by Adam Lazarus
Falling behind by nine points, coupled with the necessary pass-heavy approach on the drive late in the second quarter, limited Anderson’s touches. Still, he had been extremely efficient on those seven runs, gaining just under six yards per carry.
As the second half unfolded, the Giants would lean on their thirty-four-year-old veteran. Two plays after Meggett’s pickup, the offense faced another big play: third down and one near midfield. From a two–tight end, single-back formation, Hostetler gave the ball to Anderson. With such a short distance needed for the Giants to gain the first down, the Bills looked to condense the center of the field. They expected Anderson to pound the ball up the middle. But the Giants gambled, running the ball to the outside. With left guard William Roberts leading, Anderson moved patiently, parallel to the line of scrimmage, then turned upfield, bursting through the hole for a huge gain. And much like his counterpart, Thurman Thomas, who had accentuated several runs with forearm shivers to approaching defenders, Anderson pounded safety Mark Kelso with an uppercut just before being dragged to the ground. The twenty-four-yard pickup advanced New York into field-goal range.
Watching the hard-nosed third-down efforts from Meggett and Anderson pleased Parcells, who expected nothing less. His “power football” philosophy did not just apply to the running backs, who made up such an integral part of the Giants offense.
Amassing 121 catches, twelve touchdowns, and more than eighteen hundred yards earned tight end Mark Bavaro first-team all-pro honors in 1986 and 1987. But his primary objective was to block. The same was true for Howard Cross and Bob Mrosko, New York’s other tight ends, who combined for just eleven catches that season.
“I understood we were a running team more than a passing team,” Bavaro said years later. “I loved Ron Erhardt’s offense. I enjoyed blocking, and I enjoyed catching passes. Ron required both from his tight ends. I liked the fact that tight end on the Giants was a multidimensional position. As far as stats went, I knew my receiving production in 1990 was less than in 1986. But stats didn’t mean much to us overall. What meant everything was winning or losing.”
That unselfish attitude filled the entire Giants’ offensive huddle.
Throughout the 1980s, individual passing and receiving records were continually broken, rewritten, and broken again. As the pro game morphed into a pass-first, run-second league, the obdurate Bill Parcells remained wedded to his style. Fortunately, his receivers bought into it.
“We went 13-3 this season,” Stephen Baker said, “so I can’t complain. Hey, I’d rather win 13 games and not get so many catches than make a lot of catches and have a losing season. Winning is really what counts the most.”
Both Baker (third round) and wide receiver teammate Mark Ingram (first round) had been with the squad since their selections in the 1987 NFL draft. Each developed into capable blockers for the running game. The tandem also contributed several significant catches throughout the Giants’ postseason run. Both Ingram and Baker made vital catches at the end of the NFC Championship Game.
Still, while high-profile, Pro-Bowl caliber receiving duos filled the rosters of several NFL teams—Jerry Rice and John Taylor in San Francisco, Mark Clayton and Mark Duper in Miami, Gary Clark and Art Monk in Washington, and, of course, Andre Reed and James Lofton for the Bills—New York’s receiving corps was widely overlooked.
“It’s always frustrating, because I would like to catch more balls,” Ingram said during the 1991 playoffs. “Any receiver would. But as long as we’re winning, I’m not going to complain. I know I can do more than I’ve shown. When they’ve thrown the ball to me I’ve produced. I’d like them to throw it to me more, but Bill doesn’t like to mess with a winning formula.”
They occasionally experimented with the formula midway through Super Bowl XXV.
Stephen Baker’s beautiful over-the-shoulder touchdown grab in the final seconds of the first half provided a considerable swing in momentum. More important, it cut the Bills’ lead to just two points. Only six minutes wore off the second-half game clock before Mark Ingram matched his teammate’s tremendous and unforgettable reception.
Twice on their first possession of the second half, the Giants kept the drive alive by converting clutch third downs: Meggett’s catch out of the backfield, paired with O. J. Anderson’s charging run into the Buffalo secondary. New York’s next third-down conversion was the most spectacular—not just of the drive or the game but, arguably, in Super Bowl history.
Anderson’s big gainer set the Giants up at Buffalo’s twenty-nine. Relying on the input from his players—“Our offensive linemen were saying that
Buffalo was getting a little tired, especially in the third quarter,” Parcells said—the coaches wisely stuck to the power football game plan. After a hard-hitting Carthon run netted five yards, it was Dave Meggett’s turn to carry the ball. The five-foot, nine-inch multipurpose back sidestepped two Bills defenders and bounced to the outside, picking up fifteen yards. But Meggett was only able to reach the edge because Mark Bavaro had illegally wrestled Buffalo linebacker Cornelius Bennett to the ground. Not only was Meggett’s huge play nullified, but also, the holding penalty against Bavaro pushed the Giants back an additional ten yards.
On second and fifteen at the thirty-four (instead of first and ten at the fourteen), Hostetler dropped back to pass. Unable to find an open man and with the pocket collapsing, he scrambled upfield before being brought down just two yards past the line of scrimmage. From a fresh set of downs inside Buffalo’s red zone to a third and thirteen at the thirty-two in the matter of a few snaps, the Giants now faced the very real possibility of scoring no points on the drive.
The play came in from the sidelines: “half-right–huddle-62-comeback-dig.” Hostetler broke the huddle and the other ten men spread out to their pre-snap positions.
“Here we go! Big play!” wide receiver Mark Ingram told himself. “Here’s our chance! So many times they’ve said we can’t do it. Let’s show ’em!”
From the shotgun, Hostetler flicked a pass across the middle of the field, seven yards short of the first down. Ingram pulled in the ball and wiggled out of a tackle.
Still six yards shy of where he needed to get to, Ingram pivoted upfield.
“All I saw was white jerseys coming at me,” Ingram said afterwards. “I looked at the chains before the play started and I knew I had a long way to run to get the first down.”
The first white jersey he saw read “56,” that of Pro-Bowler Darryl Talley. In great position to make the tackle, Talley lunged at the ball carrier. But Ingram—once a track star at Michigan State—stopped instantaneously, spun back to the inside of the field, and avoided Talley.
Slowing down to spin out of Talley’s tackle allowed the defense to advance on him. Six Bills now surrounded Ingram, who was still four yards behind the first down marker. Safety Mark Kelso swooped in to make the play, only to be frozen by a juke move from Ingram.
“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 announ
ced 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 were hanging,” Parcells said. “They were not even flowing to the flow side, they got so paranoid about the bootleg.”
But the fourth time that the Giants ran the play, Bills linebacker Cornelius Bennett was ready. Inside the Buffalo red zone, late in the second period, Hostetler faked a handoff left, rolled right, and fired a pass for Cross. Bennett recognized another bootleg was coming to his side—did not bite on the fake—and lunged at Hostetler. Although he couldn’t get to the quarterback, he sprung into the air and swatted down the pass.
“He kept trying that bootleg against me early, and I told him, ‘Look, you’re not going to get outside against me,’” said Bennett. “I said, ‘Don’t try that to my side. I’m gonna knock that pass down or I’m going to stick you.’”
The Giants waited for a critical moment—third down and four from the Buffalo twelve—to accommodate Bennett’s suggestion.
New York’s offense had already eaten up sixty-three yards and more than eight minutes of game clock on this opening drive of the third period. And unlike the third downs they had faced earlier in the drive, they were now well within Matt Bahr’s range. But forcing a field goal attempt out of the Giants offense—after such a productive and emotionally charged possession—would have sapped some of New York’s high . . . and boosted the Buffalo defense.
As future Hall of Famer Steve Young—a man who would retire with three Super Bowl rings—would later say: “I always had this philosophy that every time you kicked a field goal, you were just that much closer to losing. . . . Field goals to me, especially in the second half, it’s like kissing your sister: it’s not gonna help you too much.”
In the huddle, Hostetler called a bootleg to the left. He faked a handoff to Anderson and rolled away from Cornelius Bennett, right at Bruce Smith. Smith read the bootleg, sprung into the air to knock down the pass, as Bennett had late in the second period. Hostetler spied Howard Cross wide open on the Buffalo eight-yard line. All he had to do was get him the ball: not an easy task with athletic six-foot, four-inch Smith standing in front of him.
The former star shooting guard for Conemaugh Township, Hostetler fed his big man in the low post, softly floating the ball over Smith’s fingertips into Cross’ hands. The tight end lowered his shoulder into a defensive back before being dragged out-of-bounds at the three-yard line.
A dive up the middle pushed the Giants closer to the goal line. On second and goal from the one, Anderson carried the ball off tackle, ripped out of an arm tackle from Kirby Jackson, and chugged into the end zone.
The eighty-seven-yard touchdown march was as historic as it was thrilling. The fourteen plays run and the nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds used each set new Super Bowl records. Bahr’s extra point gave the Giants a 17-12 advantage.
The five-point deficit did not worry Buffalo. They trailed by less than a touchdown with more than twenty minutes of game time remaining. Still, New York’s methodical offense had cost the Bills more than the lead. A thirty-seven-minute-long halftime sandwiched in between two excruciatingly slow Giants’ touchdown drives meant that (aside from a kneel-down to conclude the first half) Buffalo did not run an offensive play in an hour.
Such an unusually long layoff severely hurt Jim Kelly and the offense. Their offense relied on a particular pace and rhythm. Furthermore, part of the
no-huddle’s success was the result of wearing down the opponent: the Giants defense had now been granted an hour to rest and strategize.
“Bill Belichick is a genius, but I’m gonna tell you something. If we had had another quarter, we would have killed them,” Buffalo center Kent Hull said years later. “They still didn’t stop us; we just didn’t have the time. Their offense was as good as their defense. That’s what they were looking to do. They said ‘our offense has got to keep them off the field.’ And they did it.”
Buffalo’s first possession of the second half didn’t go nearly how they planned. Rushes by Thurman Thomas and Kelly produced a quick first down. But an offensive pass-interference penalty, an incompletion, then Leonard Marshall’s bull-rushing quarterback sack meant the Bills punted the football right back to New York, minutes after the Giants go-ahead touchdown.
As frustrating as it was for Kelly and the Bills offense, the tremendous difference in time-of-possession devastated the Buffalo defense more.
“We were on the field 10 minutes at a time,” Cornelius Bennett said. “We’d rest for two, and then go back on. When that happens, there’s no way you can keep up your intensity. You tend to start reaching instead of taking the proper steps. You start making arm tackles.”
The seventy-one-degree weather and 76 percent humidity compounded their exhaustion. Aside from the regular-season finale, in which most starters did not play all four quarters, the Bills had played the previous five games in wintry conditions: the “miserable,” snowy scene at Giants Stadium in mid-December, followed by three games at Rich Stadium in Buffalo. Although defensive coordinator Walt Corey didn’t believe the humidity that night in Tampa bothered his unit, at least one of the men perpetually running up and down the field disagreed.
“We weren’t used to playing in this kind of heat,” Shane Conlan said. “This was training camp weather.”
Buffalo’s defense slogged onto the field and—by way of another bootleg away from Bennett and toward Bruce Smith—Hostetler again connected with Howard C
ross for a ten-yard gain. A defensive-holding call against cornerback Nate Odomes during the play further irritated Buffalo fans.
The penalty advanced New York five more yards and gave Hostetler’s unit a first and ten from the Buffalo forty-three. Because they had controlled the clock and tempo, a few more first downs punctuated by another score—even a field goal—would give the Giants a two-score lead with less than a quarter to play.[1]
Still, no matter how tired they were, the Bills defense did not give in. After the automatic first down due to Odomes’ penalty, the Giants failed to gain anything on a run from Anderson and (yet another) bootleg to the left by Jeff Hostetler, who scrambled toward the sideline, unable to find an open man.
That left a third and eleven. Hostetler’s Giants had been so prolific at coming up with big plays on third down. They fully expected another.
“We had a lot of talent on that offense: Mark Ingram, Steven Baker, Dave Meggett, etc.,” Mark Bavaro remembered years later. “Combined with Jeff’s throwing skills, vision, and scrambling ability, there was never a third-down situation that seemed unattainable.”
From a shotgun, four-receiver set, Hostetler sat in the pocket and fired a quick strike to Mark Ingram. As he had on the incredible third-and-thirteen conversion, Ingram caught the ball well short of the first down line with plenty of open field to run. But instead of using the fast feet and spin moves that shook four Bills defenders one drive earlier, Ingram elected to try and bowl over would-be tackler Leonard Smith, who collided with Ingram. Using the sideline to his advantage, Smith stymied the ball carrier by pushing him out-of-bounds, two yards behind the marker.
Finally, the Buffalo defense came up with the third-down stop they needed. But for the Bills to take back the football and regain momentum, the job was not done yet.
