Super Bowl Monday_ From the Persian Gulf to the Shores of West Florida - Adam Lazarus [102]
Riggins had already carried the football twenty-seven times for ninety-three yards that evening. Those totals were so often enough to put his team ahead, yet the Redskins still trailed 17-13 once they took over at their own forty-eight with under twelve minutes remaining in the game. Gibbs turned to Riggins again: “He’s our bread and butter. We give it to him and make people take it away from him.”
Consecutive carries by Riggins pushed the Redskins across midfield, setting up a third and two at the Miami forty-four. Trying to sneak Clarence Harmon through the middle of Miami’s defense—a unit that surrendered the fewest total yards in the NFL that season—didn’t pick up the first down, and the Redskins now faced a fourth and inches.
“We were on the sidelines, and coach Joe Gibbs and the staff were all debating whether to go for it and the urgency and time of the game and that if we were going to make a statement it had to be right then. So they decided to go for it,” tight end Clint Didier recalled.
“Joe Gibbs was more of a conservative coach than that, but we went for it on fourth down but not that much. He wasn’t a gambler. He played the odds: we were in the fourth quarter, we were behind, and it was time. You had to go for it. You had to make your stand. You had to show the other team that you were willing to risk it all right then and there to make a statement.”
Gibbs made his decision and told the play to Theismann, who sprinted back onto the field.
“Goal line, I-left, tight-wing, fake zoom, seventy chip,” he told the other ten men in Washington’s huddle.
“Goal line, I-left, tight-wing” was the formation. “seventy chip” was the play call—a Riggins run off tackle. The Redskins relied so heavily on seventy chip that in order to perfect it, the offense ran the play in practice under very special conditions.
“[Redskins offensive line coach Joe] Bugel and those guys took great pride in never being stopped when they ran it,” Ray Didinger said.
Bugel told me that they practiced it all the time because it was such a key play in their arsenal. But Bugel said that when they practiced it, they ran it against a defense with thirteen men.
Because they wanted to hone it to such a fine edge that when they would run short yardage or goal line in practice and they wanted to run seventy chip, they would actually put two extra defenders on the field and make it that much harder on the offense to execute it, that much harder for [Jeff] Bostic and Grimm and Jacoby and Otis Wonsley, who had to throw the key lead block.
. . . And they were still making it in practice so when they got out to play in the game and they played against eleven, it almost seemed easy.
As proficient as the Redskins—and especially the Hogs—became at forcefully carving out holes in the defense, seventy chip was virtually unstoppable for one more reason: motion.
The “fake zoom” portion of the play call in “Goal line, I-left, tight-wing, fake zoom, seventy chip,” meant that, prior to the snap, wing–tight end Clint Didier—who was aligned on the left side of the line—would go in motion to the right, then come back left. The purpose of the motion was to disrupt the positioning of Miami’s Don McNeal: wherever Didier went, it was McNeal’s job to follow.
“I can remember in the huddle thinking all I gotta do is make sure I get that safety that follows me to think that I’m gonna go clear cross the formation,” Didier remembered. “I carried my motion further than I normally would, and I had good footing and I came back and [McNeal] slipped.”
At the snap, Didier and each one of the Hogs neutralized Miami’s six-man front line at the line of scrimmage, opening a huge hole for Riggins to run through. The last man in position to make the tackle was McNeal. A few steps out of position, the 190-pound McNeal had no chance of bringing down the 235-pound