Mark Bavaro: the former Giants tight end remembers being on pins and needles as Buffalo's Scott Norwood lined up for his ill-fated field goal in Super Bowl 25

Football Digest, June, 2005 by Chuck O'Donnell

IN SUPER BOWL, 25, THE BUFFALO Bills drove down the field and were lining up to kick the winning field goal. I was on the New York Giants sideline, thinking, "This is typical. Here we go. What was I thinking? No one deserves two Super Bowl rings?"

I was also thinking, "This is going to be, what, a 47-yard field goal? This isn't going to be a chip shot." This guy, Scott Norwood, was a turf kicker. It was kind of a slow field and was getting a little bogged down at the end. I just kept thinking, "There's a good chance this guy is going to miss. It's not automatic."

We had played the exact kind of game that we had to in order to win. What a lot of people don't remember is that our offense held the ball for 40 minutes of the game. The Bills only had the ball for about 19 minutes and scored 19 points. If it weren't for the offense keeping the ball out of their hands, I don't think we would have been in the game.

One of the keys was running back O.J. Anderson, who had a big game for us. He was just one of those big powerful running backs. You think about it now--you look at the New England Patriots' Corey Dillon running through people--and O.J. was bigger. You try tackling that guy in November, December, or January--good luck to you.

That's basically what he did against the Bills. Those guys weren't used to playing against big backs. Their whole game was predicated on speed and pass-rushing. We came out with three tight ends, fat slobs picking you up and moving you and letting you tackle O.J., if you could. And they couldn't. We just physically beat the Buffalo Bills. It was the type of physical beating of a football team that you don't see much anymore.

We never tried to be something we weren't. We had great wide receivers, but they weren't household names; we had a great quarterback in Phil Simms, but he wasn't known for his cannon arm and throwing the ball 50, 60 yards on go patterns. We were a play-action, pound-it-up-in-your-face, smash-mouth type of team, and we never veered off that course the whole year. We didn't score many points. In the NFC Championship Game against the San Francisco 49ers, we scored five field goals--we didn't even score a touchdown.

Our whole season could have gone down the tubes when Phil got hurt at about midseason. But then Jeff Hostetler stepped in, and we really didn't miss a beat. That's not a knock against Phil--that was just the setup of the offense. We weren't run-and-shoot. We were a heavy, heavy, heavy running offense with a mix of play-action passes. You have to be able to execute that kind of offense, but it wasn't like we were depending on the arm of Phil Simms to be successful.

There wasn't that much pressure for Hostetler to step in. It wasn't like he was replacing Jim Kelly or Dan Marino, whose offenses were predicated on their passing arms. What we needed was a field commander, which Phil Simms was. He was the leader--he told everybody what to do, put them in their places and gave us a sense of confidence that we had everything we needed on the field. The question was whether Hostetler was going to be able to step in and assume that kind of role. And he did. I don't recall it being a problem for him.

But you have to remember, too, that back then the difference between the quarterbacks--first, second, third string--wasn't always very much. Those guys had been there forever. It wasn't like we had picked up Jeff the season before through free agency. They didn't have free agency back then. Jeff had been there before I was there, so in my eyes, he was already an established leader. And if he was in my eyes, he should have been in everybody else's eyes. It wasn't as dramatic a change as it would be today if, say, Tom Brady got hurt for the Patriots and Rohan Davey had to step in.

I caught five passes in Super Bowl 25. I remember a few of them, two in particular. They were big catches for big first downs. The one I remember best came on a third-down play in the final quarter. We were near midfield and needed to keep the drive alive. We were in our sub package, and I just ran a quick 10-yard out. Jeff threw it--it was a good catch, good throw. I got tackled right away, but we got the first down and kept the drive alive.

Looking back now, I'm not sure I understood the full implication of the play. If you drop that ball, the drive ends. When you're playing, you're in that training mode--you've been trained to do it. You don't think much about it. When you get older and you look back, you say, "Wow, that was pretty cool." Now I'm not so sure I could do it, knowing what was on the line. So we drove down, Matt Bahr hit a short field goal, and we went ahead by a point, 20-19.

The Bills got the ball and came back down the field. They were lining up for the winning field goal, and I can remember hoping that somehow we were going to pull it out. But at the same time, I was worried about Norwood. I was like, "Geez, I hope he misses it, but I don't want to wish that on anybody." I can remember thinking, "Hey, if he misses this field goal, which there's a good chance he'll do because of a lot of factors, I'm going to have two Super Bowl rings. That's unbelievable."