by Adam Lazarus
Flashback: Super bowl XVII
“I’m bored, I’m broke and I’m back,” John Riggins announced to a small gaggle of reporters outside a Washington Redskins’ off-season practice on June 11, 1981. “What did I miss most? Besides the money? I missed the little kiddie atmosphere. If I quit football, I’d have to grow up.”
Riggins—the ninth-leading rusher in league history—had walked away from the NFL the previous July. After one day of training camp at the team’s facility in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the ten-year veteran left, citing his desire for a new contract. The Redskins refused to give in to the demands of the thirty-one-year-old who, throughout the 1970s, embodied the prototypical bruising running back.
An all-American at the University of Kansas, Riggins was the New York Jets’ sixth overall pick in the 1971 NFL draft. After a Pro Bowl season in 1975, Riggins, “the New Yorkers’ curly-haired iconoclast,” left the Jets, in search of a six-figure deal. Washington eventually gave it to him. But two seasons in George Allen’s uncompromising offense, combined with a knee injury in 1977, suggested that Riggins hadn’t lived up to his expensive salary.
“[I] never had a chance to earn what I was making,” he said.
Jack Pardee replaced Allen after the 1977 season, and Riggins enjoyed the finest stretch of his career, breaking the one-thousand-yard mark in consecutive seasons and winning the NFL Comeback Player of the Year Award in 1978. With the start of the new decade, Riggins felt he had out-performed his $300,000 per year salary and demanded the Redskins raise it to half a million. He announced his “retirement” and sat out the entire 1980 season.
Without Riggins, the Redskins struggled mightily in 1980, and Pardee was fired three weeks after the season. But the club refused to increase his salary. Still, Riggins returned to the team in the summer of 1981. The man who helped rescue Riggins back from the wilderness (literally) was Washington’s new coach, Joe Gibbs.
Five months into his first head-coaching job, Gibbs journeyed to rural Kansas and personally met with Riggins to see if he could coax him out of retirement:
When I got the job, everyone said, “You got to get John Riggins back here.” Of course, he sat out the year before in a contract dispute, and everyone got fired. I didn’t want to get fired. Without saying anything to anybody, I got on a plane. Flew to Lawrence, Kansas. Got a rental car. Went to the first corner gas station and said, “Do you know where John Riggins lives?” They said, “Yes, I do. Out down the dirt road.” I pulled up on the back of this farmhouse. I knocked on the door, and I always say, I knew I had a chance to get John Riggins back because his wife answers the door, her hair’s up in rollers, kids are running through the house, and says she wanted to come back.
I said, “Get me an appointment with John Riggins. I’ll be at this motel.” Got up the next morning. The [voicemail] red light was on. It said I got a breakfast appointment at 10 a.m. I put my best stuff on. Young coach. I go roaring out there. Pull up to the back of his farmhouse. First time I laid my eyes on John, he’s walking across the back of the courtyard. He’s got a buddy with him in camouflage outfit. They had been hunting that morning. It’s 10 a.m., and he has a beer can in his left hand. I said, “I can tell he’s impressed with me!” I sit down at the breakfast table and man, I start my sales pitch.
Gibbs’ charm worked on Riggins, and in July, he was back at training camp, ready to don the Redskins’ burgundy and gold.
“I’m out here trying to act like a young kid, which I’m not, and it’s not easy,” said the ninth-leading rusher in NFL history. “I can’t do that and learn the plays, too. I thought about using something to cover up my gray hairs, but I skipped that.”
By October, Riggins regained the role of feature back, and in Gibbs’ power-running system, he began to flash shades of his former self. During a Week Five win at Soldier Field, Riggins upstaged a sore-legged Walter Payton, rushing for 126 yards on twenty-three carries as Joe Gibbs notched his first win as Washington’s head coach.
Three weeks later, Riggins gained only fifty-six yards on the ground, but his trio of rushing touchdowns was the difference in a 42-21 win over the Cardinals. St Louis’ featured back—twenty-four-year-old Ottis Anderson—racked up twice as many yards on the ground, but failed to get in the end zone as the woeful Cardinals fell to 3-6.
Despite splitting the carries with Joe Washington, Riggins’ thirteen rushing touchdowns tied for the most in the NFC. Gibbs rewarded Riggins with an increased offensive load, and he responded with a remarkable half season. (Nearly two months of the 1982 season was canceled by a players’ strike from mid-September to mid-November.)
Riggins didn’t post prolific yardage totals: barely sixty-one yards per game and only three rushing touchdowns during the nine-game schedule, but at age thirty-three, he shared the NFL lead with 177 rushing attempts.
With a running back on whom he could rely for twenty-plus carries per game and an offensive line, newly dubbed the “Hogs,” plowing open huge holes, Joe Gibbs’ run-heavy, ball-control offense excelled. Washington went 8-1, cruised through the playoffs, and earned a berth in Super Bowl XVII. In those three playoff wins, Riggins averaged thirty-two carries and 148 yards per game: the greatest cumulative postseason rushing effort in NFL history.
“I thought it was awesome,” Hall of Fame football writer Ray Didinger remembered three decades later.
I don’t think that in terms of history, it’s really given its due. At the time it was . . . I think there’s no question that that [performance] put him in the Hall of Fame. But I do think that when people look back and talk about great postseason performances, it’s hardly mentioned at all. It does kind of get lost—which it shouldn’t.
How many running backs in the history of the NFL have their best years in their thirties? It doesn’t happen. . . . That’s the amazing thing, is that he played as well as he played, and accomplished what he accomplished with that kind of workload as a thirty-three-year-old man.
On January 30, 1983, Washington battled the Miami Dolphins in Super Bowl XVII. The Redskins’ hopes for a first world championship in forty years did not get off to a rousing start. David Woodley’s seventy-six-yard touchdown pass to Jimmy Cefalo midway through the first quarter gave the ho-hum Dolphins offense an early lead. And while the Redskins had been proficient at gaining a first-quarter lead, then playing keep-away thanks to a stout defense, the Dolphins owned the lead and dictated the game’s tempo from the outset.
“In our first couple of offensive series, I think we were just caught up in playing in the Super Bowl. It was hard not to be excited,” left tackle Joe Jacoby remembered. “[Quarterback Joe] Theismann was probably a little hyper, but I’d say that was true for all of us. We moved the ball pretty well, but we were forced to punt when we let them sack Theismann a couple times on third down. Then all of us calmed down and began to play much better.”
Late in the second period, a touchdown pass from Theismann to Alvin Garrett gave the Redskins their first touchdown, and Washington looked to head for halftime content with the 10-10 score. But while Theismann, Riggins, and the Hogs celebrated their impressive eleven-play, eighty-yard touchdown drive on the sidelines, Dolphins kick returner Fulton Walker stunned every one of the 103,667 patrons at the Rose Bowl.
The second-year defensive back accepted the ensuing kickoff at his own two-yard line, found a seam along the left side, and raced untouched into the end zone. The first kickoff return for a touchdown in Super Bowl history gave the Dolphins an unexpected 17-10 halftime lead.
“I almost swallowed my tongue when I saw Walker’s run,” linebacker Larry Kubin said. “When you see a play like that, sometimes you wonder if fate isn’t smiling on the other side of the field.”
As the second half unfolded, Kubin’s fear did not manage to spread across the Redskins’ sidelines.
“Nobody panicked. We knew what had to be done and we were ready to do it,” said guard Russ Grimm.
Early in the third quarter,
a trick play—a forty-four-yard reverse to Garrett—buoyed the Redskins with a first and goal inside Miami’s ten-yard line. But after a short Riggins run, two passes failed to produce a touchdown, and Washington settled for a short field goal.
Not long after that missed opportunity, Theismann threw an interception and almost threw another: near his own goal line, Theismann himself broke up Dolphins lineman Kim Bokamper’s attempt to haul in a pass batted down at the line of scrimmage. And when a flea-flicker from the Washington offense resulted in Theismann’s second interception of the half, the game plan simplified.
“Joe [Jacoby] came over to me,” offensive line coach Joe Bugel told reporters after the game, “and said, ‘Hey, Bugs, let’s stop running that trick stuff and let’s start trying to run the ball. I made the suggestion to [Joe Gibbs].”
Riggins had already carried the football twenty-seven times for ninety-three yards that evening. Those totals were so often enough to put his team ahead, yet the Redskins still trailed 17-13 once they took over at their own forty-eight with under twelve minutes remaining in the game. Gibbs turned to Riggins again: “He’s our bread and butter. We give it to him and make people take it away from him.”
Consecutive carries by Riggins pushed the Redskins across midfield, setting up a third and two at the Miami forty-four. Trying to sneak Clarence Harmon through the middle of Miami’s defense—a unit that surrendered the fewest total yards in the NFL that season—didn’t pick up the first down, and the Redskins now faced a fourth and inches.
“We were on the sidelines, and coach Joe Gibbs and the staff were all debating whether to go for it and the urgency and time of the game and that if we were going to make a statement it had to be right then. So they decided to go for it,” tight end Clint Didier recalled.
“Joe Gibbs was more of a conservative coach than that, but we went for it on fourth down but not that much. He wasn’t a gambler. He played the odds: we were in the fourth quarter, we were behind, and it was time. You had to go for it. You had to make your stand. You had to show the other team that you were willing to risk it all right then and there to make a statement.”
Gibbs made his decision and told the play to Theismann, who sprinted back onto the field.
“Goal line, I-left, tight-wing, fake zoom, seventy chip,” he told the other ten men in Washington’s huddle.
“Goal line, I-left, tight-wing” was the formation. “seventy chip” was the play call—a Riggins run off tackle. The Redskins relied so heavily on seventy chip that in order to perfect it, the offense ran the play in practice under very special conditions.
“[Redskins offensive line coach Joe] Bugel and those guys took great pride in never being stopped when they ran it,” Ray Didinger said.
Bugel told me that they practiced it all the time because it was such a key play in their arsenal. But Bugel said that when they practiced it, they ran it against a defense with thirteen men.
Because they wanted to hone it to such a fine edge that when they would run short yardage or goal line in practice and they wanted to run seventy chip, they would actually put two extra defenders on the field and make it that much harder on the offense to execute it, that much harder for [Jeff] Bostic and Grimm and Jacoby and Otis Wonsley, who had to throw the key lead block.
. . . And they were still making it in practice so when they got out to play in the game and they played against eleven, it almost seemed easy.
As proficient as the Redskins—and especially the Hogs—became at forcefully carving out holes in the defense, seventy chip was virtually unstoppable for one more reason: motion.
The “fake zoom” portion of the play call in “Goal line, I-left, tight-wing, fake zoom, seventy chip,” meant that, prior to the snap, wing–tight end Clint Didier—who was aligned on the left side of the line—would go in motion to the right, then come back left. The purpose of the motion was to disrupt the positioning of Miami’s Don McNeal: wherever Didier went, it was McNeal’s job to follow.
“I can remember in the huddle thinking all I gotta do is make sure I get that safety that follows me to think that I’m gonna go clear cross the formation,” Didier remembered. “I carried my motion further than I normally would, and I had good footing and I came back and [McNeal] slipped.”
At the snap, Didier and each one of the Hogs neutralized Miami’s six-man front line at the line of scrimmage, opening a huge hole for Riggins to run through. The last man in position to make the tackle was McNeal. A few steps out of position, the 190-pound McNeal had no chance of bringing down the 235-pound “Diesel.”
The eleven-year veteran plowed over McNeal, continued on in the open field and chugged into the end zone. The forty-three-yarder gave Washington a 20-17 lead.
“It was amazing to see a guy that age do the things that he did over the course of that long season and then cap it off with the performance he had in Pasadena,” Didinger said. “If he had played that whole game and scored that winning touchdown from the one-yard line, you still would have said ‘Jesus, that’s quite an accomplishment.’
“But for him to cap it off with that run, which was forty-plus yards, that’s the really amazing thing: on that carry, at that stage in the game after all the wear and tear and all the pounding he had taken, that he could still break through the line and outrun the secondary. That’s the one that just takes your breath away.”
An immediate three-and-out from the Washington defense, followed by a seven-minute, twelve-play touchdown drive—in which Riggins toted the ball eight more times—sealed the Redskins’ victory. And an hour later, in the victorious locker room, Joe Gibbs chatted with a satisfied commander-in-chief.
“I hope when you come back you can help me up on Capitol Hill with some congressmen,” President Ronald Reagan told Gibbs during a postgame, congratulatory phone call.
Meanwhile, a never-shy John Riggins—“Ron is the President, but I am the King”—soaked up his share of the championship spotlight. Setting new records for rushing yards and carries made the sportswriters’ choice for the Most Valuable Player of Super Bowl XVII a no-brainer: Riggins garnered every single vote.
But for all those yards and all those runs, it was the longest run in Super Bowl history—a play on which he needed just a foot—that defined Riggins, the Redskins, and Super Bowl XVII.
“I felt like that was the game right there. That broke their backs,” center Jeff Bostic told the Super Bowl press corps regarding Riggins’ touchdown jaunt. “It wasn’t so much what it did for our team, it was what it did to their team. It took all the emotions out of them.”
With the third-quarter game clock showing just under a minute and a half, Bill Parcells did not hesitate about his approach to fourth and two at the Buffalo thirty-five. And why not: in the postseason, New York was five-for-five on fourth-down conversion attempts.
Hostetler and the Giants offense stayed out on the field while Parcells and Erhardt—speaking to each other through headsets—selected a play. It wasn’t exactly “Goal line, I-left, tight-wing, fake zoom, seventy chip,” but it was close.
There was no motion-man, and, instead of a lead blocker, the three–tight end formation featured a flexed-out wide receiver, Mark Ingram. Still, in another moment of Super Bowl déjà vu, thirty-four-year-old Ottis Anderson—the recently reborn power back—took the ball from his quarterback and spied a spot off left tackle.
Serving as lead blocker, front-side left guard William Roberts pulled around left tackle Jumbo Elliott, looking to block any Bills defender who crossed his path. But next to Roberts were tight ends Howard Cross and Mark Bavaro, and they couldn’t quite figure out who to block: Pro Bowl linebacker and Buffalo’s leading tackler that season, Darryl Talley, or the NFL’s Defensive Player of the Year, Bruce Smith.
Fortunately for the Bills defense, they both chose to block Talley. That left Smith virtually untouched precisely at the spot on the field where Ottis Anderson was heading. Anderson had no chance. He couldn’t bounc
e away from Smith—there was too much congestion, the result of his own blockers’ miscue. And no running back—even a bruising load such as Anderson—could bowl over a 275-pound defensive end.
Two yards behind the line of scrimmage, Smith stood Anderson up, and with teammates Shane Conlan, Leon Seals, Nate Odomes, and Mike Lodish swooping in as reinforcements, the mob wrestled Anderson to the ground. While sitting on the ground, Smith, who, since recording his pivotal sack/safety, had been largely neutralized in his one-on-one battles with Jumbo Elliott, stared down and pointed to the nearby Giants’ sideline.
“We contributed to our own demise there,” Parcells remembered. “And it was a really important play. That could have provided more additional momentum than we already had. And we had an awful lot at that time.”
Buffalo took over on downs at their own thirty-seven-yard line. Narrowly avoiding Lawrence Taylor’s first sack of the game, Jim Kelly floated a short pass toward the sideline. Thurman Thomas made the catch, avoided a would-be tackler, juked away from another, and picked up nine yards.
Thomas had now carried the football on sixteen plays and averaged more than seven yards per touch. That, coupled with a hard hit that nose tackle Erik Howard delivered to his surgically reconstructed right knee, meant Thomas needed a short break. Backup Kenneth Davis took his spot. This time, rather than stalling with their main cog on the sidelines, the Buffalo offense continued to churn out yardage.
A quick dump-off pass to Davis gained four yards and pushed the football to the midfield stripe. The third-quarter game clock dipped under thirty seconds while Kelly assembled the K-Gun offense in place. Four receivers, along with running back Davis, spread across the formation, leaving Kelly alone in the backfield. He ignored a tame Giants rush and unloaded the ball a few yards past the line of scrimmage, where Davis made his second straight catch. Employing his own flashy moves, Davis took advantage of a key block from wide receiver Al Edwards and sprang upfield, gaining another nineteen yards.
The game had quickly shifted from the lumbering, measured pace of the Giants offense to Buffalo’s frenetic, spastic style.
