Super Bowl Monday_ From the Persian Gulf to the Shores of West Florida - Adam Lazarus [62]
“Did you ever eat a meal in the dark? We’ve gotten good at it,” said Bill Belichick.
Belichick’s unit had already strung together a pair of exemplary defensive performances in two playoff games. Parcells expected another one on Super Bowl Sunday. Still, he knew that might not be enough to defeat the Bills.
For the Giants offense, touchdowns were usually the result of a carefully executed, meticulously crafted, lengthy drive. In a close game, Buffalo’s quick-strike ability could pose a real problem.
“I don’t think we can win a shootout game with Buffalo,” Parcells said. “I don’t think our team has proven it can win any kind of shootout game this year. But I think it has proven it can win a lot of methodical games. So if we can play our style, and keep them from playing theirs, then we have a better chance of making it.”
While his defensive staff and players burned their eyes out watching film, Parcells and Ron Erhardt devised a supplementary strategy for curtailing Buffalo’s potent scoring: keep Jim Kelly, Thurman Thomas, and the rest of the exceptional Bills skill players off the field.
“Our whole plan was to shorten the game for Buffalo,” Parcells said. “We wanted the ball and we didn’t want them to have it.”
In addition to stifling the K-Gun, that approach would have a two-pronged effect. Each first down New York gained would further wear down the Bills, both physically and emotionally. Allowing the opponent to convert on third down—when the defense is just one stop away from ending a drive and giving the ball back to their offense—can demoralize a team. Every successive play meant linebackers and 275-pound defensive linemen would have to chase ball carriers across the field, and do so with little recovery time in between snaps. With Buffalo’s defense tired, the Giants hoped to collect points, and piece together a lead.
Meanwhile, on the sidelines, Giants defenders could catch their breath and prepare for their next bout with the fast-paced, intricate no-huddle.
“There were stretches this season when we were able to control the ball between 36 and 40 minutes per game,” tackle Jumbo Elliott said that week. “This gives our defense the opportunity to rest. So when they do go onto the field, they can really sell out, go out there for three downs then get off.”
Parcells’ vision of how to defeat Buffalo made sense. “Power football,” as he called it, had been a reliable victory formula for decades. “It’s always been vindicated. It’s the new stuff that had something to prove,” he said by week’s end.
Still, no matter how well designed the Giants’ symbiotic game plan was, it was up to his players to execute. Especially in one phase of the game: the quintessential element of “power football.”
“You’ve got to feel that we have to run the ball,” Ottis Anderson said on Thursday. “The only way you can keep Jim Kelly off the field is to run the ball, and that’s what we’re going to try to do.”
Sixty nations would broadcast the Bills and Giants battle for the NFL title. For the first time, curious sports fans in Argentina, Portugal, and Switzerland would be able to see the Super Bowl live. But, to virtually every country outside the United States, football’s world champion had been crowned: not in Tampa that winter evening, but in Italy the previous summer.
In July 1990, Andreas Brehme, Lothar Matthäus, Jürgen Klinsmann, and Rudi Völler of the West German soccer team—benefiting from the post–Berlin Wall reunification just a few months earlier—defeated Argentina 1-0 to win a third FIFA World Cup title.
The U.S. men’s team did not fare well in Italy. Because they failed to qualify each time, Team USA did not even compete in the elimination bracket of the World Cup from 1954 to 1986. So when the United States finally did reach round one in the 1990 World Cup, their 0-0-3 record was not surprising. Following a 2-1 loss to Austria, the team