown-man sport, “you just take it like a man and keep working.”
So he was excited to get back at it, to better understand and fix what went wrong and be ready to play the Chargers Monday night in Mexico City. The play that might best be called fluky was tough, he added, but life is tough and sometimes “it bears down on you.”
“But you can’t go back and change it,” he said, “so why beat yourself up over it?”
Winchester isn’t shrugging anything off. He sees this as a moment to live out his faith.
“People get stuck in a ‘have to be perfect’ world,” he said. “And don’t get me wrong: You want to go an entire season or career without anything like that happening.
“But when it does, you can’t change what’s happened. What you can do is move forward and control what’s ahead of you. And so you can control your attitude. You can control how you handle yourself when adversity comes.
“A lot of those things, I have my dad and mom and family to thank for that. And that teaching and just relying on faith, relying on the good Lord that the sun comes up tomorrow and I have an awesome opportunity (today).
“And I’m blessed to be here, blessed to be healthy and keep going.”
Just like we’re blessed to keep having the chance to learn from him.
This story was originally published November 14, 2019 at 4:37 PM with the headline "Chiefs’ long-snapper James Winchester offers example, and inspiration, after gaffe."