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“We contributed to our own demise there,” Parcells remembered. “And it was a really important play. That could have provided more additional momentum than we already had. And we had an awful lot at that time.”

Buffalo took over on downs at their own thirty-seven-yard line. Narrowly avoiding Lawrence Taylor’s first sack of the game, Jim Kelly floated a short pass toward the sideline. Thurman Thomas made the catch, avoided a would-be tackler, juked away from another, and picked up nine yards.

Thomas had now carried the football on sixteen plays and averaged more than seven yards per touch. That, coupled with a hard hit that nose tackle Erik Howard delivered to his surgically reconstructed right knee, meant Thomas needed a short break. Backup Kenneth Davis took his spot. This time, rather than stalling with their main cog on the sidelines, the Buffalo offense continued to churn out yardage.

A quick dump-off pass to Davis gained four yards and pushed the football to the midfield stripe. The third-quarter game clock dipped under thirty seconds while Kelly assembled the K-Gun offense in place. Four receivers, along with running back Davis, spread across the formation, leaving Kelly alone in the backfield. He ignored a tame Giants rush and unloaded the ball a few yards past the line of scrimmage, where Davis made his second straight catch. Employing his own flashy moves, Davis took advantage of a key block from wide receiver Al Edwards and sprang upfield, gaining another nineteen yards.

The game had quickly shifted from the lumbering, measured pace of the Giants offense to Buffalo’s frenetic, spastic style.

“Any time you’re standing on the sideline and you run our type of offense, it’s very frustrating because we know sooner or later, we’re going to put the ball in the end zone,” Kelly said. “When we have the ball, we’re going to have to score because we’re just not going to get that many opportunities.”

Reduced to all zeroes, the third-quarter game clock meant a brief pause in the action and an opportunity for the defense to rest and Bill Belichick to ponder adjustments.

Once again, the Giants turned to their best weapon thus far in Super Bowl XXV—dwindling time—to stifle the Bills. But the momentary pause in action would serve as merely an immaterial impediment on Buffalo’s fervid march to a fourth-quarter lead in Super Bowl XXV.

[1]At this point in the game, with less than three minutes remaining in the third period, a Giants field goal would have made the score 20-12. With the two-point conversion play not implemented in the National Football League until the 1994 season, Buffalo could not tie the game by scoring a single touchdown.

10

Buffalo’s Bickering Bills

Sixty-one-year-old Marv Levy did not fit the stereotypical image of a football coach. He was a fine athlete in his day. A native of Chicago, Levy lettered in football and basketball at South Shore High School, then (after dropping basketball) added track to his list of activities upon attending Coe College in 1946.

Well into his seventies, he remained a health fanatic. He jogged, ate right, and camera crews routinely caught him doing multiple sets of push-ups on the sidelines of Bills’ practices.

Still, at five feet, seven inches, and 165 pounds—he didn’t intimidate anyone. At least not physically: Marv Levy was one of the most intelligent men ever to come through professional football.

Levy enrolled at Harvard Law School in the fall of 1950, but within a few weeks realized he’d rather coach football. He remained at Harvard, earning a master’s degree in English history, then began a five-decade-long coaching career.

“There are moments,” Levy said during Super Bowl week, “when I look out on the field and say to myself, ‘What the heck are you doing here? What’s so important about all these men banging into each other?’ But I love the game and the challenge of it all.”

Because of his unique background, he did not speak like a jock. In team meetings, he befuddled many of his players with words like “extrapolate