by Adam Lazarus
“Continued trust needs to be placed in rookie running back Rodney Hampton, who has taken the reins from a tired Anderson. Hampton is going to be the guy for the playoffs,” a New York columnist insisted. “Use Hampton in short-yardage situations as a complement to Anderson. Hampton’s speed often will mean the difference between a first down and a punt. If Anderson can’t push the pile any more, the Giants must try something else.”
In Jeff Hostetler’s debut the next week against the 5-9 Cardinals, the Giants began trying something else. Fullback Maurice Carthon led the team with sixty-seven yards rushing, while Rodney Hampton and Hostetler combined for an additional eighty. Anderson’s contribution was minimal: four carries for sixteen yards.
That day, New York had its most productive rushing effort of the season, which allowed Hostetler to settle in at quarterback. The de facto starter scrambled for a touchdown and tossed for another to give the Giants a 24-14 fourth-quarter lead.
Although they surrendered three touchdown passes in the second half, New York hung on to defeat the lowly Cardinals 24-21, earning the NFC’s second seed. Having locked up a first-round playoff bye, the Giants did not sit their stars in the Week Seventeen finale against New England. For a team that had lost three of the previous five games—and surrendered 381 passing yards to Phoenix, the NFL’s worst passing offense—they needed to play, not rest. And heading into the postseason with an unproved quarterback, every game-time snap would be vital.
“The more time I have to do it, the better it will go,” said Hostetler. “The timing is going to improve. I’m going to get better throwing to the right place at the right time. The more reps I get the better it’s going to be.”
“Two weeks from now,” Parcells said, “Jeff will be better able to play than now. Hopefully by (playoff) time, things will change for the better from a physical, psychological and performance standpoint.”
On a drizzling final Sunday of the regular season, the Giants defeated New England 13-10. A three-point win over the 1-14 Patriots—losers of thirteen consecutive games—failed to excite the demanding New York fans and media. But at 13-3, with a bye during Wild-Card Weekend and a home game to follow, the Giants had survived a horrible December. And once the postseason arrived, they showcased the excellence that fashioned a magnificent 10-0 start.
The Giants drew Chicago in the second round of the postseason. Similar to their opponent, the Bears had fallen fast and hard after a fantastic start to the 1990 season. Mike Ditka’s team began 9-1, only to lose four of their remaining six games. And despite their 16-6 wild-card triumph over New Orleans in the next round of the playoffs, they were no match for the Giants.
Bill Parcells and offensive coordinator Ron Erhardt showed faith in Hostetler from the very beginning. New York’s opening possession came with the Giants pinned deep inside their own territory. Rather than play it safe and run the ball on first down, the Giants threw.
“That was a real confidence booster,” Hostetler said. “That’s not the easiest place to throw from.”
Hostetler passed on first down six times in the first quarter alone, a whopping number for the run-dedicated head coach. Ahead 3-0, Parcells even shunned a forty-three-yard field goal attempt to throw on fourth down and inches to go: Hostetler rolled right and completed a six-yard pass to tight end Bob Mrosko. On the next play, Stephen Baker hauled in a perfectly placed, over-the-shoulder pass at the back-left corner of the end zone to give the Giants a 10-0 lead.
“All day, the play-calling, I felt, showed confidence in me,” Hostetler said.
Confidence in the defense also soared after a critical fourth down and short early in the second quarter.
The Bears finished the 1990 season averaging 152 rushing yards per game, second in the NFL. Neal Anderson—the heir-apparent to Walter Payton—spearheaded the attack, posting his third consecutive 1,000-yard season. To defend Chicago, assistant coach Bill Belichick made the bold switch from their standard 3-4 defense to a 4-3 approach.
“Hopefully, it would give the Bears the most trouble,” said the team’s thirty-year-old defensive coordinator. “It wasn’t that big an adjustment for our guys. Nobody played a position they hadn’t been at sometime during the year. But the combination was a different look for the offense with Lawrence Taylor and Carl Banks as true outside linebackers.”
The change was brilliant. Spurred on by a momentous fourth-down goal-line stand at the one-yard line, the Giants suffocated Chicago’s offense.
“They forced us to a passing game,” Ditka lamented. “And I don’t like to play that kind of game.”
Ill-equipped to be one-dimensional, Chicago’s offense attempted thirty-six passes, gaining just 205 yards. The new-look Giants defense forced three turnovers, did not allow a single rushing first down, and kept the Bears out of the end zone the entire afternoon.
Meanwhile, New York’s offense was efficient, if not spectacular, against the aging Bears. With under a minute remaining in the second quarter, Hostetler sprinted out of the pocket and flicked a five-yard touchdown pass to tight end Howard Cross, extending the lead to 17-3. In the second half, touchdown runs by Hostetler and Maurice Carthon built an insurmountable 31-3 advantage.
New York rushed for 194 yards, controlled the ball for thirty-eight minutes and converted all four of their fourth-down attempts, all the while gradually restoring faith to the quarterback position.
“We’re very predictable around here,” Parcells facetiously remarked in the locker room. “Today, I think you would have to say we were a little less predictable. We were still very predictable but we were a little less predictable today.”
The lone objective that the Giants did not achieve against Chicago was to stay healthy.
In the second quarter, New York ran another surprising first-down pass play. Defensive tackle Steve McMichael sacked Hostetler, who fumbled. Rodney Hampton recovered the ball and picked up three yards before two Bears defenders pounced on him, shattering his left fibula.
“My leg felt numb after the play,” the rookie said. “I stayed in for the next play, but it still felt numb, and I couldn’t run my pass pattern.”
As Hampton hobbled off the Meadowlands field, Ottis Anderson jogged past him and into the Giants’ huddle.
With his production reducing each week—simultaneous to Hampton’s late-season surge—Anderson wasn’t entirely dressed for the role of feature back. He mistakenly wore his practice pants instead of the team-issued game pair against Chicago. (Because the Giants won, Bill Parcells insisted Anderson wear practice pants on game day for the duration of the postseason.)
“Ottis thought he wouldn’t play much right before the game,” Maurice Carthon said. “I told him, ‘You’ll get a lot of work.’ Now, he thinks I’m psychic.”
In Hampton’s place, Anderson totaled eighty yards on twenty-one attempts and added a six-yard reception. He touched the ball twenty-two times, nearly one-third of the Giants’ total play count. And it was his goal-line block—of enormous William “The Refrigerator” Perry—that sprung Hostetler for New York’s third touchdown.
Anderson became the second-oldest back in NFL history to post more than seventy-five yards rushing in a playoff game.
“I ain’t throwing no Gatorade,” Anderson told a teammate who asked for his help in a postgame showering of Bill Parcells. “I’m too tired to throw Gatorade.”
The franchise’s first playoff win since Super Bowl XXI set up an NFC Championship Game showdown with the 49ers. At 14-2, San Francisco owned the best record in the NFL and had earned the number-one seed in the NFC, a reward for defeating the Giants 7-3 in early December.
The Giants and 49ers were similar in many ways. Parcells and San Francisco’s George Seifert had each earned exactly one Super Bowl ring as a head coach. And both men had worked their way up through the organization, from position coach, to defensive coordinator, and finally to head coach. Although Parcells’ sideline and postgame press conference demeanor was th
e antithesis of the subdued Seifert, they both craved defensive excellence. As a result, Parcells’ Giants and Seifert’s 49ers were among the best in the league, two of the best units in the modern era. Twelve of the twenty-two starting Giants and 49ers defenders were once or future Pro Bowlers. The two teams even finished the 1990 season with unusually similar statistics: 4.6 yards allowed per play, and only five first downs and three turnovers separated that year’s totals.
Offense—and specifically the decorations with which offensive personnel were adorned—made for the lone disparity between the two teams.
Forty-niners quarterback Joe Montana won his second consecutive MVP Award in 1990. In three of the four Super Bowl titles that San Francisco won during the decade, Montana was named the game’s Most Valuable Player. Ironically, the one Super Bowl victory in which he did not receive the trophy was arguably the greatest performance of his career. He passed for a record 357 yards and two touchdowns, the second of which completed a 92-yard drive in the final minutes of a 20-16 victory over Cincinnati.
Instead of Montana, the MVP for that Super Bowl XXIII triumph went to wide receiver Jerry Rice. The finest pass catcher of his or, perhaps, any era, Rice set a new personal record in 1990 with one hundred receptions. After six seasons, the twenty-eight-year-old was already halfway past breaking every receiving record in league history.
Although the “Montana-to-Rice” mantra became etched in pro football history throughout the second half of the 1980s, San Francisco’s run at an unprecedented three consecutive Super Bowl titles (the popularly labeled “three-peat”) was fueled by a roster of all-stars. Versatile running back Roger Craig along with prototypical fullback Tom Rathman comprised a phenomenal backfield. John Taylor and Brent Jones, one of the league’s premier tight ends, gave the 49er passing game several weapons to complement Rice. And with the same five players starting every game that season, the San Francisco offensive line was among the most consistent and productive in the NFL.
Even with a healthy Simms and a healthy Hampton, the Giants scored only a field goal in the regular-season loss to San Francisco. A month later, the 49ers still possessed the same talent, while the Giants offense now featured second-stringers at quarterback and running back. Few gave New York much of a chance.
“People talk about Hostetler; how he’s a seven-year veteran. Yeah, but he’s a seven-year backup quarterback,” said John Madden, the Super Bowl winning coach who, along with Pat Summerall, would broadcast the NFC Championship Game for CBS.
How will he respond on the road in a hostile environment? His sense of poise and running ability has to be of concern to (49ers coach) George Seifert. But can he have back-to-back great games? It will be tough. . . . He did well against Chicago because he was kind of an unknown. But after last week, the 49ers have more film. The 49ers will be practicing all week to prepare for him. For the Giants to win, Hostetler has to play the greatest game of his life. And it’s going to be much, much more difficult this week.
By game day, San Francisco was an eight-point favorite. But the veteran Giants paid little attention to the prognosticators. They had already proven once in 1990 that they could match up well with their prolific opponent: holding Montana’s unit to just one score during the December loss marked the lowest output from the famed 49er offense in thirty-five games. And in the only postseason showdown between the two franchises, during the 1986 playoffs, the Giants walloped San Francisco 49-3. (During the rout, a brutal hit by a Giants defensive lineman knocked Joe Montana out of the game.)
The mostly veteran Giants squad didn’t need fiery confidence-boosting speeches by their head coach. Bill Parcells delivered one anyway.
“There was just a one-week interval before the Super Bowl,” Parcells said in 2010. “I told our team before we went to San Francisco that I wanted them to pack for ten days because we weren’t coming home. A lot of players have mentioned that to me over the years that that was a display of confidence that I really believed we could beat San Francisco—even though not many people did.”
Forty-niners wide receiver John Taylor had a knack for the big play.
A league suspension sidelined Taylor for the opening four weeks of the 1988 NFL season. But in his first game back, the third-round draft pick out of Delaware State fielded a punt deep in his own territory and sprinted seventy-seven yards for a touchdown. That third-quarter score proved to be the difference in San Francisco’s 20-13 victory over Detroit. In November, against the World Champion Washington Redskins, Taylor violated the cardinal rule that forbids fielding a punt inside the ten-yard line. He atoned for the sin, soaring ninety-five yards for an incredible touchdown.
Of course, the most famous moment in Taylor’s career came the following January, when he caught Montana’s game-winning touchdown pass with thirty-four seconds remaining in Super Bowl XXIII.
A year later, as the bookend receiver to Jerry Rice, he grabbed sixty receptions for 1,077 yards and ten touchdowns. That postseason, Taylor was on the receiving end of a Montana touchdown pass in each of the 49ers’ three playoff victories against the Minnesota Vikings, Los Angeles Rams, and Denver Broncos.
But in 1990, no team felt the sting of Taylor’s penchant for clutch catches and electrifying runs more than the New York Giants.
The only points allowed by the Giants defense during the Monday night loss to San Francisco in early December came on a twenty-three-yard touchdown strike from Montana to a sliding Taylor.
“I was supposed to be over in the middle area,” defensive back Everson Walls said. “When Montana pumped, I got drawn in. He took me out of my area.”
Montana had been fooling NFL defensive backs for twelve seasons. But to Everson Walls, Taylor’s touchdown was eerily familiar.
Nine seasons earlier, in the same south end zone of Candlestick Park, Montana pump-faked, then hooked up with Dwight Clark for the most famous six-yard touchdown in NFL history: “The Catch” vaulted San Francisco to a win over Dallas in the 1981 NFC Championship Game and, two weeks later, the Super Bowl championship. The Cowboys rookie cornerback over whom Clark snagged that dynasty-forging pass was Everson Walls.
“Each time I play [the 49ers] I think about the play, no doubt about it,” Walls said on the Tuesday before the 1990 NFC Championship Game. “Stepping in Candlestick gives me a feeling of intensity and alertness because I never want to be caught in that position again.”
A decade after “The Catch,” Walls found himself in that position—or, rather, out of position—at another critical moment of an NFC Championship Game played beside San Francisco Bay.
The Giants and 49ers played to a 6-6 tie through the first half of the 1990 NFC title game. Early in the third quarter, New York’s Sean Landeta boomed a punt downfield where John Taylor dangerously fielded the kick at his own seven-yard line. Taylor took two steps right, noticed a wall of blockers aligning by the opposite sideline, reversed field, then turned up and gained thirty-two yards. Only Landeta—who forced him out-of-bounds—could prevent the tie-breaking score.
Landeta’s “tackle” didn’t really matter, however. He simply delayed a Taylor touchdown by one play. On first and ten from his own thirty-nine-yard line, Montana took a five-step drop, scanned the field, and spotted Taylor eighteen yards away, near the sideline. Everson Walls, locked in man-to-man coverage with Taylor, sprinted toward that spot.
“I went for the interception,” said Walls. “I got a hand on it, but he got two on it. My break was good. My execution was bad.”
Intercepting quarterbacks had made Walls a Pro Bowler. In 1981, the undrafted rookie from Grambling State posted a league-high eleven interceptions. And although he was “posterized” by Montana’s pass to Dwight Clark, Walls had played tremendous defense prior to yielding “The Catch.” He picked off Montana twice, recovered a fumble, and accounted for eight tackles.
“You can’t blame Everson for just one play,” Cowboys great Charlie Waters said. “We had double coverage on Clark. It had
to be a perfect throw and a perfect catch . . . he just made a spectacular catch.”
After nine seasons and forty-four interceptions, Dallas released the hometown veteran. The Giants signed him for the 1990 season. At age thirty, Walls started all sixteen games, scored his first career touchdown on a fumble recovery, and paced the team with six interceptions.
But Walls’ attempt to nab Montana’s toss in the third quarter of the NFC Championship Game came up short. Taylor caught the ball, spun around, and bolted for the end zone.
“Everson Walls is a gambler, always has been,” John Madden said, breaking down the play during the CBS television broadcast. “He goes [for the interception] in front of Taylor, and now the bad thing is when you miss the interception and you go for it in front of him and there’s no one behind ya, it’s a touchdown.”
Walls’ heart sank: “I thought, ‘Oh [shit.]’ I knew he was gone.”
Taylor’s sixty-one-yard touchdown reception lifted San Francisco to a 13-6 advantage.
“It wasn’t the first time that we had had our back against the wall that season,” Everson Walls said. “No panic, no change. We had plenty of time left. So even though there was frustration, we were still very poised as a team.”
That poise even extended to kicker Matt Bahr, another retread who the Giants scooped up that year when no one else wanted him.
Bahr’s career as a professional athlete began in relative obscurity, as a defenseman for the Colorado Caribous of the North American Soccer League. Within eighteen months, however, Bahr was playing in the Super Bowl. He kicked a forty-one-yard field goal and four extra points as the 1979 Pittsburgh Steelers won a fourth championship in six seasons.
