Anatomy of an upset
Posted: Sunday December 20, 1998 03:11 PM
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I wish I could tell you I was smart enough to figure out that the
Giants would have a terrific shot at toppling the Broncos last weekend, and
that's why I found myself in the Meadowlands on that cloudy Sunday
afternoon, but I wasn't. I thought it would be a neat thing, because a
Denver loss would stick it to the ABC folks who were looking past this game
while they promoted their Monday night Broncos-Dolphins spectacular, and I
always like to see the network folks get their comeuppance, because
they're so arrogant.
I thought the Giants could hang in for a while because their defense can
give anyone a rough time when it's in the mood. But I thought the contest
would eventually swing on the inability of the Giants' attack to get
anything done against the Broncos' D. I didn't count on Kent Graham having a
career day. Neither did anyone else.
So there I was, two-and-a-half hours before kickoff, standing in the west
end zone, chatting pleasantly with Alex Gibbs , the Broncos'
offensive line coach and one of my favorite assistants because he's an
old-timer and he believes in the values I grew up with: smaller linemen
well-versed in proper techniques.
"Every week it gets tougher," he said. "People don't
understand. Every game turns into the other team's Super Bowl."
It sounded like normal coaching talk. Two sub-par performances in a row
(against San Diego and Kansas City) had produced the usual run of
locker-room quotes that basically said the same thing: a win's a win, even
if we win ugly, etc. But Gibbs seemed genuinely worried that his guys were
wearing down.
"The pressure of a long season, the wear-and-tear, the pressure of
never letting up," he was saying. "It has to worry you."
A couple of hours later I saw what he meant.
There's a tendency, when a major power suffers a loss, to talk about a
letdown, or a lack of intensity, or any number of reasons why that team
wasn't playing up to its full potential. Seldom does the other outfit get
credit for simply playing better. The Tom Landry Dallas teams led
the league in that kind of whining.
"Every time we beat them," the old 49ers quarterback John
Brodie once said, "we'd have to hear, 'That wasn't the real
Cowboys team out there today.' How many guys did they carry on their
roster, anyway?"
On Sunday the Giants played better in every phase of the game except one.
Terrell Davis punished
them. He got his yards, but until midway through the fourth quarter they
were in small chunks, annoying but not disastrous.
The first three-and-a-half quarters of the game were like two fighters
trading body punches -- long, grueling drives that ended in field goals,
three of them for Denver, two for the Giants, who also got a TD on a
15-play march. A 10-6 New York lead turned into 10-9, then 13-9, and
during this whole period I was figuring, OK, now Denver opens it up, now
John Elway goes up on
top.
We've been so conditioned to seeing this team switch gears when Davis isn't
having one of his huge days, seeing Rod Smith or Ed McCaffrey or Shannon Sharpe go waltzing
into the end zone after some busted coverage or mixup in a zone, all neatly
plotted and schemed by the Broncos brain trust, that we kind of expect it.
I certainly did.
The weird thing about the Denver offense was that Elway got choked off.
Everything was underneath, five- and seven-yard hitches and curls, quick
throws, everything safe. He completed 12 passes in the first half, only
one of them 10 yards or longer. The Vikings' Randall Cunningham had four
of this distance in his first five passes against the Ravens Sunday.
Atlanta's Chris
Chandler, throwing against a pretty decent New Orleans defense, opened
that game with four straight double-figure completions, and six out of his
first 10. And so on.
I kept waiting for the double move from Elway's receivers, the
hitch-and-go, the out-and-up, now that the Giants' corners were so
conditioned to defending the short stuff. But they never came. Final
tally of double-figure completions for Elway: five out of 19, and two of
them came in the last 40 seconds when New York was laying back.
Meadowlands wind? Uh-uh. Negligible. Graham, for instance, had
half-a-dozen doubles in the first half--12, total, out of his 18
completions in the game.
"Yeah, I was waiting for John to throw deep," right cornerback Conrad Hamilton said,
"especially with all the man-to-man coverage we were playing. He'd
throw a little hitch, then an out, and I'd yell to the guys, 'OK, here it
comes!' But it just never did."
This fascinated me. So I went around the Denver locker room trying to find
out what was up. Elway looked very weary when I got to him. Exhausted,
actually. Feeling his years. He'd been sacked three times, hammered a lot
more.
"No, there was no wind out there," he said. "Why didn't we
go deep? You'll have to talk to the coach about that. I had no problem
with what was called. They were getting good pressure. It wasn't easy to
go deep."
I got Bubby Brister,
Elway's backup QB, alone. Hey, what was going on out there anyway?
"John wanted to go downtown, or at least a little longer," he
said, "but their front seven wasn't giving him time. I heard
check-off to something deep two times. Two sacks. Then he didn't do it
anymore."
Sometimes we get too caught up in all this game-planning and scheming, and
it's necessary to take the game down to its essentials. The Giants' front
four is one of those sturdy, blue-collar outfits with a pair of
300-pounders at the tackles and ends who go 275 and 280. There are no
will-o'-the-wisp 255-pound outside rushers in there. They simply beat the
guys blocking them at the point. When the Giants chose to blitz, not
frequently but effectively, they gave Elway a hard time.
The cornerbacks, Phillippi
Sparks and Hamilton, were terrific. During the week they had been told
they'd be manned up against the Broncos receivers for most of the day and
they came through -- particularly Hamilton, who'd never been better. They
were playing on a different level; it was one of those teeth-gritting types
of days you sometimes see corners have, in which they're fighting and
clawing to knock down everything thrown their way. Why don't cornerbacks
give it that type of effort every week? I don't know. They just don't.
Late in the fourth quarter Davis finally popped one against a tired
defense, scoring on one of his typical runs, 27 yards through a bunch of
arm tackles. And at the end it came down to one final, 86-yard Giants drive
to win the game. Eighty-six yards for the league's 29th-rated offense is
like 86 miles, but that's statistics, numbers, paper cutouts.
"Expect to win!" coach Jim Fassel hollered to his
offensive players before they went out, and that's what they did. Graham,
who'd been terrific all day, sharp on his reads, particularly his hot reads
against the blitz, accurate on his deep and medium-range throws, nimble
enough when he had to elude the rush, threw a perfect 37-yard TD at the
end, and the Broncos were 13-1.
I found Graham in the locker room afterward. I've always liked him. He's
an extremely decent person, and I never felt he got a fair shake in his
battle with Dave Brown
for the starting spot -- how many years ago? Only four, but it seems like
40. He's been booed in Arizona and New York and points between, but he's
never carried himself like anything but a gentleman.
"Career game," I said to him.
"Career game," he said, smiling.
In the days following the upset, people have been asking: If the Giants
could be so inspired on one particular Sunday, where's it been all season?
I'm afraid I can't answer that. Neither can anyone else. Sometimes people
just get tired of being pushed around.
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