Derek Carr stepped up in crunch time after Russell Wilson shunned the slide that would have made his counterpart's heroics so much harder.

Carr hit a wide-open Davante Adams with a 35-yard touchdown pass on the third play of overtime, powering the Las Vegas Raiders to a 22-16 win over the Denver Broncos on Sunday.

"I've always loved those moments. That's what I dreamed of as a kid," Carr said after leading to the Raiders (3-7) to their first win in seven one-score games this season.

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The Broncos (3-7) found another way to lose a close one, dropping their sixth one-score game when Wilson left too much time on the clock at the end of regulation.

Denver was clinging to a 16-13 lead at the 2-minute warning when Wilson rolled right on third-and-10 from his own 34, and instead of sliding to burn more time, he pulled up and fired out of bounds.

"We called a pass play to basically try to end the game right there," Wilson said. "We get a first down, the game's over. They covered it up pretty good, I was trying to get outside the pocket and then (Jalen) Virgil was scrambling down. I thought I had him, tried to take a shot at him and the ball just kind of went away.

"But we've got the best defense in the world and unfortunately it didn't work out this time."

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Wilson's misfire stopped the clock and the Raiders, who did not have any timeouts left and had not led all afternoon, got the ball back with 1:43 left instead of about a minute.

Carr drove them 71 yards, hitting running back Josh Jacobs for 43 yards to the Denver 7 to set up Daniel Carlson’s game-tying kick with 16 seconds left in regulation.

The Raiders won the overtime coin toss and Brandon McManus kicked it to the 5-yard line instead of blasting the ball out of the back of the end zone. Ameer Abdullah returned it 28 yards to the Las Vegas 33.

After Jacobs lost a yard, Carr hit tight end Foster Moreau for 33 yards over the middle to the Denver 35. From there, Adams confused the Denver defense and was all alone for the game-winner, which gave him 141 yards and two TDs on seven catches. Carr finished 23 of 37 for 307 yards.

"Learn from this game and learn from my mistakes," Broncos star cornerback Pat Surtain II said after getting turned around on the final play and also giving up a 31-yard TD reception to Adams in the first half.

McManus' 48-yard field goal put the Broncos ahead 16-13 with 3:30 left in the fourth quarter. Denver's defense forced the Raiders to go three-and-out, but Wilson could not burn enough time off the clock before the Raiders got the ball back.

Embattled first-year Broncos coach Nathaniel Hackett relinquished offensive play-calling duties to Klint Kubiak, his QB coach and passing game coordinator, saying, "I want to do whatever I can to help this team."

The move paid off immediately when the Broncos scored a touchdown on their opening drive for the first time under Wilson, whose 32-yard throw to Kendall Hinton set up Latavius Murray’s 1-yard TD run.

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After that, the game settled into the grind-it-out defensive affair expected of two teams that have been riddled by injuries and ineffective offensive play.

"Everyone's sick to their stomach week in and week out," Broncos linebacker Alex Singleton said after the Broncos blew another early lead, this time 10-0. "We know what we've got to do. We've got to find a way."

Maxx Crosby came up huge in the final seconds of the first half, preventing a touchdown and then a field goal as the Raiders turned back the Broncos and kept their deficit to 10-7 at the half.

Crosby punched the ball out of fumble-prone running back Melvin Gordon's arms at the 1. Although guard Quinn Meinerz recovered for Denver at the 7, Crosby blocked McManus' 25-yard field-goal try as the first half expired.

That was Crosby's third career blocked field goal, and all three have been against the Broncos. He had two against Denver on Jan. 3, 2021.

"If you don’t block that field goal, then we have to score a touchdown at the end of regulation, so I thought it was an enormous play," Raiders coach Josh McDaniels said. "I thought it definitely gave us a little bit of a boost there."

Crosby had two sacks in the second half, giving him nine of Las Vegas' 14 sacks on the season.

In the first quarter, Carlson's 48-yard try sailed wide right for his first missed field goal since Nov. 7 2021, against the Giants in the Meadowlands.

A Stanford University professor of medicine says "academic freedom is dead" after his life became a "living hell" for challenging coronavirus lockdown orders and the "scientific clerisy" during the pandemic.

"The basic premise is that if you don't have protection and academic freedom in the hard cases, when a faculty member has an idea that's unpopular among some of the other faculty - powerful faculty, or even the administration … If they don't protect it in that case, then you don't have academic freedom at all," Dr. Jay Bhattacharya told Fox News Digital in a phone interview. 

Bhattacharya is a tenured professor of medicine at Stanford University and also an economist who serves as director of Stanford’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. 

He came under fire during the pandemic after co-authoring the Great Barrington Declaration, which was an open letter signed by thousands of doctors and scientists in 2020 denouncing lockdowns as harmful. Bhattacharya was joined by Harvard professor of medicine Dr. Martin Kulldorff and Oxford professor Dr. Sunetra Gupta in co-authoring the document. 

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The declaration was quickly denounced by other health leaders including National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci, who slammed the call for herd immunity in the document as "nonsense and very dangerous."

Bhattacharya spoke at the Academic Freedom Conference at Stanford's Graduate School of Business earlier this month and said that in the current era, "we have a high clerisy that declares from on high what is true and what is not true."

"When you take a position that is at odds with the scientific clerisy, your life becomes a living hell," he said at the conference. "You face a deeply hostile work environment."

Bhattacharya said that soon after the Great Barrington Declaration gained widespread attention, he received death threats, hate mail and questions on where he receives funding, which he noted, "most of my money has come from the NIH for most of my life."

"The purpose of the one-page document was aimed at telling the public that there was not a scientific consensus in favor of lockdown, that in fact many epidemiologists, many doctors, many other people — prominent people — disagreed with the consensus," Bhattacharya said during his 10-minute talk at the conference. 

And on campus, "a chill" on debate set in and he was disinvited from delivering a campus talk and an effort to organize a debate on COVID policies stalled, the College Fix reported of his remarks at the conference. 

"If Stanford really truly were committed to academic freedom, they would have … worked to make sure that there were debates and discussions, seminars, where these ideas were discussed among faculty," regardless of whether academics agreed or disagreed, he told Fox News Digital following his address at the conference. 

Bhattacharya argued in his comments to Fox News that in many scientific circles during the pandemic, "power replaced the idea of truth as the guiding light."

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"So you have somebody like Tony Fauci who says unironically, that if you question me, you're not simply questioning a man, you're questioning science itself. That is an exercise of raw power, where he places himself effectively as the pope of science rather than a genuine desire to learn the truth."

"They systematically tried to make it seem like everyone agreed with their ideas about COVID policy, when in fact there was deep disagreement among scientists and epidemiologists about the right strategy. That's why we wrote the Great Barrington Declaration to tell the public that there was this disagreement. There was another alternate policy available," he said.

Bhattacharya charged at the conference that "academic freedom is dead" and that he was left without support from Stanford leaders. 

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"The policy of the university, when push comes to shove, is to permit this kind of hostile work environment," he said. "What if there had been open scientific debate on campus, sponsored by the university on this? So that people could know there were legitimate alternate views?"

He argued that if the Stanford president had pushed for a debate when the Great Barrington Declaration was written, "there would have been tremendous controversy around it."

"But at the same time the hostile work environment would have dissipated because what it would have said is, ‘Look, there’s a debate, it’s legitimate to have this debate, a place like Stanford is where this debate ought to happen."

Neither Stanford’s media team nor the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases immediately responded to Fox News Digital’s requests for comment on Bhattacharya’s remarks.