Nick Foles’ Super Bowl Performance Puts Him Atop List of NFL One-Hit Wonders

After an 11-year NFL career, Nick Foles on Thursday announced his retirement from the NFL. In those 11 seasons, he started a total of 58 regular-season games and won exactly half of them. He threw 82 career touchdown passes and 47 interceptions. Nothing extraordinary. Oh, but there’s also the fact that Foles played one of the most spectacular games in NFL history.

Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Carson Wentz was an MVP frontrunner when he went down with a knee injury late in the 2017 season. Enter Foles, who helped the Eagles advance to Super Bowl LII and then outdueled Tom Brady in a record-setting performance. Foles passed for 373 yards and three touchdowns, and famously caught a TD pass on a fourth-down play at the end of the first half, a play immortalized in Super Bowl lore as the “Philly Special.”

Amazingly, Foles only started five more games in his Eagles career, playing sparingly for three other teams after that. Foles’ career qualifies him as perhaps the greatest “one-hit wonder” in NFL history.

Here are some other candidates for that honor:

Max McGee

Even before the game was called the Super Bowl, the tradition of favoring the quarterback for MVP was well established. Bart Starr won the first of his back-to-back MVPs in the first AFL-NFL World Championship Game — aka Super Bowl I — but it could easily have gone to McGee. Maybe McGee wasn’t exactly a one-hit wonder. He started at least 12 games in eight of his first nine NFL seasons, and he caught 50 career touchdown passes. But McGee had only caught 14 passes combined in the two seasons leading up to Super Bowl I. He didn’t expect to play much in that game, so he infamously had a few too many cocktails the night before. Then Packers star receiver Boyd Dowler got injured and McGee was forced into action. The result: seven receptions, 138 yards and two touchdowns.

Timmy Smith

In 58 Super Bowls, Washington’s Timmy Smith remains the only player ever to rush for more than 200 yards in a single game. Smith had rushed for a grand total of 126 yards in his rookie season of 1987, but Washington head coach Joe Gibbs was unhappy with his top two running backs in the playoffs and started giving Smith more carries. Washington advanced to Super Bowl XXII, and Gibbs named Smith the starter. He came through, rushing for a Super Bowl-record 204 yards and two touchdowns in a 42-10 demolition of the Denver Broncos. Smith was worthy of MVP, though quarterback Doug Williams rightfully won the award after passing for 340 yards and four touchdowns — all four coming in the second quarter after Denver got off to a 10-0 lead.

What’s crazy is that Smith’s stardom faded just as quickly as it emerged. Injuries and rumors of drug use plagued Smith, who only played two more seasons in the NFL. Washington let him go after the 1988 season; he missed the entire 1989 season, then rushed for all of six yards in one game with the Cowboys in 1990. That was the end of Smith’s career.

Jeff Hostetler

The New York Giants got off to an 11-2 start in 1990 before Phil Simms — the NFL’s top-rated passer at the time — suffered a season-ending foot injury in Week 15. This was Hostetler’s fifth NFL season, and he had all of two career starts under his belt. Hostetler started two more games to finish the 1990 regular season and then the defense carried the Giants to a spot in Super Bowl XXV. In that game, Hostetler was 20-of-32 for 222 yards with one TD and no interceptions. But the most amazing play he made in the game was this: Trailing 10-3 midway through the second quarter, Hostetler was sacked in the end zone by future Hall of Fame defensive end Bruce Smith. How he didn’t fumble as Smith grabbed his right wrist and took him down is a mystery. Giving up a safety as opposed to a touchdown kept the Giants within reach and allowed them to hang on when Scott Norwood’s kick sailed wide right.

Hostetler started a couple more years for the Giants and then spent four seasons as the Raiders’ starter. Jim Kelly wasn’t the only Hall of Fame quarterback Hostetler defeated in the postseason; he outdueled John Elway in a 1993 wild-card game, but that’s as close as he got to another Super Bowl.

Bob Shaw

Three players share the NFL record for most touchdown receptions in one game (5). Two of those players are Pro Football Hall of Famers: Jerry Rice and Kellen Winslow. The other is Bob Shaw, who only played four seasons in the NFL. In his first three seasons, he caught a total of eight touchdown passes in 26 career games. With the Chicago Cardinals in 1950, he led the league with 12 TD catches — thanks to the five he scored in Week 3 against the Baltimore Colts. Shaw played three more years in the Canadian Football League but never returned to the NFL.

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