Look you can alibi anything you desire away but both teams had the same poor footing which made it = on both sides & the Miami QB did not throw the INTs it was our guy using there killer "Bs" as his personal target practice range :sad:
shula cheated after he saw what happened in the snow plow game he was head of the competition committee so he knew he could get away with it
i was 6 therefor i never comment on the game. too young to understand what i saw.sorta like a playboy magazine you know what your seeing just dont know what to do with it.
This was the season that football took over my Sundays. I was 9 at the time of the game and was stuck at a rollerskating party for the kid down the street. I spent the majority of the time at the counter watching the game with the clerk, miserable that I could not be home with my grandfather watching the game. I got home with a few minutes left in the game and mad at my mother for making me go to the party.
Is the entire Championship game available as a DVD? I don't remember the pbp as I was watching with a group . Would love to see previous week's game vs. Raiders. 3rd & 1 @ mid-field...late in the game, Todd goes long off a play-fake(I believe) to Walker. (good call by Walton, who was probably the most highly regarded OC in 1982... fear of losing him was partially the reason for canning Michaels I think. Dierking scores the GW TD. Mehl picks off two Plunkett passes in the last 3 minutes
One of many heartbreaks. I was 22 at the time. I believe our backup was Pat Ryan and I kept hoping they would put him to give us another option since he was better afoot than Todd.
I was 19, living with my girlfirend--who I had every intention of marrying--in my first apartment. I was a rabid fan in those days, screaming at every play, etc. I proceeded to drink a quart of cheap gin, getting more effed up and obnoxious as the game went on, culminating in puking all night long post game. I've always said that was the beginning of the end for that relationship as she saw me on my very worst behavior, planting the seed that I may not be Mr. Right. Oh well. But the field WAS the worst I've ever seen for an NFL game. By the 3rd quarter, with Freeman stifled by the inability to cut back, I was screaming for Michaels to put in Tom Newton at HB...but no matter how loud I screamed he couldn't hear me. Still one of the worst days of my life.
i can vaguely remember this game. you cant complain about things like field condition, it makes you look like a whiner. it sucks but you have to do whatever is necessary to win the game. shula was a douche, after we said it almost 20 years ago once we never needed to say it again. win this year and it wont bother people quite as much.
Sometimes you are unbelievable. Stick with what you really know and not things you never saw (Namath) or games you watched when you were 7. Seriously, your football knowledge is better than this and you are embarrassing yourself with your posts in this thread. It's time for you to stop basing your knowledge of events by reading old box scores or comparing stats of players from different eras. I was 23 when this game was played and I remember it vividly. Let's start with your misconceptions. 1. Weather doesn't affect games because both teams play in it? Really? Why do we bother looking at weather reports of games? You don't think a windy day will have a greater impact on a passing team? Cold weather doesn't negatively impact warm weather teams in the playoffs? Give me a break. Wet fields slow down pass rushers, neutralize speed, and cause cutting players to slip. The field that day was among the worst I have ever seen. The 82 Dolphins were a run oriented defensive football team. The Jets were better balanced and had a tremendous advantage in team speed. If you can't see how that swamp of a field benefited the Dolphins then you are hopeless. The Dolphins had David Woodley at QB, who might have been the worst QB to ever take a team to the SB. 2. The Jets had no gripe because the Dolphins earned home field advantage. Really? So that gave Shula the right to ignore NFL rules? Home teams can do what they want to a field? Don't be so ignorant. If you weren't 7, you would have remembered that there was a tremendous amount of discussion about how Shula, who was head of the NFL rules committee, had ignored the rules to give his team an advantage. How there was talk of moving the game to another field. How, if it weren't a strike season with one week between the Championship games the Super Bowl that the game might have been postponed to a Monday night because of the field. What Shula did that day was one of the most despicable acts of poor sportsmanship I have ever witnessed. And what do the prior two losses the Jets had to the Dolphins that year have to do with the outcome of this game? Under your view, the game probably should not have been played because the Dolphins two wins over the Jets automatically made them the better team. You completely ignore (because you were 7) that the Jets were hot coming into that game. You completely ignore that the Dolphins were only 1-2 point favorites at home, which meant most people considered the Jets a better team. You also ignore that the Jets lost the second game to the Dolphins that year because Leahy missed multiple kicks including an extra point in a 1 point loss. Yes the Jets still could have won the game and yes the Jets played poorly. But to ignore that the conditions gave the Dolphins a huge advantage that day and greatly contributed to that win means you do not know what you are talking about. Stick to what you know and not your interpretation of events you were too young to understand or appreciate. The Jets were robbed of an opportunity that day by Shula and his conscious decision to neutralize the speed advantage the Jets had over his team. That is a fact. Whether they would have taken advantage of that opportunity on a dry field is something we will never know. We do know, at least those of us old enough to remember, that when that game came on TV that day and Jets fans saw the conditions, we know we were being hosed (no pun intended) before the game even started. That is not sour grapes. It is fact.
The runner that should have been used by the Jets that day was Dwane Crutchfield - a power RB (from Iowa I think). He was a big North-South runner who would have been a better mudder than McNeil.
Shula ended up being a unsportsmanlike cheat and the league ignored it. So the league got to have that crappy David Woodley led Dolphin team in the Super Bowl instead of the Jets. I will say this. I have alot of these games on DVD and those Jet teams were not well coached. They used to get so many penalties, everytime it seemed they did something good, their would be a penalty on the play. Either a hold on Chris Ward, who got like 4 holding penalties a game, a roughing penalty, an offsides. And while Walton was a far better OC then Head Coach, I never understood why he got so much credit as OC. He was still way too in love with dumping a pass off to the RB and in the Miami AFC Championship game, they never adapted to the conditions. He kept trying to run the same offense, which wasn't gonna work on that field. The more I've watched those games, the more it becomes obvious that the best players were Lance Mehl, Greg Buttle, Klecko, Gastineau, Lyons, Salaam, Ray, Todd, Walker, Barkum and Mcneil. Todd had big years in 1981 and 1982 but he threw the ball to the other team way too often. During those successful years, his stats were far better but even then, he was fortunate that alot of awful passes that should have been picked were dropped. He threw some of the best passes you'll ever see but then he'd follow it with some of those most hideous passes of all time. And Mcneil was a big fumbler back then, guy fumbled in numerous big games. And Walker was always hurt as was Mcneil. The one guy that I always though got too much of a bad rap was Lam Jones. Yes, he was a disappointment for a 2nd pick in the draft, no doubt about it. But he wasn't this awful player that Jet history sometimes paints him as. In 1981, when they made the playoffs for the first time since 1969, he had many big catches at the end of the season, including a great long td catch in the playoff clinching game vs. Green Bay. Todd always said that he couldn't catch and i'm not saying he had great hands, but you watch these games and he made alot of good catches. He had alot of good games as a Jet. Just not a 2nd pick in the draft quality player. His last full season as a Jet, in which he played most of the games, was I think 1984 and he had greatly improved, as his numbers showed.
Woodley threw three picks that game. The field was unplayable and the Jets were a hot speed team that had it's whole game taken away by the field.
I don't have time to look it up, but my memory--admittedly shakey--is that Cruthfield was drafted in 83. Either way, I don't recall him being on the 81 team. I was so wasted though, I could have been calling for Matt Snall :jets:
