Deebo Samuel’s fifth touchdown of the 2025 season was a historic one. With a 20-yard screen pass in the third quarter of the Washington Commanders’ Week 12 game against the Miami Dolphins, the gadget receiver became the first player in NFL history to score a touchdown in Madrid, Spain.
The game entered halftime knotted at six after each team hit a field goal in the first and second quarters. Samuel ended the touchdown drought with a well-drawn-up screen pass on 1st-and-10, taking a short pass from Marcus Mariota the distance to give the Commanders a 13-6 lead.
Samuel went untouched until he got inside the five-yard line, where he plowed through three Dolphins defenders to reach paydirt.
Deebo Samuel breaks tackles for the first-ever TD in Madrid
The catch was Samuel’s third of the game, giving him 22 receiving yards at the time of his score. He was unsurprisingly the leader of the Commanders’ low-volume passing attack, which Mariota led without Terry McLaurin, Noah Brown, Luke McCaffrey and Week 10 leading receiver Treylon Burks.
Samuel entered the game as the Commanders’ No. 1 receiver for yet another week. He joined the team in the offseason, expecting to be a complementary target to McLaurin, but the latter’s injury woes have kept him off the field for most of the year.
In addition to becoming the team’s top passing option, Samuel has become one of Washington’s best red zone threats. The touchdown marked Samuel’s second in as many weeks. His six total touchdowns are the most on the team, two more than Jacory Croskey-Merritt and Zach Ertz, who are tied for second with four each.
Mike Johnson parlayed a 661-game NHL career that included stops with the Toronto Maple Leafs, Tampa Bay Lightning, Phoenix Coyotes, Montreal Canadiens, and St. Louis Blues into a broadcasting career with TSN.
Johnson has been the color commentator for numerous NHL and IIHF broadcasts, but recently, he has been the primary commentator for the Maple Leafs’ regional TSN broadcasts. Unsurprisingly, given his ties to so many Atlantic Division rivals, Johnson doesn’t have too many good things to say about the Boston Bruins.
That continued on a recent NHL Network hit, where he dropped the take that two-time Stanley Cup Champion and 1000-point getter Brad Marchand doesn’t have a place in the Hockey Hall of Fame. While criticizing the Bruins on the Maple Leafs broadcasts makes sense as the regional guy, taking such a bizarre stance about Marchand’s Hall of Fame status is a bridge too far.
Winning two Stanley Cups, recording 1000 points, winning 2 World Junior Gold Medals, scoring the championship-winning goal in the 2016 World Cup, and playing an essential role on Canada’s 4 Nations Face-Off team when many said he shouldn’t have made it, isn’t enough of a resume for Johnson. Neither was scoring two goals in the Game 7 clincher in 2011 or recording 20 points in 23 games for the Florida Panthers’ run last postseason.
Instead, Johnson believes that players like Keith Tkachuk and Curtis Joseph should be in the Hall over Marchand. Tkachuk, whose trophy case includes one Maurice Richard Trophy and a silver medal with Team USA, and Joseph, who was a Vezina Trophy finalist on a couple of occasions, and had a front-row seat to Martin Brodeur winning him an Olympic Gold Medal in 2002. Coincidentally, both were also former teammates of the non-biased Mike Johnson.
Johnson finished his explanation by saying that today he wouldn’t put Marchand in the Hall of Fame, but talk to him in three years and it’ll be a yes. My question would be what else could Marchand possibly achieve to make him worthy in Johnson’s eyes? An Olympic Gold Medal is one of the only things missing from the trophy case, which he might get a chance to win in a few months.
If Johnson was attempting to generate some clickbait from this take, it worked, but sometimes a biased take has to come under scrutiny. The good news is that his fans in Toronto will love the take after years of watching the man who doesn’t belong in the Hall of Fame dominate their team in the postseason.