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NFL loses precision over time
Updated: Thursday June 14, 2001 6:36 PM
One day Donny Slade, my friend at the healthy club where I occasionally work out, said, "Guess what I found? The tape I made of the 1987 Giants-Broncos Super Bowl. Sure was interesting watching the game again." Well, naturally I had to have it, so I borrowed it, and last weekend I watched the game in its entirety. I even watched CBS' two-hour pregame, although I have to admit that I fast-forwarded through most of the halftime entertainment. Has the game changed that much in 15 seasons? Well, yes and no. The players are bigger and faster now. Offensive coaches spend more time trying to fool people with misdirection and motion and reverse motion. There are more personnel switches and groupings and alignment packages. I don't think the word "package" was even used back in the '86 season. There are more defensive role players, more substitution in clumps. The game is much tougher on my charts than it was in Pasadena in January '87. The pass patterns were basically the same. Bill Walsh's 49ers offense had been in vogue for more than half a decade, and his horizontal, short-passing game was being copied around the league. Not by the Giants or Broncos, though. They were both down-the-field throwing teams. Defensive copycats had also latched on to Buddy Ryan's 46 alignment, which had destroyed the Patriots in the previous Super Bowl. New York and Denver weren't interested. These two teams used a 3-4 alignment, which was still favored by Bill Parcells when he had his last go-round with the Jets a couple of years ago. The play I wanted to study was the Joe Morris power-off-tackle, the heart and soul of the Giants' running game, the springboard from which their entire offense was launched. Tight end Mark Bavaro had the key block. He had to hook the man to his inside, whether it was a linebacker or defensive end. They ran it more to the right side than left, and 285-pound right tackle Karl Nelson was the power guy, the drive blocker. Right guard Chris Godfrey pulled, turned upfield and cleared a lane while fullback Mo Carthon kicked out on the winger. The first time the Giants ran it, it picked up 11 yards -- on second-and-three. The next time was on second-and-18, on the same opening TD drive. It gained eight and made the first down attainable. Precision football, pretty football to watch, at least for someone like me, who was schooled in the niceties of the running game. And it's something you seldom see nowadays, the timing of a well-constructed running play. Bavaro wasn't just the brute he was depicted as; he was an agile, skillful, technically adept blocker. Ditto Godfrey. Nelson came off the ball with old-style blocking form. The difference between that kind of execution and what, with a few exceptions, you have today -- the big, mushing, belly-bumping style -- is the difference between ballet and clog-dancing. "You had continuity then," says Phil Simms, who quarterbacked the Giants that afternoon. "Offensive lines would be together for years. Parcells would drill us on that play maybe 20 times each practice. We'd rehearse it in the running drills, in the individual drills, then we'd run it as a team in the 11-on-11." The big angle during the two weeks before the Super Bowl was how John Elway would do against that murderous Giants defense. Simms was a lesser story; everyone assumed that the Giants behind their "big offensive line" would muscle the smaller Broncos defense. Big line? Well, yeah, by 1986 standards, and certainly bigger than the Broncos' OL, whose heaviest man weighed 269. From left to right, the Giants' unit went 270, 270, 265, 265, 285. Average weight: 271. Pretty big for those days, but still agile enough to run that precision off-tackle or sweep, when Morris turned it outside, and certainly big enough to overpower a Denver front three that averaged 257, with nose tackle Greg Kragen topping out at 245. The thing that fascinated me, though, was that the Giants ran their offense almost exclusively from the same package, two backs, two wideouts and Bavaro, working from either split backs or the I-formation. Occasionally they'd bring in a second tight end for the fullback, or they'd substitute Lee Rouson for Morris and put him in the slot, but they'd use fancy stuff like the three-wideout package only on third-and-long. Four wideouts? Never. Parcells didn't like too many little guys on the field, even on second-and-long. There was very little motion. Here we are, try to stop us. "In Parcells' system, it was 'Who's the best,'" Simms says. "Now it's 'Who's the smartest?' We'd come out and we'd run our core, our basic offense. Now a lot of teams don't even have a core. It's a completely different package for them every week. "Our defense was the same way. Oh, there would be a substitution here and there, but you didn't see all these shifts and switches. We ran our base. Teams would substitute a lot against us, and we'd keep our linebackers on the field and say, 'OK, beat us.' "That's why I liked watching Baltimore so much last year. It was really a mirror of the Giants of years ago. It was like the Ravens were saying, 'OK, are you done shifting and motioning and playing dress-up? Now let's play. Now you've got to come to us; you've got to come to the fight.'" Well, the Giants won that old Super Bowl, 39-20, even though the Broncos outplayed them in the first half and led 10-9. Denver could have been up by more, except that kicker Rich Karlis missed two short field goals and Dan Reeves showed a weird kind of stubbornness, while Parcells changed his whole approach. Just because Parcells' offense lined up in predictable formations didn't mean that his game-planning was predictable. The Giants were one of the league's heavier run-versus-pass overload teams, but on this day either he or his offensive coordinator Ron Erhardt decided to switch the approach. "Sometimes Bill just had a feel for things and he'd surprise you," Simms says. "I remember the year before, when we played Cincinnati, Bill said early in the week, 'Simms, you're gonna come out throwing Sunday.' It just came from nowhere. That was the day I set a club record with 513 yards." Simms threw on nine of the 11 first downs in the first half of the Super Bowl, completing all nine passes en route to his phenomenal 22-for-25 day. The only reason the Giants didn't have much to show for it on the scoreboard was that they didn't have the ball enough. Elway had a terrific half, marching the Broncos into scoring position on four of their five possessions. I didn't make a note of it at the time, but with 14-plus years of hindsight, plus the ability to run the action back, I found a play that set the scene for one of the game's defining moments. It gave me an insight into Reeves' persona as a coach -- at least in those days. It was on the Broncos' first possession, third-and-two on the Giants' 31. Nowadays, as teams lose the ability to effectively run the ball in short-yardage situations, third-and-two means a three- or four-wideout package. Fourteen-and-a-half years ago, though, it would have been the ultimate sign of cowardice, a threat to your manhood, a message to your team, etc. So the Broncos loaded up with three tight ends and ran Sammy Winder to the power side, right into the heart of the Giants defense, and the play had no chance from the start. The Giants, who ranked alongside the 49ers as the NFL's best goal-line defense teams, were too sturdy at the point, too quick in their backside pursuit, just better in all phases of short-yardage football, and LB Carl Banks, the best defensive player on the field that day, shed his blocker quickly and stiffed the play for no gain. One quarter later came the game's most memorable series, when Denver had a first-and-goal on the Giants' one-yard line, and three running plays went for minus-one, zero and minus-four, and then Karlis missed the chippie. Third-and-goal from the two, and Winder was still running strongside and the Giants simply ate it up. What did it take to convince Reeves? "They could have run 30 plays down there and they wouldn't have gotten it in," Simms says. Postgame there was some speculation about what would have happened had Denver put seven points on the board, and then three more on their final possession of the half, when Karlis missed a 34-yarder. Different attitude for the second half, maybe? More upbeat? More spring in the legs? I don't think so. This was the way CBS sideline reporters Irv Cross, who tracked the Giants in and out of their locker room at halftime, and Will McDonough, who was on the Broncos, described the scene: McDonough: "The Broncos came into the locker room angry. They started yelling, walking off the field. Their defensive end, Rulon Jones, said, 'We've got the Giants where we want 'em right now, and we're gonna beat 'em.' And that's the way they walked onto the field for the second half." Cross: "The Giants came into the locker room drained. The heat really affected them. They're going out now without a whole lot of emotion." And then the Giants scored four times -- 24 points -- on their first four possessions and held the Broncos to three straight series of three-and-out or less, and the game was essentially over. The big guys had worn down the little guys on both sides of the ball. Simms had the game of his life, completing all 10 of his second-half passes to pick up an MVP trophy. After the Giants went ahead on the opening drive of the second half, Reeves, finally sensing the futility of a running game, called 13 straight passing plays for Elway, but by then the game had departed. How great was Simms' day? Well, let's look at the wideouts he had to work with, and I'll bet you can't remember the names of the starters. Here's a hint. Lionel Manuel and Stacy Robinson, 40 catches for the season between them. The leading receiver among the Giants' wide receiving corps, Bobby Johnson, a reserve that day, didn't rank among the NFL's top 100 receivers. Simms was in a zone. They could have lined up O-linemen at wideout and he'd have completed passes. A few notes: CBS' two-hour pregame, hosted by Brent Musburger and, for one brief stretch, Jimmy the Greek (who picked the Giants, 24-20, making him a loser if he bet it, since they covered the nine-point spread) was a nice workmanlike job, long on football, short on silly hoopla, which was just fine with yours truly. In the parade of pregame analysts, only Terry Bradshaw saw Simms as a factor. "In a game like this, I give the edge to Simms on experience," he said. Instant replay was used for the first time in a Super Bowl. A crucial call was blown in the first half, depriving Broncos tight end Clarence Kay of a first-down catch and setting up a two-point safety for the Giants. The explanation was that the all-telling reverse angle shot came to the replay booth too late. Since the game was in Pasadena, the halftime show featured a double tribute, to Hollywood and to, oh god, Walt Disney -- again. "Like a trip through the inside of Zsa Zsa Gabor's brain," the late Village Voice columnist Joe Flaherty wrote. Finally, and this was very big for me, and I'm surprised that I didn't remember it, Neil Diamond sang The Star-Spangled Banner in 1:00.46, hitting the turn ("rockets red glare") in a breathless 23.8. It was the fastest national anthem in Super Bowl history and the second-fastest vocal that I ever clocked. Compare that to the draggy, moony, 1:40 to 1:45 anthems of today. See, it was a better game all around. Sports Illustrated senior writer Paul Zimmerman covers the NFL for the magazine and CNNSI.com. His "Inside Football" column and Mailbag appear weekly on CNNSI.com. To send a question to Dr. Z, click here. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.
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