The agony of finishing second in Last Man Standing contest

How do you get over just missing out on $65,000? Dave Sager would like to know.

The 64-year-old retired postal worker recently finished second in Station Casinos’ NFL Last Man Standing contest. Amber Hanover outlasted the field of 3,211 entries and collected $65,925.

Sager was the Second-to-Last Man Standing and got nothing except regret.

“This will affect me the rest of my life,” he said. “I’m being serious. It will. I’ll always think about it. Any betting I do will be meager in comparison. If I win a couple of hundred bucks on a basketball game, it’s like, ‘All right, so what?’ I could have gotten that big check.”

The Last Man Standing is a winner-take-all contest in which entrants pick one NFL game against the spread each week. Each entry costs $25, and $100 buys the maximum five entries. There are no second chances; entries are eliminated for a missed pick.

Hanover won Nov. 29 when the San Francisco 49ers won outright as 7½-point underdogs at the Los Angeles Rams, 23-20. Sager lost earlier in the day when the Los Angeles Chargers failed to score in the final seconds and didn’t cover +5½ in a 27-17 loss to the Buffalo Bills.

To make Sager feel worse, he changed his pick late in the week from the Atlanta Falcons, who destroyed the Raiders 43-6.

The Bills led the Chargers 24-6 in the third quarter, but the gambling gods didn’t let Sager off easy with a blowout loss. Instead, he endured an excruciating finish involving questionable clock management and four failed plays inside the 2-yard line.

Trailing 27-17, the Chargers mounted a final drive, and Sager needed a touchdown to cover +5½. Facing fourth-and-17 at the Buffalo 47, quarterback Justin Herbert completed a 46-yard pass to Jalen Guyton to the 1 that was called back for offensive pass interference.

Now facing fourth-and-27 at the Los Angeles 43, Herbert lofted a deep pass into a crowd of bodies at the 8-yard line. The Chargers’ Tyron Johnson came down with the ball and nearly broke free for the score, but he was tackled at the 2-yard line with 46 seconds remaining.

“They hit a Hail Mary, but unfortunately it didn’t go to the end zone,” Sager said.

The Chargers had no timeouts left, so they ran up to the ball and snapped it with 24 seconds left. But instead of throwing the ball into the ground to stop the clock, Herbert handed off to Austin Ekeler, who was stopped at the 1.

The clock kept running. Herbert finally got off another snap with eight seconds left and threw incomplete. After another incomplete pass, the Chargers — and Sager — had one last shot with three seconds left.

Run or pass? How about both — sort of? Herbert took the snap and surged forward on a quarterback sneak. The only problem was that his lineman all dropped back to block for a pass.

Herbert was swamped by unblocked Bills defenders, and Buffalo won 27-17.

Sager watched the game at home and was talking to his contest partner on the phone as the final seconds played out.

“I forgot that Anthony Lynn is the worst coach in the NFL and has no clue about anything,” Sager said. “… We’re just shaking our heads. What the hell is going on here?”

He said he ended up walking around his neighborhood in a daze for a while, and that feeling has stayed with him. He can’t stop thinking about switching the final pick from the Falcons, the Chargers’ late blunders and the fact that he and Hanover dueled as the final two for three weeks before he finally slipped up.

Sager uses gallows humor to cope and laughs that friends have compared him to the downtrodden Eeyore from “Winnie-the-Pooh.”

“It’s two weeks later, and I’m still relatively in shock from losing,” he said. “But I guess I’m coming to grips with it, with the help of Xanax and other stuff — I’m actually not kidding about that. It’s hard to accept.

“… I’ve got to get out from under that shroud of sadness at some point. I’m sure I will at some point.”

Contact Jim Barnes at jbarnes@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0277. Follow @JimBarnesLV on Twitter.