Super Bowl Monday_ From the Persian Gulf to the Shores of West Florida - Adam Lazarus [76]
Asked why, during stressful times, Americans found comfort in professional football, Tagliabue replied that “the Super Bowl is the winter version of the Fourth of July, an event without parallel.”
Clearly, the new commissioner intended to link a distinctly American game with the chief American holiday: the Fourth of July is an annual celebration, when Americans come together, eat way too much food, and cheer and shout over explosive violence. So is the Super Bowl.
“It’d be like cancelling the Fourth of July to cancel [the Super Bowl],” fan Bill Urseth said. His wife, Cathy, agreed: “And if you did, Saddam wins.”
With the flick of his right thumb, Pete Rozelle officially began Super Bowl XXV.
“Commissioner Rozelle, will you please toss the coin,” head referee Jerry Seeman asked.
Standing in the eye of the hurricane that he brought to America, Rozelle flipped the specially minted commemorative coin into the air.
“Heads,” called out Reed, a member of the so-called visiting team.
The coin landed heads up. Buffalo elected to receive; the Giants chose to defend the north end zone. The pregame pageantry now over, both teams’ special teams units readied to take the field.
“Don’t be offsides, let’s start it off right!” one member of the Giants’ kickoff team shouted in the sideline huddle with special teams coach Mike Sweatman. “Hit somebody!”
The Giants’ kickoff team dispersed across their own thirty-yard line. Kicker Matt Bahr teed up the ball from his own thirty-five-yard line, then sent a booming end-over-end kick into the seventy-one-degree night air. Returner Don Smith accepted it at the fourteen-yard line and charged upfield before Bahr, the smallest, slowest, and oldest man on the field, wrapped two arms around Smith and wrestled him to the ground. Curiously, a kicker starred on the first play of Super Bowl XXV.
Sans huddle, ten Bills assembled along the thirty-four-yard line. All alone in the backfield (Thurman Thomas split out as a receiver), Jim Kelly stood in the shotgun, four yards behind his center, Kent Hull. To no one’s surprise, the Bills would come out throwing.
On the opposite side of the line of scrimmage, there was a surprise. As Kelly peered past his offensive line, he saw a bizarre defensive alignment: only two Giants down-linemen.
Years later, in his acclaimed biography, The Education of a Coach, the brilliant author David Halberstam summed up Belichick’s Super Bowl XXV game plan.
“He did not want Jim Kelly throwing on every down. The Bills were less dangerous, he thought, given the superb abilities of the New York defense, if they went to their running game, which also had the advantage of taking more time off the clock. He thought the Giants could stop Thurman Thomas, even though he was an exceptional back, if and when they needed to, because they were so good against the run,” Halberstam wrote. “What Belichick really hoped was, in effect, to tease Kelly, to offer him the running game in the second half and then at critical moments take it away from him.”
Though counterintuitive, Belichick openly welcomed a Thurman Thomas–led offensive attack and used a peculiar two-man defensive line (most teams have four or, at least, three) to encourage Buffalo’s running game. By using more speed-oriented defenses—variations on the dime and nickel packages—Belichick believed the Giants would be in a better position both to saturate Kelly’s passing lanes and bring down Thomas in the running game.
The “Big Nickel” package featured only two defensive linemen; linebackers Lawrence Taylor and Pepper Johnson rushed the passer as stand-up defensive ends. Along with Carl Banks, six defensive backs patrolled the passing lanes. In the “Little Nickel,” a defensive back was swapped out for one linebacker. In short, the Giants were rushing four men, dropping seven.
“We went into the game thinking we gotta stop the passing