|
| |
| ||
|
| ||
|
Denver's weak link Broncos need more from No. 7 if they are to beat Falcons
Posted: Wednesday January 20, 1999 07:13 PM
I was in the press tent Sunday, waiting for the Denver locker room to open up, and I asked somebody what he thought the line would be on Broncos-Falcons. "Thirteen or 14," he said. I was surprised. "That much, huh?" "Elway against Chandler?" he said. "Are you kidding?" Just for fun I did a little poll of my own among the media people who looked like they had a bit of smarts -- which, of course, excluded the radio and TV folks -- and about 80 percent of them had the line in double figures. Then the post-game coverage on CBS had a brief flash. The opening Super Bowl line was 8 1/2, we were told. As usual, the network had it wrong. The number that finally came out of Vegas was seven, which told me one thing: The guys who set the price like Atlanta. They're looking for Denver money, since public opinion -- and I read the media's slant on things as a barometer of public opinion -- thought that Denver was a lot better than the pros did. Which, of course, makes me like Atlanta even more than I did before I got into all this numbers-juggling. What's there not to like about Denver? Only one thing -- and I'm very reluctant to put this kind of rap on the greatest sports hero in the history of the Rocky Mountain area -- John Elway. The broadcast, the stadium, the bars, the newspapers -- everything was one long love affair between Elway and Denver, which is fine because he did an awful lot for the city in his 16 years there, but let's face it, he nearly cost his team the game Sunday. The wind at game time was announced at 20-30 mph. Broncos players told me they'd played in winds that high, but this seemed worse. It was whipping up the field vertically, but just as bad was a vicious crosswind that pushed the ball right to left, if the wind was behind you, left to right if you were going into it. Sound familiar? You're right: It was a Giants Stadium wind, and Vinny Testaverde looked like he was born for it. In the first quarter he had to go into it, and he was 6-for-6, and they weren't just short dumpoffs. Four of the passes were longer than 10 yards, including a 29-yard post to Wayne Chrebet and a 19-yard touch pass that Keith Byars ran under. Then he hit his first seven in the second quarter, with the wind at his back. As for Elway, it nearly did him in. I can't remember him ever having a worse start in a game of this magnitude. Twenty minutes went by before he completed his first pass, and he played the whole first quarter with the wind at his back. You'd figure that Elway, with the stronger arm, should have been able to handle it better than Testaverde did, but he didn't handle it at all. The book says that when you're playing in wind you throw with it at your back and run the ball when you're going into it, but the situation was reversed in the Broncos-Jets game. Testaverde threw in that first quarter, but the Broncos ran the ball 11 times, passed four, all incompletes. At the midway point in the second period Elway was 1-for-8, a six-yard hook to his tight end, Shannon Sharpe. He'd had four deflected. By the end of the half he was 4-for-14, with one drop, five deflections and some misfires. Only one of those completions was 10 yards or longer, a 12-yard circle route by Terrell Davis against the zone. Testaverde had completed 10 in double figures. The Jets were driving consistently, but two of those drives were killed by fumbles. And they made a real special-teams mistake. Broncos punter Tom Rouen was struggling. He'd fumbled one attempt for a nine-yard loss. In the third quarter he'd have one blocked on his own one-yard line. But in that second quarter, punting into the wind, he hit a pair of 35-yard bloops that became much longer, thanks to the old bounce-and-roll. He said after the game that he was deliberately punching the ball, trying for the roll, but I don't buy it. Both punts got into the air, but each time Dave Meggett was playing 50 yards deep and didn't want to risk a catch, so he let the ball go. If he'd have played up, at least on the second one, after he'd seen that Rouen was getting nothing on them, if he'd have caught the ball on the run, the Jets would have had serious field position, because the hang time was minimal. Woulda, coulda, shoulda, the sucker's holler, but hey, take away the fumbles, give the Jets a decent punt return or two, and the score at halftime could have been 17-0, Jets, instead of 3-0. What would that have done? Taken Davis, who killed the Jets with his cutbacks, as he's done to almost everyone else, out of the game, or at least severely limited him. Then it would have been in the hands of a very shaky Elway, and who knows? Instead, there was that freak-show third quarter. Wideouts Ed McCaffrey and Rod Smith line up on the wrong sides, Elway signals them to run each other's routes, strong safety Victor Green jumps the wrong route and McCaffrey winds up with a 47-yard completion on Elway's only decent long throw of the afternoon. It sets up a TD, and then Jason Elam, who's trying to hit a low liner on his kickoff, pops one up instead. It bounces off the back of the wedge, Broncos recover, score's tied at 10-10, and now the crowd's back into it and Davis does his thing and the rest is history. Elway emerges as the hero -- but not to the guys setting the Super Bowl odds. And what you've got to ask is: Was it only the wind that screwed him up Sunday or has the season simply been too long for him? He hasn't looked all that great down the stretch, and in Atlanta he'll be facing what I consider the best front seven in football. The secondary's decent, not great, but in front of it there's a hungry, relentless gang of pursuers, and I give them a decent chance. Atlanta-Minnesota was winding down in overtime just as the Broncos and Jets were lining up for their kickoff. For years I used to pester the NFL's media relations people to start the championship games four hours apart, instead of three and a half, to avoid an overlap. Or better yet, hold them on different days. You could even throw a Monday nighter in there, since the Super Bowl would be two weeks away. I talked myself hoarse, and the answer I always got was, "Well, it hasn't happened yet." I couldn't break through that thinking. Even with Paul Tagliabue pushing the start of Denver-Jets back 10 minutes, a viewer at home had to make a choice -- watch the start of one game or Morten Andersen's game winning field goal in the other one. And for a chart freak like me, it was positively nerve-wracking, until I got home, of course, and ran back the end of my Atlanta-Minnesota tape. What did I see in that game? Tremendous courage by the Falcons, particularly Chris Chandler. I never thought Atlanta would bounce back from that first half, when they were down by six and the recipients of a couple of really bad calls, both of them setting up Vikings TDs. Randy Moss runs downfield, Cunningham underthrows, tweet, interference on Ray Buchanan. Am I sick of that call or what? Moss pushes off first, as he likes to do. Buchanan pushes back -- and he gets the flag. The second one involved another superstar. This was on an 18-yard screen to Moss, and if you looked carefully you could see Cris Carter grabbing the cornerback's neck and yanking him to the ground. To call it holding would be kind. No call, naturally. Are these officials star-struck? Is there an unwritten rule that highly publicized figures are exempt from the same scrutiny awarded to poor Joe Schmoe ? Sure looks like it. Atlanta gets something going at the start of the third quarter, and boom, here comes bad call No. 3, again vs. the visiting Falcons. This was on a really nifty gadget play that Dan Reeves came up with for this contest. Reeves, a veteran of the great gadget system in Dallas, always comes up with unusual things in big games. So does Mike Shanahan . You'll see a ton of them in the Super Bowl. Anyway, on this one he lined Chandler up on the flank, setting the return man and third wideout, Tim Dwight, into a shotgun -- and then he ran a sweep off this alignment. Dwight gained 21 yards against the surprised Vikings, down to the Minnesota 15. The play would be tried twice more and finally bagged when the Vikes countered it by jamming Chandler forcefully to the ground, but on the first one cornerback Corey Fuller got Dwight out of bounds with an almost 180-degree yank of the facemask. Oh my. No call, of course, and this was the one that brought Reeves onto the field, screaming. (Careful, buddy. Remember the old ticker.) The drive ended with three points. It could have been seven. Minnesota retaliated by driving the length of the field in 15 plays against a tiring defense. Early in the fourth quarter that defense had been on the field for 58 snaps, 20 more than the Vikings defense had. That's it, I figured. They've been out there too long. They're exhausted. The Vikings were up by 10 and I figured it would get worse. Shows how much I know. They would never score again. Atlanta would score three more times to win it in OT. Gary Anderson's missed field goal would have iced it for Minnesota, but it didn't cost the Vikings the game. The fact that Atlanta drove the field twice, once at the end of the fourth period, once in OT, was what won it. Overtime was like a couple of heavyweights slugging it out in the late rounds. Both teams were exhausted. It was a matter of which one could take the punches. I don't like it when I hear people saying that the Vikings blew the game. They didn't blow it. They played hard, but the Falcons were tougher. They won it the hard way, showing tremendous courage, which has been a mirror of their most amazing season. I think they'll give the Broncos a tremendous tussle and might even upset them. Intellectually, I make Denver the choice on superior firepower, the same way I incorrectly handicapped Minnesota-Atlanta. Emotionally, who knows? But we all know what'll happen. There will be freak plays, the unexpected, highlight-film plays on special teams by guys you seldom hear about. That's what usually happens.
| |||||||||||||||||
Copyright © 1999 CNN/SI. A Time Warner Company. Terms under which this service is provided to you.
| |||||||||||||||||
