by Adam Lazarus
Buffalo’s defense had now surrendered eighty-eight yards and six first downs. A week earlier in the AFC Championship Game against Los Angeles, at the three-minute mark of the opening period, Darryl Talley was returning an interception for a touchdown to boost their lead to 21-3. Seven days later, at the exact same three-minute mark, the Bills were embroiled in a much different contest.
“I’ve never been so tired in a football game in my life,” said Shane Conlan. “I was even tired in the first quarter. They kept pounding with guys like Anderson, and that wears you out. . . . I broke my face mask on Anderson in the first half. It just snapped and turned all the way around to the right side of my helmet. I mean, jeez, it’s the first time I ever broke a face mask.”
“They were sagging,” said tight end Bob Mrosko, who needed postgame stitches on his forehead following a collision with Darryl Talley. “They weren’t pursuing as hard. In practice we had told ourselves that no matter what happened, we’d play our style of football.”
While Anderson was vital to the offensive game plan, the Giants needed to mix passes into the ground-heavy attack. And after Anderson pounded out four yards on a first and ten from midfield, miscues in the passing game—a far-too-high Hostetler pass and a drop by Meggett—led to a Sean Landeta punt.
At the twenty-yard line, Buffalo began their third attempt at cracking the league’s top-ranked defense. This time the renowned K-Gun finally appeared. Three quick completions from Kelly to Reed (in the span of just four plays) gained thirty-five yards and surged Buffalo across midfield. The opening quarter came to a close, and the teams paused to switch sides and catch a breath while another sequence of $800,000-per-thirty-second advertisements entertained ABC’s viewing audience.
The momentary break in action did not interrupt the Bills’ rhythm. Healthy gains followed, via a catch by Thomas for thirteen yards and Kelly’s sixth completion to Andre Reed, which picked up another nine. Kelly then connected with tight end Keith McKeller; a penalty—Leonard Marshall blindsided Kelly and shoved him to the ground well after the quarterback released the ball—added four yards to McKeller’s catch and Buffalo advanced to the four-yard line.
On the previous drive, Buffalo had squandered an opportunity deep inside Giants territory. Following Lofton’s sixty-one-yard grab and the subsequent first and goal, the Bills stayed in their familiar no-huddle, shotgun offense: only a field goal resulted.
For their second chance so close to the Giants goal line, the Bills switched to a more conventional short-yardage offense: three tight ends, two backs, no shotgun. A sneaky run up the middle to seldom-used fullback Jamie Mueller came up just inches shy: only a crushing hit by Lawrence Taylor kept him from scoring. Instant replay was even used to determine if Mueller broke the plane of the goal line.
Again, from their unfamiliar formation, the Bills lined up, center Kent Hull gripping a football that flirted with the end zone’s white line. At the snap, a powerful surge by Hull and guard Jim Ritcher opened up a spot in the Giants defensive front. Reserve running back Don Smith aimed for the hole and, behind Mueller’s piercing block of Gary Reasons, squeezed into the end zone for the first Super Bowl touchdown in Buffalo Bills history.
“It was really great coming back here, especially scoring a touchdown here,” said Smith, a former Mississippi State quarterback who played the previous three seasons with the Buccaneers before joining Buffalo as a free agent. “I had never scored a touchdown in this stadium before. The fact that it was the Super Bowl made it even better.”
The 10-3 lead gave Buffalo slight command of the scoreboard. Over the next few minutes, they seized command of the game.
Consecutive marginal gains at the start of the ensuing drive left the Giants with a third and six from their own thirty-six: not ideal positioning for an offense designed to leave minimal distances on third down.
From the shotgun with four wide receivers, Hostetler surveyed the field and fired an incomplete pass, far off-line from his target, rookie Troy Kyles. The quick three-and-out (New York ran only a minute and a half off the clock) troubled Parcells and the entire New York sideline. But there was a much more damaging result of the third-down incompletion.
Giants left tackle Doug Riesenberg, concerned by the inside rush of NFL Defensive Player of the Year Bruce Smith, unknowingly allowed Buffalo’s Leon Seals a clear path into the backfield. (This defensive line stunt is known as an “outside twist.”) Seals, the man initially responsible for Phil Simms’ injured foot back in Week Fifteen, clobbered Hostetler just as the ball was thrown.
“Seals is a big, powerful man, and he got what a defensive lineman would call a great hit,” remembered Hostetler, “because he came down on top of me with his whole body weight and nothing stopping it.”
Hostetler stumbled to the bench and sat there for several minutes with smelling salts pinned to his nose: “I couldn’t even smell the ammonia, I was so woozy. My vision was fuzzy. I thought I might have to come out.”
Meanwhile, Buffalo’s offense, fresh off their twelve-play, eighty-yard touchdown drive, sprang into action. Consecutive Thurman Thomas rushes, against the two-down-linemen Giants front, netted eighteen yards. But patience and confidence in Belichick’s unusual defensive approach promptly paid off.
No matter how good Thurman Thomas was, the Bills were not going to run him on every down. And by flooding the field with quick defenders very capable in pass coverage, the Giants could limit Jim Kelly’s options when the Bills did try and stay balanced by throwing the football.
Following a pair of rushes, Kelly returned to the air. On the run to avoid pressure, he tossed the ball to Reed who was unable to hang on after being decked midair by Myron Guyton. Punishing Buffalo receivers was another part of the Giants’ strategy in defending the pass game. The strategy had a prolonged impact. On the next play, a third and one near midfield, Kelly again targeted Reed on a short pass over the middle. No defender was within three yards of him, and Kelly’s pass was precise. Still, Reed dropped the ball: he must have noticed Pepper Johnson, the Giant linebacker in position to pound Reed had he hauled in the football.
“In the tapes of other games,” said Carl Banks, “they had guys catch the ball and run through the defense for large gains. We backed up in our zones, changed the coverages and rushes, and when receivers caught the ball, we wanted to punish them. They have the kind of offense that is going to make some plays. We knew that, but we wanted them to understand that we were going to hammer them when they caught it.”
The Giants defense had held, but the Bills were about to add to their lead.
A good punt by Rick Tuten pinned the Giants back at their own six-yard line. Despite the noticeable wear and tear on their quarterback, Parcells and his offensive staff remained confident in Hostetler. Play-action on first down (Hostetler was actually standing three yards deep in his own end zone as he scanned the field) gained seven yards, which was lost on second down, the result of a holding penalty.
On the next snap, Hostetler again receded into the backfield with the intention of putting the ball in the air.
“I remember the play, it was ‘258,’ it was a straight drop back and rollout to the right and what Ottis [Anderson] saw was that they had a blitz coming. And Ottis was trying to step up quick underneath me to pick up his guy,” Hostetler said years later. “Well, in doing that, he stepped in and caught my foot as I’m dropping back.”
Hostetler stumbled toward the ground, then regained balance and began to straighten up, hoping to either escape his own end zone or simply throw the ball away.
“[All] of a sudden I felt this big paw in my ear trying to strip the ball,” he said.
That paw belonged to Bruce Smith, who locked hold of Hostetler’s right wrist, then swiped at the ball with the other hand. Knowing that the difference between a safety and a touchdown would be his ability to maintain possession—by now there was no chance of escaping the swarm of Bills—Hostetler pulled the football into his stomach, smothering it like
a grease fire.
“If I lost the ball there and they recover, we’re probably finished, because that puts them up [17-3] at that point in the game, and I don’t think we can recover from that. But holding on to it, and just giving them the safety, it turned out to be a huge, huge play for us. For me it was like in the backyard with my two older brothers again: getting beat up and trying to hold on to the football.”
“That was a huge play, and it could have been an even bigger play,” Smith said years later. “But he just had a strong grip, a strong hold on the ball, and was able to hold onto it, and we ended up getting a safety and two points out of it but the ultimate would have been to get the strip and get the touchdown.”
Smith—who was flagged for an excessive celebration penalty—and the Bills’ sideline showed little angst. In addition to two points, the Bills also received possession of the football by way of a free kick from New York.
“[Parcells] said it multiple times that week,” recalled Bob Mrosko, the Giants tight end from Penn State,
that we had to be patient. He said it as plain as day, there are going to be a couple of times in this game when things are going to start going bad for us. And no matter what we do, we have to stick with our game plan and we can’t try and get in a shoot-out with this team.
I remember Bill Parcells calling the whole defense over [after the safety], and he talked to them. I imagine he must have told them “stop ’em.” Then he called the whole offense. Basically, he said, “I just talked to the defense: they’re stopping [Buffalo] after we do the free kick. We’re gonna get the ball back. We’re gonna drive it down the field, and score, we’re gonna get back in this game and take control of this game. . . . The way Bill Parcells coached—I’ve been around some great football coaches, college with Joe Paterno—but that guy was absolutely a prophet in how he designed a football game.
From there, the fast-paced first half momentarily slowed. A trio of incompletions—including another drop by Andre Reed, the result of another tough hit delivered from a Giants defender—forced the Bills to punt. A similarly uneventful Giants’ three-and-out returned possession to Buffalo.
Five straight incompletions on five straight offensive snaps convinced Kelly to put the ball in the hands of their most elusive and reliable player. Thurman Thomas gashed the Giants for an eighteen-yard run on first down following the Giants’ punt. The five-foot, ten-inch back punctuated his big gain by pounding safety Myron Guyton, just before three Giants brought him down.
“He runs so big, doesn’t he, Dan,” Frank Gifford wondered aloud, on camera to Dan Dierdorf, “198 pounds and he runs liked a 220-pound back. He’s so quick, so shifty. . . . He just looks for guys, then hammers Guyton.”
Thomas carried the ball on the next three plays—a run for four yards and back-to-back passes out of the backfield that yielded eighteen more—before taking a much-deserved rest on the sidelines.
“It’s up to Thomas,” Gifford said. “They’re not going to change the offense much because he gets more work than any of the receivers, anyone else in that offensive unit. He’s in the pass pattern, he runs the ball, he runs the draw, he runs on the screen. When he finally had it, he points his finger to himself, ‘get me outta here,’ and they bring in help.”
Gifford, the Giants’ all-time leader in total yardage, could appreciate a multitalented back who served as the cornerstone of a championship-caliber team.
But while Thomas stood on the sidelines catching his breath, the Buffalo offense screeched to a halt: an incompletion, a false-start penalty, and a short pass reception that failed to convert on third and seven. Buffalo punted.
“Thurman was an outstanding player; he could run and catch and could do a lot with the ball. I think he was really their ultimate weapon. He provided the balance for that team,” Parcells said in 2010. “They were in the no-huddle, kinda a one-back offense and three wide receivers, the NFL hadn’t seen a lot of that. And it was the offense of the ‘90s. The [Indianapolis] Colts still use, basically, the same thing. It’s had a long lifespan, and almost every team uses some aspects of it.”
Less than four minutes remained in the first half when Hostetler and the Giants offense took the field for a first and ten from their own thirteen. Despite the two-score deficit and being backed up near their own end zone late in the first half, the Giants didn’t flinch.
“I had seen so much of the Giants,” Eagles beat-writer Ray Didinger said,
I knew how mentally tough a team they were. And I knew how well coached they were. I never got the feeling they were gonna let that game get away from them. . . . That’s usually how Super Bowls get out of hand: one team falls behind and the coaching staff would totally get away from what they’ve done all year and what they do well, and they get into sort of a panic mode, and they start trying to force the issue, and they start throwing the ball a lot and taking chances. And then all of a sudden, they start making mistakes, and a couple mistakes lead to more points, and the next thing you know, the roof has fallen in. The Giants, with Parcells and that coaching staff, they just weren’t going to do that. That was not a group that was prone to panic.
Although there was no panic on the Giants’ sideline, in the huddle, Jeff Hostetler alerted his teammates of the urgency.
“I told them it was time to stop screwing around,” he said. “I told them that we were about to blow this thing for ourselves.”
The Giants responded to their leader. After a nice gain on first down, Ottis Anderson burst through a crease in the Buffalo front to pick up eighteen. Then Hostetler slung a dart downfield along the right sideline, over a leaping cornerback, into the hands of Mark Ingram, who touched both feet down before falling out-of-bounds. An outside run by Meggett picked up seventeen yards. On three consecutive snaps, the Giants had gained more yards (fifty-seven) than they had on their previous four series combined.
Meggett’s burst brought about the two-minute warning. Nearing Buffalo’s red zone, the Giants could now think about putting points on the board. But no receivers opened up downfield on first or second down, and in order to keep the drive alive, the Giants would need to convert a third and seven from the twenty-one.
With the clock reading 1:13, Parcells signaled for a time-out: he wanted to discuss the play options with his quarterback and offensive coordinator. Moments later, Hostetler returned to the field, broke the huddle, took the snap, and surveyed the field. After all that discussion, the second-string tight end was not the man Parcells, Hostetler, or Ron Erhardt were hoping to get the ball too. Nevertheless, Howard Cross came up with a huge play. On his knees, the second-year University of Alabama product caught the ball in the flats, a yard shy of the flagstick, then rolled sideways for an additional yard to gain the critical first down.
Cornelius Bennett batted down Hostetler’s next pass, leaving the Giants with thirty-six seconds to gain the fourteen yards needed for a touchdown.
Throughout the first half, both quarterbacks struggled to make accurate passes. In addition to badly overthrowing Reed on the game’s opening play from scrimmage, Kelly had already twice underthrown Lofton on deep passes, including the sixty-one-yard tipped ball completion early in the game. Hostetler—still in a haze from several crushing blows—accumulated his share of subpar tosses as well. During the Giants’ lone scoring drive, he too had underthrown his receiver on a critical play: not leading Mark Ingram enough on a third-down throw into the end zone meant New York had to settle for a Matt Bahr field-goal attempt. Earlier in that drive, he also overthrew Mark Bavaro by several feet as the veteran tight end was wide open near the goal line.
On this drive late in the second period, he remained inconsistent. The twenty-two-yard strike to Ingram along the sideline hummed and was placed brilliantly. But his next throw was far out of reach for Maurice Carton. Even the critical third-down completion to Howard Cross had been errant.
“Hostetler has just been off in throwing the ball,” Dan Dierdorf remarked to the ABC viewing audienc
e. “That might have been a touchdown if he threw it and led Cross.”
Despite several regrettable throws, the Giants kept turning to Hostetler. Even after another, seemingly devastating misfire.
From the fourteen-yard line, Hostetler took the snap and stood tall in the pocket. Leon Seals bearing down on him, Hostetler tossed the ball toward the center of the end zone. There, Stephen Baker had cut underneath safety Mark Kelso. A throw anywhere near the sure-handed receiver would result in six points. The ball hit the ground two feet in front of Baker, who dove forward to try and snag the pass.
“I was mad at myself because I knew I had underthrown him,” Hostetler wrote. “I lost him momentarily behind the line and threw where I thought he would be. I was wrong.”
“When he threw that first one in the dirt, I said, ‘that’s it, I’m not gonna get another chance to score,’” Baker remembered.
Rather than trying to avoid another miscue between quarterback and receiver, the Giants offensive staff turned right back to Hostetler and Baker via a familiar approach.
Back in October, the post-corner route—a receiver running toward the center of the field (“the post”), then breaking sharply downfield to the sidelines (“the corner” of the end zone)—had produced a thirty-eight-yard touchdown in Hostetler’s fourth-quarter comeback against Phoenix. Three months later, Baker ran the post-corner in the divisional round and hauled in a Hostetler pass for the Giants’ first touchdown against Chicago.
“When we got back in the huddle, the coaches called the same play we used to beat the Cardinals and also in the playoff game against the Bears. So he called my number.”
Prior to the start of the play—called “back green X flag”—Hostetler read a blitz in the Buffalo formation: from the shotgun, he could see an expanded view of the field. At the snap, six members of the Bills front seven charged toward him. Although linebacker Ray Bentley breached the offensive line, Hostetler found enough time to float the ball toward the left corner before being touched.