Guts get you glory
Paul Zimmerman has covered the
NFL for Sports Illustrated since 1979. His exclusive online
column appears each
Friday.
Posted: Fri October 17,
1997
Every weekend I see things that help define a game, a
moment, the character of a team or an individual, things
that are largely ignored by the regular coverage but which
bug me. I'll mention a
few.
What goes into the winning of a game, when you're an
underdog but have a shot at the end? Guts, a bit of
boldness at the coaching level, the ability to come up with
the unexpected. On one side you have Washington's Norv
Turner, who did it with mirrors
in his Monday night victory over Dallas, and on the other you
have the Colts' Lindy Infante, who had a real shot to upset
the Steelers but got clunky at the
end.
The Colts were down, 24-22, and things looked bad until the
Steelers fumbled them the ball on Pittsburgh's 24 with 3:11
left. If you're Infante you've got to try to do two things:
Run the clock, and get the ball down into comfortable field
goal range.
You want to take up so much time that if you make your field
goal, the enemy will be hard pressed to come back and kick
one of its own. And, of course, you'd like your kicker to
be trying one in the 30-to-35-yard range or shorter, if
possible—something in
his comfort
zone.
I've talked to a lot of kickers about this. What exactly is
the comfort zone, when the game is on the line and the
pressure is intense? Most of them say low-30s or shorter.
More than 40 yards is scary, even for Indy's Cary
Blanchard, who had been
three-for-three on the
night.
So what did Infante do? He called three hopeless running
plays into the heart of the Steeler defense, and the Colts
wound up on the 24, which meant a 42-yard attempt and a
severe duckhook to the left and Indy's sixth straight loss.
And all the while
poor old Z is shouting into his TV set, "Just throw one
damn pass and you win the
game!"
A screen, a hitch, something safe and totally unexpected,
and you buy a new set of downs and move your kicker closer,
and all kinds of nice things happen. Of course this is
going against the choo-choo train mentality of established
NFL percentage
football, but there are coaches who have the guts to buck the
odds. If you're Infante, with an 0-5 team, why
not?
At the end of the Dallas-Washington game, Gus Frerotte
picked up a first down on a 12-yard completion and turned
out the lights when the Skins were running the clock.
Seattle ran the last 3:41 off the clock to preserve its
three-point win over
Tennessee. Twice, Warren Moon threw completions on first down. He
ended it with two more completions before he went into his
kneels. Bold football, but sometimes that's what it takes.
And actually, how much of a gamble is it when a defense is
bunched to stop the
run?
Many years ago I covered a Jets-Bills game and Joe Ferguson
preserved the Buffalo win by completing a couple of hitch
passes in the final clock-killing phase. Afterward I asked
him who'd called those
plays.
"They came from the bench," he said, looking
away.
"Oh yeah, Chuck Knox called those plays," I said,
"and I'm quarterbacking the Jets next
week."
"OK, they were my calls, but don't write it," he
said. "I caught plenty of hell
afterward."
Item No. 2:
The Jets hid an injury late last week, before the Miami
game. Their center, Roger Duffy, sprained a knee on
Thursday and a kid named J.R. Conrad, who wasn't even on
the training-camp roster, was told to get ready to go.
Duffy was deactivated. Neither
the league nor the writers were notified about it, a severe
no-no, since the league is very touchy about this stuff;
the presumption is that full disclosure is necessary to
prevent gamblers with inside information from getting an
edge. Bill Parcells shuts
his practices to reporters, keeping them stashed away in a
barbed-wire enclosed compound. It all goes under the
heading of total
control.
It looks like a $10,000 fine for the club. I asked one beat
writer how the guys who cover the club could put up with
this kind of
stuff.
"It's Bill's team," he said. "No one has the
guts to buck
him."
In the press box before the game I asked Frank Ramos, whom
I've known since 1963 when he became the team's PR
director, what the deal was. He mumbled something about the
injury not being considered that serious at first. You
don't hold a job for 34
years by taking on
management.
Afterward, I asked Jimmy Johnson about the
incident.
"I kidded Bill about it," he said. "I told
him, 'Hey, you're supposed to report that stuff.' He said,
'We just found out about it.' We were both
laughing."
Good old Bill. Someday he'll come up as a Hall of Fame
candidate. I hope I'm still on the
Committee.
Item No.
3: Atlanta defensive end Chuck Smith recorded five sacks
against New Orleans, five, count 'em. I called the Falcons
to find out whom he had gotten the sacks against—certainly
not all-pro tackle William Roaf.
"All five against Roaf," I was
told.
Smith is one of those unknown, unsung guys who has a nasty
streak and a great burst off the ball. When he's on a roll,
he's practically unstoppable. "He had one of the
greatest performances I've ever seen," Roaf said
afterward. That's the trouble. He
saw it, but he didn't block
it.
Item No.
4: On the subject of unsungs, I'll sing about a guy who just
about saved the Washington-Dallas
game: punter Matt Turk. In the second half, when the Skins
offense was crumbling and Dallas was coming on, he had four
punts, all from inside his own 20. The
yardage: 56, 58, 50 and 58. The hang
times: 4.96, 5.07, 4.70 and 4.59, which is spectacular in pressure
situations. And Turk kept Dallas off the board at the end
of the first half with a 55-yarder from his own 10-yard
line, with an incredible 5.10 hang.
Player of the game? This guy gets my vote. One shank, one
blue-darter line drive, and the Cowboys could be on top of
the
division.
Which leads me to this week and a pair of upcoming upsets
involving both of the aforementioned NFC East worthies.
Jacksonville to upset the Cowboys in
Dallas. Aging home team, short work week, youthful legs on the
other side of the ball.
The Oilers to upset
Washington in front of 17,000 sunbathers in the historic Liberty
Bowl. Terry Allen and Michael Westbrook both out with knee
sprains. The Oilers will pound a battered run-defense with
more tenacity than the Cowboys
showed.
Carolina to squeak by New
Orleans and its new QB, Danny Wuerffel, but just barely. The
Saints offense is a joke, but their defense, led by an
exceptional pair of linebackers, Mark Fields and Winfred
Tubbs, and their consistently fine tackle, Wayne Martin,
plays very seriously. The
Panthers O-line got overrun by the Vikings last week, and this
could happen again, but I just can't see that New Orleans
attack beating
anybody.
The Jets over New England on a
hunch. They should have won in Foxboro last month. They're
burning out Hugh Douglas as a base 3-4 defensive end, but I
get the feeling they'll turn him loose this week and play
some 4-3. Which means that one of Parcells's old standbys,
Pepper Johnson, takes
a seat on the bench. Parcells is loyal to his own, but the
3-4, and Pepper, just ain't doing the things they're
supposed
to.
Finally,
Miami over the Ravens in a
shootout in Baltimore. I watched Dan Marino kill the Jets blitzes
with his precision-like hot reads last weekend. When they
dropped back and played coverages he was practically
laughing as he rang up 372 passing yards. All those stories
about Marino's getting
cut or traded seem to have lit a fire, and I don't think
those Raven DBs or pass-rushers will put it out.
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