Back To The Bowl

Buffalo center Kent Hull wondered afterward if Denver hadn't had 13 defenders on the field for every play. "I don't know why nobody gave us any credit," said Phillips. "We had the best defense in the AFC, and we gave up the fewest touchdowns in the league."

Fletcher raced in unblocked and sacked Kelly to ruin Buffalo's first series. Dennis Smith's safety blitz forced Kelly to rush a third-down pass and throw incomplete on the second. Kragen intercepted a tipped pass to end the third and tipped another pass to snuff the fourth. Henderson's and Braxton's muggings of Lofton and Reed, respectively, wiped out the fifth. Meanwhile, the Denver offense was moving deeper into Bills territory, but Treadwell kept misfiring in the Rich Stadium crosswinds. "I'm a finesse kicker," he said, "and this wind moves the ball around a lot."

It was 0-0 at the half, which is like Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley being scoreless at halftime of a Chicago Bulls-Philadelphia 76ers game. On the second play after intermission, Elway scrambled for two yards and didn't appear to get smashed or even unusually jostled by a Buffalo player. Still, he came up limping. Elway stayed in the game, but a Denver trainer told coach Dan Reeves that Elway was very sore and might not be able to continue. With 5:39 left in the third quarter, the Broncos took over at their 19. It was the 18th possession of the day for the two teams. It was still 0-0. "By about then I thought 3-0 would win it," Phillips said.

On second-and-10, Elway backpedaled, but the Bills had seen this play before. "Middle screen to Sewell," nose-tackle Jeff Wright said later. "We'd practiced it all week, and I actually intercepted one of these on Thursday in practice and ran it in for a touchdown." This time Wright and Bailey threw aside their blockers, but instead of continuing their charge, they recognized the screen and held up. Elway tried to pass to Sewell, but the ball tipped off Wright's outstretched hands and into Bailey's at the Denver 11. Bailey rumbled into the end zone for the first points of the game.

With 12:40 to play, Kubiak replaced Elway, whose leg had become too stiff for him to continue playing. Kubiak moved the Broncos against the Bills' prevent defense, driving them to the Buffalo 23 before turning the ball over on downs and then taking them 85 yards for Denver's only score. But he was robbed of a chance to pull out the game when Jackson stripped the ball from Sewell.

While the Bills' offense struggled to explain itself afterward—"A championship game is supposed to be a defensive battle," Kelly said cryptically—the defense basked. Bennett especially. After the game, coach Marv Levy found Bennett in the locker room and put his arm around him. "You remember last week when I told you that was your greatest game?" Levy said. "I was wrong. This one was."

That's saying something, because Bennett had stung Kansas City Chiefs running back Barry Word so often in the divisional playoff win a week earlier that Levy awarded his linebacker a cellular phone for his efforts. Levy doles out rewards each week for jobs well done, and he gave Bennett the Wake-up Call award for a vicious tackle of Word on the Chiefs' second play from scrimmage. "That hit on Word was the exclamation point on our season," said Buffalo assistant general manager Bob Ferguson last week.

Bennett's stats against Denver—nine tackles (tied for most in the game), half a sack and a deflected pass—don't tell nearly enough about his presence in the game. On a day loaded with impact players, Bennett was the most impactful. He threw aside his blocker to rush the quarterback from his regular outside linebacker position, he covered the tight end on pass routes, and he spied on Elway from an inside linebacker spot. Twice he caught the fleet Green from behind, which shouldn't really surprise: Bennett runs a 4.48 40.

Bennett wants a share of the credit that regularly goes to the Kelly-Smith-Thomas-Reed publicity juggernaut, but he rarely seeks attention. And it's no wonder, given past experiences. As soon as Bennett arrived at Alabama, then Tide coach Ray Perkins called him "the next Lawrence Taylor." Before he ever played a down as a pro, he was part of one of the biggest trades in NFL history—the three-team monster deal that sent Eric Dicker-son from the Los Angeles Rams to the Indianapolis Colts, unsigned first-round pick Bennett from the Colts to the Bills and six high draft picks from Buffalo and Indy to L.A. He has been a terrific player for the Bills, but they did not totally realize his true value until this season.

In the first half of Buffalo's season opener against Miami, the Dolphins took a quick 14-0 lead as Mark Higgs ran the Bills silly. "Everyone's hysterical on the sidelines," Bennett recalled last week, "and the coaches just decided to put the whole defensive game plan out the window. We just drew up something new right there on the sidelines and put it in." Out went the 3-4 alignment. In came the 2-5, the Sic 'em Defense, so named (later) because defensive coordinator Walt Corey put Bennett in the middle of the five linebackers and said, Chase the ball, big fella. "We gave him all the freedom in the world," Corey says, "and all year he played football like a dog chasing a cat. Turned out we became geniuses."