by Adam Lazarus
“Any time you’re standing on the sideline and you run our type of offense, it’s very frustrating because we know sooner or later, we’re going to put the ball in the end zone,” Kelly said. “When we have the ball, we’re going to have to score because we’re just not going to get that many opportunities.”
Reduced to all zeroes, the third-quarter game clock meant a brief pause in the action and an opportunity for the defense to rest and Bill Belichick to ponder adjustments.
Once again, the Giants turned to their best weapon thus far in Super Bowl XXV—dwindling time—to stifle the Bills. But the momentary pause in action would serve as merely an immaterial impediment on Buffalo’s fervid march to a fourth-quarter lead in Super Bowl XXV.
[1]At this point in the game, with less than three minutes remaining in the third period, a Giants field goal would have made the score 20-12. With the two-point conversion play not implemented in the National Football League until the 1994 season, Buffalo could not tie the game by scoring a single touchdown.
10
Buffalo’s Bickering Bills
Sixty-one-year-old Marv Levy did not fit the stereotypical image of a football coach. He was a fine athlete in his day. A native of Chicago, Levy lettered in football and basketball at South Shore High School, then (after dropping basketball) added track to his list of activities upon attending Coe College in 1946.
Well into his seventies, he remained a health fanatic. He jogged, ate right, and camera crews routinely caught him doing multiple sets of push-ups on the sidelines of Bills’ practices.
Still, at five feet, seven inches, and 165 pounds—he didn’t intimidate anyone. At least not physically: Marv Levy was one of the most intelligent men ever to come through professional football.
Levy enrolled at Harvard Law School in the fall of 1950, but within a few weeks realized he’d rather coach football. He remained at Harvard, earning a master’s degree in English history, then began a five-decade-long coaching career.
“There are moments,” Levy said during Super Bowl week, “when I look out on the field and say to myself, ‘What the heck are you doing here? What’s so important about all these men banging into each other?’ But I love the game and the challenge of it all.”
Because of his unique background, he did not speak like a jock. In team meetings, he befuddled many of his players with words like “extrapolate” and “salient,” or references to ancient Carthaginian military leaders and the Battle of Belleau Wood.
Stanford’s James Lofton and Northwestern’s Steve Tasker were the two Bills players appointed to translate specific portions of Levy’s speeches.
“That kinda came out during Super Bowl week about how cool it was the way Marv ran his team meetings, listening to a great speaker speak rather than just a football coach laying out the day’s events. We used to keep a list,” Tasker said. “We used to keep a list. . . . Marv would throw these words out there and guys would look sideways and you write it down. I think one of them was ‘inculcate.’ There was maybe five of them on my list.
“It was a real treat to listen to him speak. The guy is a great speaker. He’s very sharp, very well organized, and it was fun to sit there every morning and listen to him give us about five or ten minutes of the day in wisdom and put us all in perspective mentally.”
On the night before the AFC Championship Game (and again throughout Super Bowl week), Levy told his team about the British Eighth Army and the war cry—“One More River to Cross”—they sang while marching into World War II battles. Levy then sang it for his players.
“He’s a better coach than he is a singer,” long-snapper Adam Lingner said.
Although that anecdote gave Buffalo an idea to rally around during the postseason, Levy’s most brilliant piece of coaching that season did not come in the form of inspirational speeches. Even implementing the no-huddle offense approach full-time—an extremely unorthodox yet wonderfully prosperous change—was not the genius move that put the Bills in position to win the franchise’s first world championship. There was no such masterstroke. But without the acumen and adaptability that Marv Levy displayed between the 1989 and 1990 NFL seasons, Buffalo would not have been in Tampa Stadium competing for the Super Bowl XXV title.
In early January 1990, it became clear to everyone who followed the National Football League that the Buffalo Bills needed change—especially owner Ralph Wilson, who phoned Levy and asked him to board a plane for Detroit.
“I wondered if, perhaps, he was so miffed that he might speak those words so many of us in my line of work hear with such demoralizing frequency at that time of year, ‘Coach, you’re fired.’”
After the 12-4 Cinderella year in 1988 that saw the Bills reach their first-ever AFC Championship Game, the Bills expected more the following September. The season opened with a 27-24 road victory over the hated Miami Dolphins. On the final play of the game, Kelly—operating in the no-huddle—capped the Bills eleven-point fourth-quarter comeback, by scoring a two-yard rushing touchdown.
“I know exactly how good Jim Kelly is,” the quarterback said about himself, after leading the Bills to a pair of long scoring drives in the game’s final four minutes. “I know I’m up there with the elite. I’m not bragging. I just know how good I am.”
But they were beaten 28-14 the following week against Denver in the Bills’ first home Monday night game in five years. During the nationally televised game, cameras caught Jim Kelly chastising a wide receiver on the sidelines, and an angry exchange between Cornelius Bennett and Bruce Smith only ended when an assistant coach broke it up.
Alone, those minor tiffs among players would not have made headlines. Every team—good or bad—goes through those squabbles; they usually are fortunate enough for them not to occur on national television. It was an incident that occurred off the field, and away from the “heat of battle,” that earned the team its undesirable nickname, the “Bickering Bills.”
“The ‘Bickering Bills,’ that came about because everybody in that locker room is so competitive. If we were playing tiddlywinks, everybody would be up on the floor,” Darryl Talley said. “We were holding each other accountable for everything we did. And if we didn’t hold each other accountable and fight with each other because we were so competitive and wanting to win, then we wouldn’t have been the resilient team we were. We fought with each other more times than not. The way I looked at it, you fight with your brothers and sisters and that’s all we were doing.”
Two weeks (and two wins) after losing to Denver on Monday night, the Colts pounded Buffalo at the Hoosier Dome. Indianapolis led 23-0 late in the third quarter before the Bills finally scored. Kelly connected with Andre Reed on a sixteen-yard touchdown, but just as he released the pass, two Colts leveled him. Defensive end Jon Hand shoved Kelly to the hard AstroTurf, and the quarterback landed directly on his left shoulder.
“I knew, the very instant I hit the ground, that my shoulder was separated,” Kelly later wrote. “I remember what my right shoulder felt like when I hit the ground in that Virginia Tech game in my senior year of college. It’s a feeling you never forget.”
Doctors recommended three to six weeks on the sidelines. A day after the 37-14 loss (which cost the Bills first place in the division), Kelly publicly blamed left tackle Howard Ballard for the hit.
“It should have never happened,” he told the press. “[Hand] should have been blocked. Watching the film, I don’t know what Howard was thinking.
. . . I think four out of our five positions [on the offensive line] are very solid. I don’t even need to tell you guys what position they might have to make a change in. I can’t stand up here and say they should do it or shouldn’t do it; I don’t make the decisions. But something has to happen.”
The comment set off a national controversy. Coaches, players, and commentators contemplated Kelly’s right to publicly chastise a teammate. Through the press, several of Kelly’s teammates expressed their disapproval.
“I told him
. . . in the last two games, you’ve had some terrible games,” Thomas said on the weekly Sports Line with Paul Maguire. “I felt somebody had to come out and say something because that’s just the way I felt and a lot of the players felt and nobody was saying anything about it.”
Kelly’s shoulder injury put Frank Reich in the starter’s role for three games, each of which Buffalo won.[1] The Bills’ subsequent five losses in seven games sparked a debate that Reich gave the team its best chance to win. Such trouble might have been on the horizon since the previous year: during the 1988 playoffs, Robb Riddick told reporters that he was “unhappy with the quarterback situation” because he did not think Kelly sufficiently utilized the running backs in the passing game.
Even the coaching staff was not immune. During a film session after a 34-3 win over the Jets, a fistfight broke out between two assistants: linebackers coach Nick Nicolau allegedly punched offensive line coach Tom Bresnahan and “rammed his head through a plasterboard wall” during a film session.
The perceived quarterback controversy, a random scrap among coaches, and open airing of the team’s “dirty laundry” compounded already shaky team chemistry.
The Buffalo News reported that African American players and white players occasionally argued over several issues: which race contributed more to the team’s success, what music to listen to in the locker room (rap or country), and inequality in endorsements deals. A story also surfaced that running back Ronnie Harmon “only allowed black teammates to autograph a football he brought into the dressing room one day and wouldn’t allow a player [Andre Reed] whose parents are racially mixed to sign it.”
Others insisted that, instead of race, the strife resulted from swelling egos.
“It wasn’t so much about black guys, white guys as it was about great players and their role on the team,” Steve Tasker later said. “The great players on the team like Bruce and Jim didn’t really like each other that much, and it had nothing to do with black or white. Bruce had a huge ego and so did Jim. And Jim was a huge celebrity and Bruce wanted to be and was. But Bruce was really more of a celebrity outside Buffalo than he was inside. He was one of the big names in the entire NFL. Jim was a Buffalo icon.”
Three consecutive losses at the start of December meant the Bills might not qualify for the 1989 playoffs. Fortunately, their opponent in the season finale was the 4-11 Jets. Buffalo clobbered New York 37-0, setting up an AFC wild-card game against the Cleveland Browns.
On that day in early January, the K-Gun was born. Four touchdowns and 405 yards passing from Kelly, along with the Thurman Thomas’ playoff-record-tying thirteen catches for 150 yards kept the Bills in stride with Cleveland.
But Matt Bahr’s forty-seven-yard field goal in the fourth quarter gave the Browns a ten-point edge midway through the fourth quarter. Kelly then drove seventy-seven yards in less than three minutes, cutting the Browns’ lead to 34-30. The Bills defense forced a three-and-out to put Kelly and the offense back on the field.
From his own twenty-six, Kelly continued to pick apart the Cleveland defense. A string of completions—including a clutch fourth-down hookup with Don Beebe—had Buffalo inside the Browns’ twenty. With sixteen seconds remaining, Kelly spotted Ronnie Harmon wide open in the left corner of the end zone. And, although he already caught four passes during that final period, the ball bounced off of Harmon’s fingertips. One play later, Kelly’s pass for Thomas was intercepted by Clay Matthews, and the game was over.
In the postgame press conference, Thomas hinted that Harmon’s drop was the result of Kelly’s hesitation—“Ronnie came back to the huddle and told Jim ‘If you looked a little sooner, I could have scored a touchdown’”—then overtly said as much about the season-ending interception.
“I was open for a split second,” he said about the final play. “Jim held the ball too long.”
Both Harmon and Kelly refused to speak to the media after the loss.
Marv Levy may have served in World War II, began his coaching career long before any of his Buffalo Bills players were born, and installed the Wing T offense when the Kansas City Chiefs hired him in 1978, but he did not fear change.
“If you don’t change with the times,” he once said, “the times are gonna change you . . . for another coach.”
Levy and General Manager Bill Polian reconstructed the Bills’ roster during the 1990 off-season. Although Levy believed there were no “troublemakers” on the 1989 roster, Ronnie Harmon was not protected from Plan B free agency. Parting with two team leaders who spent a combined twenty-five years with the Bills was much more shocking. Offensive tackle Joe Devlin was coaxed into retirement, and nose tackle Fred Smerlas was allowed to leave via free agency.
“Joe Devlin and Freddy were the oldest guys in the locker room. And at that time in the league, age was a big factor in whether you were a leader or not. If you were there for a long time, if you were an older guy, you got certain perks and privileges. I think times were changing,” Steve Tasker said.
“To Marv’s credit he released both those guys, even though they both could still play. What that did was force Jim and Bruce—the great players on our team—to be the leaders. They were now the voice of team meetings and players-only meetings. It was Jim and Bruce who spoke; not Fred and Joe. And it really worked well in a group setting because the best players were the ones calling the shots and that’s really the way it had to be.”
In addition to their star quarterback and star defensive end, each of Buffalo’s superstars was charged with a new leadership role upon the start of 1990’s training camp. Levy assembled a nine-man players’ committee (Kelly, Smith, Thurman Thomas, Kent Hull, James Lofton, Pete Metzelaars, Cornelius Bennett, Mark Kelso, and Darryl Talley) to help mitigate any locker room conflicts before they produced more headlines.
Levy didn’t shelter his players, either: “I told the team coming into training camp to be prepared for all those magazine articles about ‘the Bickering Bills,’ that the term had a nice ring to it. I told them they had to overlook that kind of thing and concentrate on football.”
“I think they were a divided team, an immature group that needed to grow up and needed to understand about working together,” said Vic Carucci, the former Buffalo News beat writer.
To me, it was the best thing that happened to them. They definitely fought like brothers, but I also think that they needed to realize how much better they would be if the bond were tighter and if they worked together and did less of the backbiting. Sure [the media], always takes something and makes it bigger than it is, but it was pretty substantive. . . . They hit that crossroads in ’89, that allowed them to be the team they were in ’90 because they made such an effort. . . . There was almost a kumbaya effort once they got to camp.
In Week Two, the Bills lost their road opener to Miami. Headlines announced that little had changed in Buffalo during the off-season. Behind 30-7 with 7:54 remaining, Levy pulled his first stringers amid the sweltering south Florida heat. Bruce Smith complained about the move, saying, “We just fuckin’ gave up.”
Levy was angry and fined Smith $500. He also fined three defenders who refused to come off the field when the starters were ordered off. But the conflict did not escalate from there.
“The harmony has been great,” Kelly said. “I know people will point to what Bruce said. Bruce says what he wants to say, but we are together as a team. Last week was a bummer. But teams go through that once in a season. Hopefully, this is ours, and we’ve gotten all that bad stuff out of the way in the second week.”
Kelly’s confidence in a new, controversy-free Bills team was valid. That off-season he took Marv Levy’s vows of change very seriously.
“It was Jim, too, I think, figuring out that he needed to learn that he had to have these guys on his side—which he did,” Vic Carucci noted.
They were behind him because they knew he was good. But when he came in, he came in kicking the door down, he was like, “Everybody get on my back, let’s get
going and you step up to my level,” calling out offensive linemen. Linemen didn’t love that, and their wives didn’t love that, and their families didn’t love that. They had issues with this cocky kid who seemed to have a free reign.
They got to know each other better; they figured out what he was about. He definitely was smart enough to—as he did with his own family—share with his team, his success and his attention. The only guy getting national notice at that point was Jim, but he shared the wealth.
Kelly—who signed the NFL’s richest contract prior to the 1990 season—started including his teammates in photo shoots as well as his endorsements projects. And the postgame parties at his house, win or lose, became a bonding ritual for the entire team.
After the loss to Miami, the harmonious Bills promptly won eight straight. A loss to the Houston Oilers, on an eardrum-busting Monday night at the Astrodome, did not sidetrack the newly focused Bills. Wins over Philadelphia and Indianapolis meant the Bills were already guaranteed a better December record than they had posted in nine years. And with a Week Fifteen victory over the New York Giants, the Bills swept away all remnants of the “Bickering Bills.”
“I told Vic [Carucci] don’t print this, but if we beat this team, on the road in the Meadowlands, there’s no stopping us. They were good, and that was a tough road game against a team we didn’t see very often, a good defense and we beat them,” Steve Tasker remembered.
That was the one locker room, after that game, when we knew we were good. We knew we were special. That was the happiest locker room I was ever in. . . . This one wasn’t a celebration of “Hey we won this game.”
That locker room was a celebration of convincing ourselves that we were special. And that was the first time—through ‘89, ‘88—when we beat that team in New York, that team for the first time believed it was special and believed it was great. I’ll never forget that locker room. It was really something. I remember Teddy Marchibroda, the smile on his face, and Marv. We were just giddy. Everyone was giggling.
