NFL FEATURES
Flashback: The double comeback
By Shelby Strother
Special to NFL.com
(Oct. 30, 2003) -- On the final day of the 1979 regular season, the Dallas Cowboys took their hardened, reinforced stereotype of being a cold, mechanical team made of football software and telecircuitry -- robots with stars on their helmets -- and shattered it over the heads of the Washington Commanders.
In their long, sometimes unfriendly, always charismatic rivalry, the Cowboys and Commanders had played many games with dramatic finishes. But none ever topped this. No defeat ever was so cruel. No victory was so fine. No game had higher highs or lower lows than when the Cowboys beat the Commanders 35-34 at Texas Stadium.
"The greatest Cowboy comeback," said a beaming Tex Schramm, the Cowboys' president and general manager. "And that's saying a lot."
Washington head coach Jack Pardee wiped away a tear in the postgame locker room and said there never had been a defeat, not as a player nor a coach, that hurt as badly.
That was saying a lot, too.
"It hurts so deeply," Pardee said, his voice barely a whisper.
What the Cowboys did that December afternoon was come back twice, first from a 17-0 deficit, finally from a 34-21 disadvantage, scoring the winning touchdown with 39 seconds to play. The 8-yard pass from quarterback Roger Staubach to wide receiver Tony Hill not only wrested the NFC East title away from the Commanders, it kicked Washington out of the playoffs (the Chicago Bears wound up with an NFC Wild Card spot instead).
"They got what they deserved," said Cowboys defensive end Harvey Martin. "Nothing."
Cowboys blood had been boiling for more than a month. In November, the Cowboys had been humbled 34-20 by the Commanders. When Pardee sent kicker Mark Moseley onto the field with nine seconds remaining to kick a field goal that seemed only to compound the insult, the Cowboys grumbled and flashed real fire, not the computerized kind. So often this team was perceived as some mechanical mirror of its head coach, the steely Tom Landry, whose next outburst of emotion would be his first. That was his reputation and his team's as well.
"But it was false," Landry said. "You can't play football without emotion. You can't coach it without emotion. You don't have to show it in public during a game. It is within our character to respond to situations like this. And we did."
"They rubbed our faces in it," Martin growled after the game in Washington.
Actually, the Commanders had genuine method to their apparent madness. Because of the NFL's system for determining the wild card with a complicated point-differential clause for tiebreakers, Washington had been correct in trying to score as many points as possible.
"As it turned out, we should have faked that field goal and gone for the touchdown," said Joe Theismann, the Commanders quarterback.
The bitter aftertaste lingered on the Cowboys' charter flight home. For one, Martin didn't like what he was hearing. Some of his teammates actually were smiling and laughing and having a good time.
"I went crazy," Martin admitted.
Walking down the aisle, Martin said in a booming voice, "Used to be when Dallas lost to Washington you could hear a pin drop. It hurt to lose. It's supposed to hurt. Losing ain't worth a damn. This isn't a happy time. Fellows, some of the older players are upset. Really upset."
The plane was quiet except for the low rumble of the engines. Martin stood stoically for several seconds, letting his stinging words settle. Then he added "If you don't hurt when you lose, you're gonna lose again."
In one of the seats, defensive tackle Larry Cole was making a list: Ten Things Wrong With Our Team.
No. 1 and underlined three times: Attitude.
Two days later, the defense met to stomp out the little prairie fires that were flaring all over the Cowboys' ranch. An attitude adjustment. Cole read his list of grievances. Martin and linebacker D.D. Lewis spoke. Even cornerback Benny Barnes got up to say something. "We were really surprised," Martin said. "Benny never speaks up."
The Cowboys' play did improve and the stretch run to the playoffs smoothed out. Then came the final Sunday, and the Washington Commanders.
The scoring differential system had thrown an interesting scenario into the day. Earlier, the Bears had run it up on the St. Louis Cardinals, 42-6. That meant the 33-point advantage the Commanders carried into the final week was gone. That meant the Commanders had to beat the Cowboys; they had to win the division outright.
In the Cowboys' meeting room, someone had written something on a chalkboard: ATTITUDE. It was underlined three times.
The game began, and the Commanders, who had every right to be aroused themselves, leaped to a 17-0 lead on a short touchdown run by Theismann, a long touchdown pass to running back Benny Malone, and a field goal by Moseley.
"That was what made that game so thrilling," Dallas quarterback Roger Staubach said. "There were so many scoring shifts. They got 17 straight, then we scored the next 21, then they got the next 17. Then we got the last 14. It was so exciting -- up and down, back and forth all game."
As the Cowboys, who played without injured running back Tony Dorsett, tried to get their act together, Staubach and Landry discussed offense the way someone might go over a grocery list.
"When you get down, you don't think about big comebacks or rallies," Staubach said. "You just talk about plays and how to execute them."
The Cowboys scored one touchdown early the second quarter, and, with nine seconds left in the half, Staubach's 26-yard touchdown pass to Preston Pearson suddenly lifted the team and it fans out of their despondency.
Never in franchise history had the Cowboys come back to win a game from 17 points behind. But when Robert Newhouse scored on a 2-yard run early in the third quarter, Dallas took the lead.
Theismann turned to John Riggins, his fullback, and said, "Riggo, this can't be happening."
Early in the fourth quarter, Moseley kicked a field goal to make it 21-20. Moments later, at midfield, Staubach threw a pass "that hit [Commanders safety] Mark Murphy right in the numbers, a really bad pass by me."
The Commanders regained the lead as Riggins bulled over from a yard out. Then with 6:54 to play, Riggins swept around end, burst down the sideline and rumbled 66 yards for what appeared to be a crushing, championship-clinching touchdown.
When the Cowboys failed to move the ball on the next possession, things were bleak on the Dallas sideline. Two minutes later, when the Commanders were pounding time off the clock, desperation had set in.
Fans were filing out of the stadium when Texas lightning struck. Washington's Clarence Harmon took a handoff and Cowboys safety Cliff Harris met him almost immediately.
Harris's helmet dug into Harmon's midsection and jarred the ball loose. The fumble bounced into the arms of tackle Randy White, who was lying on the ground and "couldn't have got out of the way of that ball if I'd tried. It was like we were supposed to have that ball."
The sudden bolt of fate was, according to Landry, "just one of about four key plays that allowed us to get back in the game."
From the Cowboys 41, Staubach coolly gunned holes in the Commanders secondary, completing passes of 14 yards to Butch Johnson, 19 yards to Tony Hill, and finally, 26 yards to Ron Springs for the touchdown.
Two minutes and 20 seconds were left.
Was it enough for Dallas?
"The way Riggins was running -- no," Randy White said. "They played ball control so well. They only needed one first down to force us to use all our time outs."
Moments later, it was third-and-2 at the Commanders 33-yard line. The classic football dilemma. And Washington had the classic player for just such a situation. Riggins already had carried the ball 21 times, already had gained a one-game career-best 153 yards. Everybody knew who would get the ball.
Including Cole.
"I took two gambles," he said. "One was that he would get the ball, which wasn't something you needed to be a brain surgeon to figure out. The other was that he would run right."
At the snap of the ball, Cole deliberately made his charge to the left. If the Commanders and Riggins had run the other way, Cole would be taking himself out of the play entirely.
Instead he ran directly into Riggins. The classic confrontation resulted in a 2-yard loss. The Commanders were forced to punt.
"Cole's play saved us two time outs," Landry said.
After a punt, the Cowboys had the ball at their 25, two time outs, and 1:46 to play with. In the huddle, Staubach could sense the booming confidence.
"We suddenly realized we didn't have to rush," he said. "We had time."
The Cowboys also had Staubach's hot hand. There had been so many of these last-minute marches to victory with Staubach at the helm. Completions of 20 yards to Hill and 22 and 25 to Preston Pearson moved the Cowboys to the Commanders' 8-yard line: first-and-goal.
"We called a play for [tight end] Billy Joe DuPree," Staubach said.
But Staubach had some special instructions for Hill: "If your man 'dogs' you, run a Fast Nine."
If Washington came with the blitz, that meant cornerback Lemar Parrish would move to the line of scrimmage, in Hill's face, to "dog" him man-to-man. Because of the blitz, the Cowboys wouldn't have time for any intricate pass patterns.
A "Fast Nine" is a simple fade to the corner of the end zone.
Landry told Staubach to line up over center instead of going into a Shotgun formation.
The Dallas quarterback saw the Commanders linebackers inching closer. Two of them were coming, he figured. Hill watched Parrish slide into his path on the right flank, ready to "dog" him.
Staubach's pass feathered softly into Hill's hands. The impact was a piano falling out of a fifth-floor window.
The Commanders were crushed.
Parrish only could say, "It was perfect. Anything else I could have covered. It was a perfect play."
"When you come back from the dead twice in the same game," Schramm said, "it's a miracle. No … It's a double miracle."
The Cowboys had engineered so many of these implausible conclusions that one player decided to rank them. Wide receiver Drew Pearson, who had caught a last-minute pass to beat Minnesota in a 1975 playoff game, said amid the uncommon bedlam in the Dallas locker room, "This puts Hail Mary in second place."
