Super Bowl Monday_ From the Persian Gulf to the Shores of West Florida - Adam Lazarus [97]
“We played a ‘Cover Three’ that time and I think we had one guy drop to the wrong zone,” Kelso remembered two decades later. “They found the opening, and there was just a lot of room when he caught the football to move. And I was coming up from the deep middle. It looked like he was gonna be tackled; I don’t know if I hesitated a second or not, but then he kinda jumped off to the side, and I just missed him cleanly.”
The next man up with a chance to bring down Ingram was cornerback James Williams, the Bills first-round draft choice that year. He too failed. Once more, Ingram employed the spin move and avoided the Bills defender. Williams did manage to grab ahold of the receiver’s foot, but Ingram was now within reach of his goal, the nineteen-yard line. Hounded by Williams and Talley—who relentlessly pursued the tackle for a second time—Ingram dove forward into a pile of players. The football landed a yard beyond the first-down mark.
“When I fell, I just looked over at the chains, and I saw that I was ahead of the stick. It was a good feeling.”
“Every now and then,” Dan Dierdorf announced to the ABC viewers, “in a football game you can look back to a play and it might set the tone for everything that happens after that. If the Giants win this game, they may look back to this catch and run by Mark Ingram.”
Rushes by Anderson and Meggett gained six yards; so just a few minutes after Ingram’s spectacular play, New York needed another clutch play on third down. Again, they got one.
Each third-down conversion on this game-defining drive had come by way of a different Giant contributing in his own unique way: Meggett outrunning a Buffalo defender, a powerful charge off tackle by Anderson, and the squirmy catch-and-run from Ingram. This time, they looked toward their multitalented quarterback to produce the key play.
When Hostetler took over in mid-December 1990, the Giants did not revamp their entire offensive game plan. But Parcells and his offensive staff knew that to succeed with their understudy performing in the lead role, they would need to take advantage of Hostetler’s gifts.
“Except for a few plays like a quarterback sneak or a draw or a rollout, you don’t design plays for the quarterback with the intent to run,” Parcells told reporters two days after Simms was placed on the injured reserve. “But he does have the improvising ability to run and escape the rush. Will we change the whole offense for him? No. Will we put in things for him? Yes.”
The “bootleg” was a perfect fit. On the bootleg, the quarterback fakes a handoff toward one side of the field, then pivots and runs to the opposite sideline where he looks for an open receiver.
With the athletic Jeff Hostetler and the Rodney Hampton–Ottis Anderson duo combining for thirteen touchdowns and more than twelve hundred rushing yards during the regular season, the bootleg was tailor-made for the new-look Giants.
A bootleg to the offense’s right was the most effective way for the Giants to run the play. A right-handed quarterback, such as Hostetler, will make a more accurate throw running to his right instead of running to his left. Furthermore, faking a handoff to the left would likely draw in more defenders than if the bootleg was run to the opposite side: the left side of the Giants’ line featured Pro Bowler William Roberts and Jumbo Elliott, fast becoming one of the league’s best tackles. More often than not, when New York needed to move the football on the ground, the running back would follow Roberts’ and Elliott’s front-side blocks.
On three plays early in the game, the Giants successfully ran the bootleg—fake handoff to the left, Hostetler drifting right. Hostetler completed a thirteen-yarder to Howard Cross, a six-yard gain to Bavaro, and a twenty-two-yard grab by Ingram.
“[On] those bootlegs, I think Buffalo’s backs