Super Bowl Monday_ From the Persian Gulf to the Shores of West Florida - Adam Lazarus [106]
Two weeks (and two wins) after losing to Denver on Monday night, the Colts pounded Buffalo at the Hoosier Dome. Indianapolis led 23-0 late in the third quarter before the Bills finally scored. Kelly connected with Andre Reed on a sixteen-yard touchdown, but just as he released the pass, two Colts leveled him. Defensive end Jon Hand shoved Kelly to the hard AstroTurf, and the quarterback landed directly on his left shoulder.
“I knew, the very instant I hit the ground, that my shoulder was separated,” Kelly later wrote. “I remember what my right shoulder felt like when I hit the ground in that Virginia Tech game in my senior year of college. It’s a feeling you never forget.”
Doctors recommended three to six weeks on the sidelines. A day after the 37-14 loss (which cost the Bills first place in the division), Kelly publicly blamed left tackle Howard Ballard for the hit.
“It should have never happened,” he told the press. “[Hand] should have been blocked. Watching the film, I don’t know what Howard was thinking.
. . . I think four out of our five positions [on the offensive line] are very solid. I don’t even need to tell you guys what position they might have to make a change in. I can’t stand up here and say they should do it or shouldn’t do it; I don’t make the decisions. But something has to happen.”
The comment set off a national controversy. Coaches, players, and commentators contemplated Kelly’s right to publicly chastise a teammate. Through the press, several of Kelly’s teammates expressed their disapproval.
“I told him . . . in the last two games, you’ve had some terrible games,” Thomas said on the weekly Sports Line with Paul Maguire. “I felt somebody had to come out and say something because that’s just the way I felt and a lot of the players felt and nobody was saying anything about it.”
Kelly’s shoulder injury put Frank Reich in the starter’s role for three games, each of which Buffalo won.[1] The Bills’ subsequent five losses in seven games sparked a debate that Reich gave the team its best chance to win. Such trouble might have been on the horizon since the previous year: during the 1988 playoffs, Robb Riddick told reporters that he was “unhappy with the quarterback situation” because he did not think Kelly sufficiently utilized the running backs in the passing game.
Even the coaching staff was not immune. During a film session after a 34-3 win over the Jets, a fistfight broke out between two assistants: linebackers coach Nick Nicolau allegedly punched offensive line coach Tom Bresnahan and “rammed his head through a plasterboard wall” during a film session.
The perceived quarterback controversy, a random scrap among coaches, and open airing of the team’s “dirty laundry” compounded already shaky team chemistry.
The Buffalo News reported that African American players and white players occasionally argued over several issues: which race contributed more to the team’s success, what music to listen to in the locker room (rap or country), and inequality in endorsements deals. A story also surfaced that running back Ronnie Harmon “only allowed black teammates to autograph a football he brought into the dressing room one day and wouldn’t allow a player [Andre Reed] whose parents are racially mixed to sign it.”
Others insisted that, instead of race, the strife resulted from swelling egos.
“It wasn’t so much about black guys, white guys as it was about great players and their role on the team,” Steve Tasker later said. “The great players on the team like Bruce and Jim didn’t really like each other that much, and it had nothing to do with black or white. Bruce had a huge ego and so did Jim. And Jim was a huge celebrity and Bruce wanted to be and was. But Bruce was really more of a celebrity outside Buffalo than he was inside. He was one of the big names in the entire NFL. Jim was a Buffalo icon.”
Three consecutive losses at the start of December meant the Bills