The Greatest Comebacks of All Time

Podcast Transcript

More often than not, in competitive sports, when a team or player has a significant lead, the outcome is often just a formality.

While that is usually the case, it isn’t always the case.

On rare occasions, sometimes very rare occasions, a huge lead does not guarantee victory. A team that is down can beat the odds and come from behind to win.

In the rarest of cases, those come-from-behind victories become legendary..

Learn more about the greatest comebacks in sports history on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

When I talk about comebacks, there are probably a few that instantly come to mind. One of the reasons they are so memorable is that they are so rare.

If a team has a huge lead in a game, a series, or even a season, it more often than not ends up winning.

In this episode, I’m going to focus on comebacks that take place on the field. I won’t focus on individual players who were injured and came back, as that’s a different type of comeback. I’m going to focus on teams or players who were on the brink of losing a game or a championship, yet managed to pull out a win.

I’ll start with the one comeback that has been the subject of a previous episode and can make a case for the greatest comeback of all time: the 2013 America’s Cup.

The finals of the America’s Cup that year were determined by the first team to win nine races. The two yachts competing were the defending champion, Oracle Team USA, and the challenger, Emirates Team New Zealand.

After 11 races, Emirates Team New Zealand was up 8 to 1. The Americans won 3 races, but were docked two points due to a rules violation.

The Kiwis needed just one more win out of the next eight races to take home the cup.

However, that didn’t happen. Team Oracle won the next eight races to win the cup. Assuming that each team had 50-50 odds of winning each race, that put their odds at 250 to 1.

Horse racing has seen its share of come-from-behind victories. When I’m talking about coming from behind in a horse race, I’m not talking about long shots. Horses with long odds can win, often because the odds are not accurately given at the start of a race.

However, some horses have come from huge distances behind to win.

One memorable race was that of Calidoscopio at the 2013 Brooklyn Handicap.

The track that day was extremely muddy. When the race started, Calidoscopio fell behind the back and at one point was a full 22 lengths behind the leader. A length is approximately 8 feet or about 2.4 meters, which is the average length of a horse from nose to tail.

In the last turn, he ran on the outside, which is the longer route, and passed everyone in the final stretch to win.

Another notable come-from-behind win was Mine That Bird at the 2009 Kentucky Derby.

At the halfway point of the race, Mine That Bird was in last place. However, over the last half of the race, the horse shifted into whatever the highest gear is for horses and won the race.

However, Mine That Bird didn’t just win the race; it won by the largest margin of victory in the Kentucky Derby since 1946.

Association football, aka soccer, has had its share of dramatic comebacks.

Perhaps the greatest comeback took place on December 21, 1957, in London. Charlton Athletic was playing Huddersfield Town.

Charlton was playing with only 10 men on the field due to an injury, and with only 27 minutes remaining in the game, they were down 5-1.

At that point, Charlton striker Johnny Summers decided to take matters into his own hands. He proceeded to score four goals, having already scored Charlton’s only goal.

Charlton ended up winning the game 7-6, and Huddersfield Town remains the only team in English football history to have scored six goals in a game… and lost.

A notable and recent come-from-behind victory took place in the 2017 UEFA Champions League. Barcelona was playing Paris Saint-Germain in the knockout stage of the competition. The format had the teams playing two games, home and away, with the total goals from the two games determining who would advance.

The first game in Paris was won by PSG four to nil. At this level of competition, that is an almost insurmountable lead.

However, in the second game, Barcelona won by a score of six to one, giving them the overall goal total of six to five.

In basketball, there have been several dramatic come-from-behind wins with different types of drama occurring with different amounts of time left.

The greatest point differential that has ever been overcome in an NBA game is 36 points. On November 27, 1996, the Denver Nuggets had the lead over the Utah Jazz in the first minute of the 3rd quarter with a score of 72 to 36. The Nuggets had literally scored twice the number of points.

The Jazz went on to win the game 107 to 104, giving them a 39-point turnaround.

This is actually bigger than the largest point deficit in NCAA history, which was when Drexel came back from 34 points down to beat Delaware on February 22, 2018.

A 34-point comeback is nothing to sneeze at, but Drexel had most of the game to make up their difference.

One of the greatest last-minute comebacks has to be the game between Texas A&M and Northern Iowa in the second round of the 2016 NCAA Tournament.

Texas A&M was down by 12 points with only 34 seconds left on the clock.

Through a series of very timely steals and clock management, Texas A&M managed to tie the game and eventually win in two overtimes.

However, the ultimate last-second comeback was probably in 1995 when the Indiana Pacers’ Reggie Miller scored eight points with only 8.9 seconds remaining on the clock to beat the New York Knicks.

The record for come-from-behind wins in the NHL is five goals, which has been done several times in the regular season. There have been nine games where a team has overcome a five-goal deficit and has managed to win.

Most of those games involved giving up five goals early and then making a comeback for the rest of the game.

However, on January 26, 1987, the Calgary Flames were down five to nothing against the Toronto Maple Leafs with 13:58 remaining in the third period.

The Flames managed to score six goals in that time to win the game.

The biggest comeback in NHL playoff history was the Miracle on Manchester in 1982. The Los Angeles Kings were down 5-0 going into the third period. They scored five unanswered goals and won the game in overtime.

I should also note that there have been four teams in NHL history that have come back to win a seven-game series after losing the first three games. The first team to do so was the Toronto Maple Leafs in the 1942 Stanley Cup Finals. They remain the only team to do so in the finals of the Stanley Cup.

There has never been a team that has come from three games down to win a seven-game series in the NBA.

American Football has seen several remarkable come-from-behind victories.

The largest comeback in NFL history occurred in 2022, when the Minnesota Vikings were down 33-0 to the Indianapolis Colts at halftime. The Vikings surged back to tie the game on a two-point conversion with 2:15 seconds left on the clock and then won the game in overtime on a field goal.

This beat the previous record of erasing a 32-point deficit, which took place in 1992 during the wild-card round of the NFL playoffs. The Buffalo Bills closed a 35-3 halftime gap to also win the game in overtime.

However, the game that most people remember as the biggest comeback took place during the 2016 Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and the Atlanta Falcons.

The Falcons led 28–3 at halftime. In the second half, the Patriots scored 25 points to tie the game with less than a minute left, and then won the game and the NFL championship with a touchdown in overtime.

There is one golf comeback I’ll cover, and if you follow golf at all, you probably know what it is. It was Paul Lawrie’s comeback at the 1999 British Open.

Going into the fourth and final round, Lawrie was 10 strokes behind the leader, Jean Van de Velde.

Jean Van de Velde had a five-stroke lead going into the last round over Justin Leonard and Craig Parry.

Lawrie’s comeback was mostly due to Van de Velde’s collapse. Van de Velde shot a triple bogey on the 18th hole to force a three-way tie between himself, Lawrite, and Leonard.

This forces a four-hole playoff that Lawrie won by three strokes. It remains the biggest final-day comeback to win a major in golf history.

I’m going to end the episode on baseball, because in baseball, there is no clock, and in theory, a comeback can happen at any point in the game.

The greatest run differential that has been overcome in a Major League Baseball game is twelve.

It has happened on three occasions: The Detroit Tigers beat the Chicago White Socks in 1911, the Philadelphia Athletics beat the Cleveland Indians in 1925, and the Cleveland Indians beat the Seattle Mariners in 2001.

However, an even more impressive feat was achieved by the Detroit Tigers in 1901. They were playing the Milwaukee Brewers on April 25, the Brewers of 1901 not being the same franchise as today. They went on to be the Saint Louis Browns and then the Baltimore Orioles.

Going into the bottom of the 9th inning, the Brewers were up 13-4. The Tigers scored 10 runs in the last inning to win 14-13.

However, that performance might even be beaten by a game that took place less than a month later. On May 23, 1901, the Washington Senators were playing the Cleveland Indians.

The Senators were ahead 13 to 5 with two outs in the bottom of the 9th inning. With no one on base and no outs to spare, Cleveland scored nine runs to win the game, 14-13. The same score as the Tigers/Brewers game, less than a month earlier.

The most remarkable comeback in all of baseball occurred in an amateur league game in 2014.

On May 8th of that year, in Iowa, the Clinton LumberKings were playing the Burlington Bees. Both teams are in the Prospect League, which is a summer league for college baseball players.

After five innings, Burlington was ahead 17-1. Here, I should note how rare it is for any team to ever score 17 runs in a game, let alone by the 5th inning.

Clinton then went on to score six runs in the sixth inning, five in the eighth, and five more in the ninth to tie the game at 17.

The game went into extra innings. Clinton scored three runs in the 12th inning, winning 20-17, erasing a 16-run deficit.

There is one series in particular that many of you are probably wondering when I will get to. That is, of course, the 2004 American League Championship Series between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox.

This series had everything going for it. The Yankees and Red Sox are arguably the most storied and enduring rivalry in baseball.

On top of the rivalry was the Red Sox’s championship drought. Known as the Curse of the Bambino, the Red Sox hadn’t won a World Series since 1918. In 1920, they sold the contract of their best player, Babe Ruth, to the Yankees, a move which resulted in the Yankees winning seven championships with Ruth, and the start of the greatest dynasty in baseball history.

It looked as though the Red Sox were going to extend their 86-year championship drought. The Red Sox had lost the first three games in the series, and no team in baseball history had ever come back from being down three games to none to win a seven-game series.

Yes, that is precisely what the Red Sox managed to do, with games four and five both going to extra innings as well.

The Red Sox managed to go on to sweep the Saint Louis Cardinals in the World Series to break the Curse of the Bambino.

If I know my audience, I’m sure many of you will come forward with comebacks that I didn’t cover in this episode. There are many that I couldn’t cover due to time constraints.

However, if there are enough suggestions, I might just have to come back to the subject.