It was the first quarter with 6:40 remaining in a 0-0 ballgame. SMU faced 1st and 10 from its own 47-yard line.
Box score watchers see a trivial 9-yard gain with minimal bearing on the result of SMU’s 34-10
home of victory over Stanford, but those who saw it in real time collectively jumped out of their seats and asked, “Did he just do that?”
On that first quarter play, SMU quarterback Kevin Jennings fielded the snap, faked a jet sweep right, and then pulled out something from a Rajon Rondo highlight reel. Jennings delivered a behind-the-back pass to tight end RJ Maryland, who motioned right in front of Jennings in the opposite direction of the fake jet sweep.
“We’ve been practicing it all week long,” Jennings said. “At first it was supposed to be a normal look. Then I told Coach Lashlee, ‘Let’s do it behind the back.’ He said if you can do it five times in a row, we’ll do it. I did it five times in a row and went out there executed it. I saw it a couple times from Mahomes, but that wasn’t really the thing I was thinking about, so let’s have some fun with it.”
The clean behind-the-back pass landed smoothly into Maryland’s gloves, and the tight end spun off two Stanford defenders before facing a gang tackle nine yards in front of the line of scrimmage.
“I didn’t see that play,” said SMU running back Chris Johnson Jr., who was on the bench during Jennings’ magic trick. “We’ve been working on it all week and he’d been good at it, but I was kinda nervous. I knew he was gonna execute it and get it done. As long as he executes it and gets the play done, that’s all that matters.”
As Jennings referenced, the only popular instance of a designed behind-the-back pass at the NFL or college was executed by Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes in a 2024 preseason game against the Lions where Mahomes delivered the fancy dime to Travis Kelce for a first down conversion.
So how did the behind-the-back concept make its way into SMU’s playbook?
“We knew he was gonna do it,” SMU head coach Rhett Lashlee said. “We had ran a version of that play (Derrick) McFall scored on last week where (Jennings) flipped it, so we knew they would overplay it and put everybody out there, which there was a bunch of people out there. It was actually designed to be the fifth play of the game, but we didn’t get to the fifth play of the game in the first drive.”
As far as the behind-the-back portion of the play, that was Jennings’ brainchild.
“Thursday when we put it in Coach (D’Eriq) King and I were talking about it, and we didn’t say anything to Kevin. We just had a feeling when we went out to walkthrough,” Lashlee said. “And sure enough, we get out there and he’s working with RJ, flipping it behind his back. And they were like, ‘Can we do that?’ And I said, ‘He can do it, I don’t care.’ Guys are gonna have fun, and he can do it. He had probably done it 15 times hadn’t missed it once, so I was like, ‘Sure, let it rip. Just don’t miss.’”
Lashlee expanded on the play, stating Jennings is the exact type of player he expects to embrace trickery of that nature. The 9-yard pickup fueled SMU’s first touchdown drive in a 34-10 victory, improving the Mustangs to 10-0 in regular season conference games since joining the ACC. The fun is in the winning, which SMU has done plenty of in recent memory, but Lashlee also wants his players to have fun throughout the season.
“I’m sure Patrick Mahomes had done it at some point,” Lashlee said. “We didn’t tell Kevin to do it, but we were pretty not shocked when he decided he wanted to do it. Look, we’re gonna have fun here. Winning is hard. We’re gonna enjoy it. Our kids are gonna have fun. If they can do it, we’re gonna be aggressive and let them do that stuff. They enjoy it, and he can pull it off. And RJ had a pretty good run with it.”
