Super Bowl Monday_ From the Persian Gulf to the Shores of West Florida - Adam Lazarus [113]
To prevent the clock from reaching the two-minute warning, Buffalo called for their second time-out. Sean Landeta booted a kick downfield, high enough that Bills returner Al Edwards called for a fair catch at the ten-yard line.
Two minutes and sixteen seconds remained. The scoreboard read “Giants 20, Bills 19.” Each unit’s objective was simple: for Buffalo, score; for New York, keep Buffalo from scoring.
Throughout Super Bowl week, one topic of debate saturated west Florida. Who would emerge superior in the battle of what Newsday’s Bob Glauber called “the irresistible force of the Bills’ offense versus the immovable object of the Giants’ defense.”
Fittingly, with the championship on the line, the outcome would be determined by one more showdown.
Kelly jogged into the huddle, called a play, and the offense spread out into the four-receiver formation. With Thurman Thomas to his left, Kelly stared down the defense; Lawrence Taylor and Carl Banks stared right back. Kelly barked out the cadence, caught the center’s snap, dropped back, and set up in the pocket.
“Two minutes to go, you’re the quarterback in a Super Bowl, you wanna lead your team down the field for victory,” Kelly said years later. “It was a dream come true for me.”
FLASHBACK: SUPER BOWL V
Upon assuming command of the Washington Redskins in 1971, head coach George Allen issued an unusual decree. He barred all rookies from his team.
“We’re going to have an all-veteran team,” Allen said. “There will be no rookies, and that’s the way it should be.”
Allen’s contempt may have been extreme, but he was not alone in distrusting rookies. Jim Lee Howell, the New York Giants head coach from 1954 to 1960, would have applauded Allen’s roster maneuvering: “I really think Howell hated rookies,” Giants Hall of Fame linebacker Sam Huff wrote in his autobiography, Tough Stuff.
Andy Russell, another great linebacker from the premerger era, echoed the same sentiment about the man who drafted him, Steelers head coach Buddy Parker.
“He hated rookies,” Russell recalled. “In fact in the year I was drafted, he traded away the first seven picks.”
Back then, no one could predict that, by the twenty-first century, rookies would routinely earn more money than ten-year veterans. But even in the early 1970s, Allen’s ideal vision of an NFL roster was becoming antiquated.
A season before Allen’s rookie purge, the Baltimore Colts’ locker room could have been confused for a college dormitory. By the end of 1970, nine men on their roster never played pro football prior to that season. Perhaps the head coach was partial to them: forty-nine-year-old Don McCafferty—an assistant throughout his entire collegiate and professional coaching career—replaced Don Shula that year.
But a rookie head coach and rookies comprising more than one-fifth of the roster did not hamper the Colts’ season. With a pair of MVP quarterbacks, John Unitas and Earl Morrall, and veterans like John Mackey, Jimmy Orr, and Billy Ray Smith, the Colts were championship-hardened. And most of them had the scars to prove it.
“Super Bowl III was an obvious turning point in the history of the National Football League and what had been the American Football League,” Colts center Bill Curry said. “There was such disdain from the NFL toward the AFL; there was such horror at the notion that one of us might eventually lose to one of them in the game. . . . We were about to be validated as the greatest team in the history of the National Football League: 15-1 going into the Super Bowl. I swear, I don’t think we were complacent. We prepared well. We didn’t just go to Miami and go to the beach.”
Complacent or not, at the Orange Bowl in January 1969, the