by Mark Bowden
Only this night, because of the circumstances, the guard thinks that maybe Randall got in a fight with his backup (there being reports, and all, of the two players not exactly being close, see), so he does his duty this time and alerts the head coach.
Jimbo gets a call from Richie in the wee hours.
“What’d you do to Randall?”
The quarterback sleepily protests he doesn’t know what Richie is talking about.
Richie relates the guard’s tale, and Jimbo laughs. He explains that he was hollering, per usual, at the video game, not at the precious Scrambling One.
“The guard says he left in a huff,” says Richie.
Jimbo says the quarterback was fine when he left and says he figured Randall had just gone back to his room.
Randall arrives at the Vet about three hours before game time, checks out some film, and heads for the training room. Richie passes him in the hallway and says nothing, doesn’t even look at him. Looks as if he’s mad about something.
Randall immediately assumes he isn’t starting. Richie’s giving Jimbo the ball again! The whole spiraling Week of the Great Benching mess starts all over again—world spinning into chaos, Empire of Self crumbling, portents of apocalypse everywhere….
Dave Archer sees Randall walk into the locker room with the face of a man whose bus has just driven off a cliff.
“Has Richie said anything yet about Jim starting?” he asks Arch.
“What?”
Arch knows Randall had taken every snap in practice the week before with the starting team.
“Jim’s going to start.”
“No, he’s not, Randall, you’re gonna play.”
But Randall walks off to the training room clearly unconvinced.
A few minutes later, Richie finds him and pulls him into the equipment manager’s office and closes the door. Randall figures this is it.
“I can’t believe what you did!” Richie says, as Randall would later recount the story in his book. “I can’t believe you, the disciplined person you are, the guy we always count on, could do this.”
Randall, who has by now figured out this is about his skipping out of the hotel the night before, is in his blank mode, waiting for the boom.
The coach tells him he’s going to have to pay a fine. The quarterback says no problem (chump change for the multimillionaire). The coach stands up, says, “Hey, have a good game,” opens the door, exits, and closes it in the quarterback’s face.
All through the pregame warm-up, Randall looks like he’s in a daze. Is he starting or isn’t he? What did Richie mean by that “Hey, have a good game?” Was he being facetious?
But, sure enough, Randall is out there for the Eagles’ first offensive series. He hands the ball off to Herschel twice, and the running back grinds out a first down. An offside penalty on Mike Schad pushes them back five yards, and on first and fifteen, Randall fails to see the obvious Minnesota blitz formation, gets swarmed trying to pass, fumbles, and the Vikings run the ball down to the Eagles’ nine-yard line. They kick a field goal four plays later.
Arch can see the confusion in Randall’s eyes when he comes off the field. So the backup quarterback walks over to consult with the quarterback’s buddy Byars.
“Hey, Tank, you better talk to your boy. He looks like he doesn’t want to play.”
“What do you mean?”
“He thinks Richie’s going to put Jim in.”
So Byars walks over and bucks up Randall’s spirits with an embrace before the offense heads back out on the field.
And, just like that, Randall is back. Stuck on third and fifteen, he takes off with the ball for a classic improvisation, juking and high stepping along the sidelines and out-of-bounds thirty yards upfield. The crowd loves it. They haven’t seen much of this from Randall this season. Then, four plays later, this time on a second-down play, he takes off again, for eighteen yards. He finishes the drive with a oneyard dive into the end zone to erase the damage caused by his earlier fumble.
And Randall goes on to have his best day of the season, running for an amazing 121 yards on just twelve carries, carrying the ball into the end zone himself twice, completing 70 percent of his passes for 164 yards, and leading an inspired offensive effort that results in a 28-17 win—this against one of the top-ten defenses in the NFL. Later, Richie explains that the Vikings’ all-out pass rush had the unintended consequence of opening up big running lanes for Randall… no, this did not mark a coaching decision to unleash the Randall of old, but the game produces a great late-season swell of confidence in fans and team alike—not to mention the quarterback.
Seth is the other big hero of the game, again. Late in the fourth quarter, after a Vikings’ touchdown had brought them within four points of victory, with plenty of time and surging momentum, Seth made an announcement to Mike Golic and a few of the other guys.
“I’m gonna make a big play. Watch.”
He had said the same thing two weeks before in the Giants game, before picking off a pass and running it back for a touchdown. “When he said it this time, you’d best believe we were watching,” says Mike.
The linebacker had observed the Vikings working little screen and flare passes all day as a way of getting around Reggie and Clyde, and he knew from his typically exhaustive film study the week before that on critical drives they liked to spring these short passes on first down, delaying the running back out of the backfield and flipping him the ball over the pass rush. When quarterback Sean Salisbury tried it this time, Seth stepped in front of the receiver. The linebacker was so far out in front of the play, in fact, that he damn near overran the pass. Reaching back with one hand and kind of coaxing the ball into his grasp—a maneuver the stunned Salisbury in postgame interviews would call “unhuman”—Seth raced twenty-four yards into the end zone for the game-clinching touchdown.
Seth had waved away his teammates when they swarmed in to congratulate him and instead ran over to the Archangel Jerome banner behind the goalpost and executed a full formal salute.
That, and Randall’s terrific day, tended to obscure the overall poor performance of Bud’s defense. In the 28-17 victory, which nudged the Eagles’ season record to a highly respectable 8-5, they had given up 219 total yards, 138 of them on the ground, and had allowed two rushing touchdowns. The Vikings had averaged more than 5 yards every time they carried the ball! Randall’s performance had put Minnesota far enough behind in the second half that the Vikings virtually had to abandon the run, but other teams would take heart from the way they had moved the ball right through the Eagles’ midsection.
Nothing is more embarrassing to a defensive line than an opponent’s running the ball right up its middle. Buddy Ryan had a crude and unforgettable analogy for that.
BUT, AS USUAL, Mike is funny about it afterward.
“Those guys [Lowdermilk and McDaniel were bouncing me into the cheap seats all day,” says Mike, in a typically self-deprecatory newspaper interview after the game. “They were having a fun time doubleteaming me all over the place, knocking me over one way, and then coming back and knocking me over the other way … I admit, it didn’t seem too funny to me at the time.”
Mike explains in detail for the hound his misstep at the goal line, the one where McDaniel crushed him right on the tip of his helmet and opened a hole for the touchdown.
“I think I’m an inch shorter,” he says.
About that embarrassing success the Vikings had running the ball?
“There wasn’t much to recommend that first half,” says Mike. “They were burying us. They were bringing three tight ends in and doing a good job executing. We were missing tackles, letting them run inside, letting them run outside.”
He describes his own missed tackles, the growing irritation of coaches on the sidelines, reveals that one big-play sack by the Eagles had resulted, not from a stroke of coaching genius, but from a serendipitous Mike Golic misreading a Vikings play—”What can I say, sometimes you screw up … and it works
out!” It’s good stuff. In all, a disarmingly candid look at a terrible outing, in this case leavened somewhat by the fact that the Eagles won the game. But, whatever the circumstances, Mike is one of very few pro football players who would so cheerfully admit he’d been overmatched.
Three days after the article appears, Dale Haupt, the Eagles’ defensive line coach, benches him. Mike gets some cold looks from teammates in the locker room, and there’s a comment or two, but he’s used to that. Then Dale invites him in for a talk in his office.
“I can’t believe you did that article!” the coach says.
Mike is flabbergasted. “You can’t be serious.”
They’re in Dale’s tiny space, across the hall from Bud’s. Both are big men; they look jammed into the space on either side of the coach’s desk. As Mike would recall later, Haupt says he’s starting Harmon and Pitts—maybe they won’t be so chirpy about getting humiliated.
“Listen, you’re the one … how many times have you told us, don’t believe what you read?” protests Mike. “Look, I’m the first one to admit that I got my butt kicked. I told reporters after the game that I did. What am I going to do? Sit there and cry about it? Sure I was pissed about it! If we played them again, I’d sure as hell want to do better, but I’m not going to whine about it, so I joke about it. That’s what I do. If some people get mad at me because I don’t carry a loss around for five days … screw ‘em!”
“Those things you said …”
“All right, maybe it wasn’t the smartest thing for me to do, doing that article, but that’s the kind of guy I am. I’ll joke about it, but I don’t take it lightly. I got my butt kicked, but I think benching me is unwarranted. Look at the last six games!”
“I think your play has been slipping,” says Dale.
“Go back and look. Count the tackles. As much or more as any other lineman!”
“You’re probably right.”
“Then how can you say I’m slipping?”
“Well, you only have that one sack.”
“But look at my hurries. I’m right behind Seth and Clyde.”
Dale won’t budge. The decision has been made—and with it, thousands of incentive dollars awarded Mike for every start.
Put that in your TV show!
EVERYBODY’S SENSE of humor is strained at this point in the ’92 season. The Eagles are locked in a second-place tie with the Redskins in the NFC East, both teams with an 8-5 record, and only one of them is going to the play-offs. Richie’s squad cannot afford another misstep. It’s time for the big-money players to step up. It’s time to bring the heat.
Unfortunately, the heat arrives Sunday morning, December 13, in the gift shop of the Marriott Sea-Tac Hotel in Seattle, in the form of the New York Times.
Seth has been pretty good the last few weeks. He always plays well, and ever since he took his vow of silence there’s been a noticeable loosening of team tensions. Until now. It seems Seth has made an exception to his gag rule. Because right there on the front page of the sports section of the Times—Richie’s hometown newspaper—is an action shot of the stone-faced Pro Bowl linebacker, under the headline:
JOYNER HITS AS HARD AS HIS CANDOR
“Joyner,” writes Times reporter Thomas George, “who turned 28 this month, is the epitome of the National Football League player of the 1990s, who speaks with bluntness and conviction and who attempts to balance his individuality with team unity and team goals.”
Uh-oh. One senses, with that reference to “bluntness and conviction,” that this is not going to be one of those times.
“I have opinions, I am not afraid to state them and this causes people to be critical of me. Well, so be it,” said Joyner …, “The truth is an ugly thing to a lot of people, but I accept it about myself, too. It’s not that I don’t have any faults or that I don’t make mistakes. But don’t attack me for caring about winning. I want us to win a Super Bowl, this Super Bowl this year, badly. Maybe by everyone taking a closer look at what’s happened here and being honest about it, we can.”
Oh, shit. The pisser is that the line “caring about winning,” is actually Richie’s. It’s the one he used publicly to defend Seth when everybody jumped all over the linebacker for running his mouth after the Packers game. After letting off steam before the team, he’d come up with this “caring about winning” line, which was pretty good … kind of turned the whole poisonous episode into a positive. Until now.
“Buddy drafted and crafted a team in his image,” said Joyner, who was part of Ryan’s first draft. “He built the identity of a team that would beat up on other teams and intimidate people. Intimidation goes a long way in this game. Under Buddy, the players were vocal, the coaches were vocal, everybody was vocal. But we had unity.”
Seth is uttering the unspoken gospel, in public! In the fucking New York Times! Coaches and players like to say that they don’t pay any attention to the things written and said about them—one way of asserting the pocket-lint status of the Pack—but they read and listen to every word. The only things that ultimately matter, however, are the things actually said by players and coaches. It’s hard to strive together toward a common goal when a member of the team keeps shouting to onlookers This’ll never work, I’m playing with a bunch of idiots, which is a fair description of what the linebacker is doing here. And at this critical moment in the season, Seth has decided—what happened to the vow of silence anyway?—to air Buddy’s Boys’ take on the new-look Norman/Richie Eagles.
“Buddy had built this team from the dumps and wanted certain things to push it over the top,” Joyner said. “Buddy cared about winning, and Braman cared about making money. Buddy did not get the chance to complete the job. Braman wanted a puppet [that would be Richie] and that’s what he got. Much of what Buddy said has come to roost. We lost Keith Jackson because of money. Free agency is coming and this team could be ripped apart.”
Having sacked his coach, Seth moves on. He trots out the old figment about Randall’s role in the palace coup.
“… Randall lobbied for Rich to Braman and deserted Buddy,” Joyner said. “Buddy gave Randall the chance, as a black quarterback, that no other coach in this league would. Buddy built the entire offense around Randall. I told Randall that he would pay for what he did, and I don’t know if him missing all of last year with the knee injury was it, but God works in mysterious ways.”
Well, so much for that business about balancing “individuality with team unity and team goals.” Seth reiterates his criticism of Rich for running the ball in the final minutes against Green Bay—”screwed up the game”—and basically leaves no old grudge unvoiced in the lengthy article.
Richie doesn’t see it until after the game. Harry Gamble reads it in his hotel room that morning, seething, but then it’s time to leave for the Kingdome and play a big football game. He thinks it best to deal with this one later.
It turns out to be the longest game in the history of the franchise, more than four hours’ worth, dragging through four quarters and an overtime period that ends with a winning Eagles’ field goal just three seconds shy of the full fifteen minutes.
During the marathon, Richie’s team is flagged with penalties seventeen times, for 191 yards, the second-highest total of penalty yards in NFL history. Clipping, holding, offside, personal fouls, defensive pass interference, offensive pass interference, illegal use of hands, illegal backfield motion, delay of game, illegal block … the play-byplay later reads like an NFL referee’s catalog. All through the game, the Eagles keep handing Seattle chances to stay in the game. Poor Vai Sikahema has two spectacular runbacks annulled by penalties, a 66-yard kickoff return and a 52-yard punt return—plays that would have made Vai the leading return man in the NFL, would probably have snared him another Pro Bowl spot and doubled or tripled his salary— flagged, walked back, and erased.
Through it all, though, Richie’s offense keeps moving the ball. Herschel rushes for 111 yards on twenty-three carries. Keith Byars almost single-hand
edly saves the game, rumbling for one big gain after another in the overtime period to move the team into field-goal range. Randall plays well, completing 60 percent of his passes, scoring one touchdown with one of his patented soaring, headfirst leaps into the end zone, engineering a long scoring drive late in the fourth quarter to tie the game, and then coolly conducting the long march (complete with a couple of nifty, improvised numbers with Byars) at the end of the overtime period to set up Roger Ruzek’s game-winning 44-yard field goal.
Mike Golic gets sent in as a sub late in the first half and promptly bulls his way into the backfield and sacks Seattle quarterback Stan Gelbaugh.
“Eagles coaches went out of their way last week to say that the lack of intensity was not Golic’s fault,” points out CBS commentator and former NFL coach John Robinson, then adds, knowingly, “Golic, nevertheless, was the guy they dropped from the starting lineup.”
The narrow, 20-17 win enables the Eagles to keep pace with the Redskins, who upset the Cowboys today. So the Eagles have now earned a one-game, do-or-die contest next week at the Vet against Washington—winner goes to the play-offs, loser only maybe. So the air in the postgame locker room is giddy with relief and expectation. They’ve narrowly escaped blowing the whole season, and they know it.