Don Shula was still just 53, but he was breeding a football family tree. He had been grooming his eldest son, David, since the kid was a teenager, when he spent time on the sideline, charting the plays. Dave played receiver in high school and at Dolphin practices was allowed to run pass patterns with Paul Warfield. “He was happy that I was so fascinated by the thing he did for a living,” he said of his father. “A lot of nights after dinner I’d take out one of his diagram pads to draw up plays and pass routes. He taught me a million things.”1 Though slow and smallish, Dave won his scholarship to Dartmouth and broke school records catching passes from another fortunate son—Jeff Kemp, whose father, Jack, was one of the earliest AFL star quarterbacks, and later a Republican congressman and Bob Dole’s vice-presidential running mate in 1996.
Despite his surname, Dave was not drafted and was signed as a walk-on by the Colts. The old man pulled no strings for him, but when his son was released after a year, his paternal instinct kicked in. He made Dave an assistant receivers coach. This was one of many ways Shula used his staff to dispense favors; when Bob Matheson was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, Shula hired him as special teams coach. Shula’s second son, Mike, meanwhile, played quarterback for Alabama in ’84. Before Archie Manning’s sons Peyton and Eli became football’s first family, the Shulas had been injected into the game’s DNA. And while Archie only had a decade in the pro game, the Shulas’ patriarch was working on his fourth, a young elder statesman.
Unlike his younger, brasher days, he was insulated from criticism, permitted his sanctimoniousness and self-pity in bad times. As Larry Dorman, who had moved on to the New York Times, recalled in 1995:
During the early 1980’s at the Orange Bowl, a sign was affixed each Sunday to a spot in the upper deck. In large block letters, it proclaimed “Shula is god,” and about the only argument it ever generated around town concerned whether the letter “g” should be upper or lower case. [Shula] owned South Florida. He was omnipresent, if not omnipotent. His face, with the trademark jutting jaw, was on billboards all over town. He had an expressway named after him. There were serious suggestions that he could not be defeated if he ran for governor.2
Shula never claimed he was either a god or God. Life never dealt him an easy hand. In 1983, he was cut to his knees when Dorothy was diagnosed with breast cancer. She took the news with her usual optimism and resolve, throwing herself into chemotherapy and other treatments. She kept it relatively quiet while embarking on a crusade to cheat the odds with a tenacious, almost metaphysical display of will. If Don Shula was calling in every chit with his God to help will Dorothy to health, he nonetheless felt small and inconsequential as reality intruded on the relative triviality of football. During her battle, he would not have recognized himself as a tough guy. In his eyes, he was nowhere near as strong as Dorothy Bartish Shula.
Marino’s extraordinary ascension made David Woodley so forgotten that, when Shula traded him to the Steelers, it seemed minor news, though ironically, Chuck Noll thought so much of him that he was given the biggest contract on the roster. Don Strock was also irrelevant now, but would stick around as Marino’s backup for four more seasons before finishing his career with the Browns.
That Marino would need to carry the team was made evident by another mediocre draft, with none of Shula’s picks doing much except for linebacker Jay Brophy. With Bob Kuechenberg retired, Roy Foster, the first-round pick in ’82, was rolled in at left guard, where he would stay for the next seven years. Shula, who had gone without a defensive coordinator since the elevation of Bill Arnsparger to assistant head coach, now hired Chuck Studley, who’d been the interim head coach for the Oilers in ’83. But Shula would still be his own offensive coordinator, and if there was a tell coming into the season, it was that he again neither drafted nor traded for a big running back to make Marino’s job easier, believing Andra Franklin was good enough.
However, Franklin tore up a knee in September and was gone for the season. With no reliable backup, Shula made a move out of desperation, trading a second-round pick in ’85 for Chuck Muncie, who had gotten on Don Coryell’s last nerve in San Diego. Muncie passed a physical, but failed a urine test, indicating he was still using cocaine—which killed both the deal and Muncie’s career. (In 1989, he was sentenced to 18 months for selling cocaine.)3 Shula dodged that bullet, but he was stuck with an anemic ground game.
Meanwhile, Marino’s star treatment only escalated. Sports Illustrated put him on the cover of its 1984 football preview issue, and he deserved it. Opening day was in D.C., a very tough task. Joe Gibbs’s Redskins would win 11 games that year, and while Marino had missed most of the preseason with a broken finger, he hit Duper for two touchdowns, the second a 74-yard missile that put Miami up 14–10 at the half. He then added TD strikes to Jim Jensen, Mark Clayton, and Jensen again. The final was 35–17 and Marino’s numbers were dizzying—21-for-28, 311 yards, no picks, no sacks, his passer rating 150.4. The defense contained John Riggins and intercepted Joe Theismann twice.
“That was pretty good football,” Shula allowed.
The media’s infatuation with Marino fed into a new trope for Shula as the ultimate molder of talent as the Dolphins decimated teams week after week, not necessarily dependent on Marino, but certainly riding his success. Shula even used his thin running game to effect. Victimized twice that season, the Pats’ dazed defensive coordinator, Rod Rust, explained what he’d been up against:
One thing Shula’s offense does is make you defend the entire field, both the length and width of it. The Dolphins won’t let you shrink the field on them. They’ll run a screen, and when you try to rush to it, they’ll run a double-screen off it and fake it and go downfield. They have a big collection of special plays and gimmicks, and they use ’em well. They’re a big-play team, but you’ve got to play the run honest, because they’ll use it as a platform for the big play.4
Indeed, while Marino was making a shambles of defenses, the disruption was subtler than most people realized. When secondaries dropped deep against Duper and Clayton—whose cyclonic presence led writers to call them the “Marks Brothers” or “Twain Marks”—Marino cleaned up on short and medium passes. He was as gifted as Unitas at play faking, and he didn’t need to square up to pump one 50 yards down the field. Shula refined him, further cutting his drop in half and having him move laterally and throw sooner, the way Bill Walsh did with Montana in the 49ers’ West Coast offense. If under pressure, a slip of the hip would buy time. To his guard Ed Newman, Marino was “the definitive wonder boy. Nothing awes him out there. . . . [G]ive us credit for blocking. But Marino is the magic.”
Howard Schnellenberger—who coached the Miami Hurricanes to the national title in ’83, then was made coach and part owner of an intended third USFL Florida franchise, to begin in ’85 and to be called the Spirit of Miami—said Shula recognized that the game had sped up. “That was the trend, and the key was the linebackers. The quarterbacks had to see if they were coming in, because they all blitzed now. You needed a little time to see that, and react, throw to the vacated area. And if Shula was on to something, he was gonna wring the hell out of it.”5
The stats tell the story. The record for most touchdown passes of 40 or more yards is shared by Johnny Unitas and Peyton Manning, their eras bookending that of Marino, who would retire as the record holder for TD passes under 40 yards (he’s now fifth, as football reaps massive passing numbers both long and short). He was hardly a mad bomber, but with an outburst against the Patriots, Marino was just 84 yards short of Griese’s club record for single-season passing yardage and on pace to obliterate the single-season NFL record for passing touchdowns—36, shared by George Blanda in ’61 (in the old AFL) and Y. A. Tittle in ’63. The rushing game wasn’t Butch, Sundance, and Merc, but it confused defenses with intricate trap and sucker blocking. As Newman explained, “We batted ’em—that’s our term for an outside trap, with me trapping on the other side.” Newman, the only player left from the last Dolphin title team, was doing much the same as he did then, on the run and pass blocking.
Some underrated the attack as “all whoosh and no muscle,” and some coaches groused that Shula got an inordinate number of pass interference calls, on his reputation and power. “That’s what it means having the coach on the NFL Competition Committee,” said one anonymous coach that October.6 “Sour grapes” was Shula’s reply. For the media, a team that had been as exciting as watching paint dry was not only winning now, but was fun to watch. To Paul Zimmerman, who took to doting on them in Sports Illustrated, Shula’s men wore “a look of greatness. . . . And the best is yet to come.”
The Dolphins took an 11–0 record (with 16 straight regular-season victories over two years, one shy of Papa Bear Halas’s 1933–34 Bears record) to the coast to play the Chargers. For three quarters, Shula seemed on safe ground. Though Don Coryell, needing to keep pace with the Dolphins’ newfound air circus, had freed Dan Fouts even more that year, the Dolphins defense held him down. Marino did his thing, going 28-for-41 for 338 yards, throwing touchdowns to Clayton and Bennett. But Fouts, the real mad bomber of the league, hit Charlie Joiner for one touchdown, then led a 19-play, 10-minute, 91-yard drive that ended with a short pass to Eric Sievers to tie it. Von Schamann was set up for a winning field goal but missed from 44 yards, resulting in yet another overtime. It ended when Buford McGee ran in a 15-yard touchdown—repeating the agony of the Epic, with the same scars for the Dolphins, who wound up surrendering 537 yards, Fouts amassing 380 and setting team records for pass attempts and completions, going 37-for-56.
If this was a warning sign, the Dolphins sped past it. In the next game, against the Jets, Marino tied the Tittle/Blanda touchdown record in an easy win. However, going up against Al Davis’s 9–4 chain gang the next week brought them back down to earth. Marino threw 57 times, completing 35, for 470 yards and four touchdowns, breaking the record, but the team lost 45–34, Miami squandering 515 total yards. The final two games, though, were impressive wins over the Colts and Cowboys. The reward was a 14–2 record, a division crown, and all kinds of Marino highlights. Some were already classics, such as Nat Moore’s “helicopter” catch in the first Jets game, when he was hit by two defenders and twirled around twice in midair before coming down.
Marino’s final tallies were 48 touchdowns and 5,084 yards (which still rank fourth and seventh-best in history, the former record not broken until Peyton Manning in 2004, the latter not until Drew Brees in 2011). Marino’s other records, all since broken or tied, included nine 300-yard games, four straight games with four or more touchdown passes, and 12 straight games with two or more. In his shadow, it seemed almost quaint that the Giants’ Phil Simms and the Cardinals’ Neil Lomax each had more than 4,000 passing yards that season. Amazingly, Marino threw all those touchdowns, even though he averaged fewer passes per game than Fouts, 35.3 to 39. Some of Marino’s stats weren’t exceptional. He had 17 picks. His completion percentage of 64.2 was lower than what Joe Montana and Steve Bartkowski rang up. His 108.9 passer rating, the fourth-best ever at the time, is now 23rd. His 317.8 passing yards per game were less than Fouts’s 320.3 two years before. His 8.5 touchdown percentage was inferior to that of numerous quarterbacks from earlier eras. And, beside the touchdowns and yardage, the most important stat might have been that he was sacked just 13 times—a microscopic 2.25 percent of his pass attempts. For the coach, of course, this was a sacred trust: a missed block letting someone get to Marino would mean incurring the wrath of Shula.
If anything redefined the outer limits of the passing game, it was Marino’s efficiency and nose for the end zone. And he had these instincts at the age of 23, even before the league made passing easier with rule changes protecting the receivers downfield. But Marino had his kryptonite. And it was the same as Shula’s in his later years: the big game.
Marino was the runaway MVP, but Shula had four other All-Pros on offense: center Dwight Stephenson and Newman made the first team, while Clayton (with a league-high 18 touchdowns) and Duper (8 TDs) the second team, as did Baumhower and Duhe on defense. As vital as the running game was to the offense’s balance, it could not have won games on its own, ranking 16th and featuring no real game breaker. While the offense rang up 513 points, the defense gave up 298, seventh-best in the league, but perhaps a few too many for comfort. With Duhe never completely healthy, Shula had to go with a rookie and a second-year man, Jay Brophy and Mark Brown, as his inside linebackers, holding his breath each game.
Any quibbles, though, were buried in the first playoff game, a revenge match with the Seahawks, whom they paid back for the year before with Marino throwing a 34-yard touchdown to Cefalo in the first half, then breaking it open in the third quarter with two more to Hardy and Clayton. Shula walked off with a 31–10 win. The next round—the AFC championship game at home against Noll’s Steelers—figured to be a lot tougher. But these weren’t the Steel Curtain Steelers any more. They had sneaked into the postseason at 9–7 after a season that saw David Woodley losing his job again, to Mark Malone. The Dolphins were a 10-point favorite, and acted like it before the match. Marino came out for warm-ups, noted Ralph Wiley in Sports Illustrated, “in shorts and a T-shirt, his belly already beginning to take on some of the spreading opulence of a Sonny Jurgensen,” laughing and cutting up with other Dolphins—with the tacit approval of the coach who once would have blown a fuse over such horsing around.
“Clearly,” wrote Wiley, “Marino was enjoying the feel of the day; he wore his confidence like a tuxedo.”7
Noll’s boys were tough nuts at first. After Marino threw an early 40-yard touchdown to Clayton, Malone sailed a 65-yard bomb to John Stallworth to go ahead 14–10. From then on, though, it was party time for Marino. His 41-yard pass to Duper took back the lead, then a 36-yard shot to Clayton made it 31–14 and a six-yard scoring flip to Bennett left the Steelers for dead. It ended at 45–28, Marino’s 421 yards just missing the playoff-yardage record. The defense cracked, giving up 455 yards, but didn’t break, making three picks.
Noll was tart about his own assistants failing to properly get to the bottom of Shula’s strategies. “Scouts aren’t perfect,” he said. “They make mistakes.” As had he. The QB he had passed on, he agreed, was the “best we’ve seen, no question.” Steeler cornerback Dwayne Woodruff seemed dazed. “We were all over them sometimes,” he said, “but Marino was right on, as right on as a man can be.” To Sports Illustrated, the game was SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH DAN.
So, Shula came into another Super Bowl, his fifth, on a high. No quarterback had ever had a season like Marino had, and perhaps no other quarterback except the one that altered the social context of football had ever entered a Super Bowl as cocky as he was. After the Steelers win, Marino had no use for humility. “We knew we could go upfield,” he said. “It was there. It’s always there.” Little wonder that comparisons between Marino and Namath were inevitable, because of their flair, ego, and shared quick release. However, that induction overlooked a crucial difference: Namath beat Shula because of his backfield, Snell and Boozer. Against Pittsburgh, Shula had struck as much of a balance between the pass and run as he could while letting Marino dominate. But in Super Bowl XIX, coach and quarterback would face a team that knew how to systematically deconstruct another team trying to hide a weakness.
Bill Walsh’s 49ers were a team without flaw. They were carved in the image of their own super quarterback, Joe Montana, who at 28 was at his peak. The team had gone through the season like cold-blooded assassins. They lost only once, to the Steelers in week seven. Five times, they gave up fewer than 10 points, never more than 17 in the last eight games. Montana threw for 3,630 yards with 28 touchdowns and 10 picks, and was first-team All-Pro, but threw 132 fewer times than Marino within a classic balanced offense—halfback Wendell Tyler rushed for 1,262 yards, fullback Roger Craig for 649 while also catching 71 passes out of the backfield. Running the archetypical West Coast offense, Montana had sure-handed targets: Dwight Clark, Freddie Solomon, and tight ends Earl Cooper and Russ Francis. Across the line, George Seifert’s 3–4 defense was a thresher. Walsh had five All-Pros on offense, five on defense—37-year-old linebacker Hacksaw Reynolds had been an All-Pro twice.
San Francisco was second to Miami in points scored, first in least points allowed, and in the playoffs had plundered the Giants 21–10 and the Bears 23–0. Montana, with his wide smile and marriage to a model providing fodder for the tabloids, would have been the focus during Super Bowl week if not for the precocious kid. Paul Zimmerman observed that the “pregame hype . . . relegated [Montana] to something less than a spear carrier to . . . the dazzling young Dan Marino.”8 He and his 49er teammates, who had won it all in ’81, were still bristling over the previous year’s 24–21 loss to the Redskins in the NFC title game. As the Super Bowl approached, they were salivating about cutting Marino down to size.
Other players around the league wondered if Marino needed a lesson in dues paying. The Steelers’ longtime center Mike Webster, who had snapped the ball to Bradshaw in four Super Bowls, said, “It takes time [for a quarterback]. You don’t win four Super Bowls in one year.” But Marino could look around and see only glitter. He was on the cover of the January 14 Sports Illustrated, beneath the words DANGEROUS DAN, the story inside puffing him up as “unstoppable.” A week later, in the pre–Super Bowl issue, Paul Zimmerman similarly wondered, “Can Marino be stopped?” Asked about the pressure, the quarterback coolly responded, “I think I can handle it.”
To be fair, he had acted the same way before the Steeler game, which he treated as a sort of frat party. Not even Namath was that arrogant. “From a team standpoint the hype bothered me a little,” Montana admitted. “Deep down we all felt it. All we heard was ‘Miami, Miami, how are you going to stop Miami?’ Yeah, yeah, we were overlooked a little.” Even Shula seemed to be taking a lot for granted. Bragging about his main man, he dropped his usual humility, saying, “Teams have tried all kinds of schemes against him—drop eight men and rush only three, or blitz everybody, or combinations. Pittsburgh tried the combinations [but] Dan had the answers.”
The game, on January 20, 1985, would be played on virtual home grounds for the Niners, in nearby Palo Alto at Stanford Stadium. The Dolphins had to make a 3,000-mile trek to play a great team in its own backyard. Shula’s game plan was formulated on getting out to a quick lead, defusing the Niners’ intensity and morale. As Tom Landry, who’d seen them plenty, noted, the Niners were “a ball-control team. You have to strike fast against them.”9
The game, which began in a dense fog, provided some false hope. On their first drive, the Dolphins moved effortlessly. Marino’s swing pass to Nathan broke for 25 yards when the Niners blew a tackle. They got a field goal out of it. Then, after Montana found scrub running back Carl Monroe for a 33-yard touchdown, Shula unveiled his surprise, going no-huddle. At a hastened pace, the team gained 70 yards in six plays, capped by a two-yard touchdown pass to Dan Johnson for a 10–7 lead. In response, Walsh made a modification. He began switching from the 3–4 to a 4–3 and even a 4–2, to get more heat on Marino. It was more than the highly praised Dolphin line could handle—or Marino. Walsh didn’t blitz much, keeping his linebackers and secondary back in coverage, blocking Marino’s sight lines. And his linemen were on fire.
The Dolphins stopped moving, and when Montana controlled the ball, he engineered touchdowns on three straight drives, running one in from six yards. It was 28–16 at the half. Trying somehow to slow the momentum, Shula junked the no-huddle and all but bagged the run. He called for long, increasingly desperate passes—that is, when Marino could get them off. Under attack, he was sacked four times, twice by right end Dwaine Board, and hounded by an extra lineman, Gary Johnson. He would throw 50 times, completing 29 for 318 yards, but he threw two interceptions and never got into the end zone again. Montana, a 38–16 winner, took back his sovereignty, going 24-for-35, with 331 yards, three touchdowns, and a 127.8 passer rating, all Super Bowl records at the time.
Before the game had even ended, the league announced Montana as the game’s MVP, which Ed Pope considered “a classless act.” Shula then walked through the gloom to midfield for the ritual he despised, shaking Walsh’s hand, then several 49er players sought him out to shake his. In the locker room, he was glowering but graceful in defeat.
“It’s going to be tough to live with this one,” he said. “I’m so disappointed. Montana kept us off balance the entire game. He’s a great, great athlete.”10
Ashen, the gray at his temples and lines on his forehead in contrast to his bright orange sweater, defeat seemed to age him on the spot. “You can’t get dragged down, you’ve got to think about all the good things that happened this year,” he went on. But, by now, it seemed too habitual even to old retainers like Pope, who, like everyone else in Miami, thought the winning would never end. Pope, seeming offended, wrote in his postmortem, “The fog also spread like virus through the Dolphin coaching brain trust. . . . [W]hy did the Dolphins abandon the no-huddle system that worked so well on their only touchdown drive?” Shula had to explain why his entire ground game was nine rushes, for just 25 yards—the first still a Super Bowl record for fewest carries. No explanation was good enough for Pope, who saw an alarming pattern:
I don’t know what it is with the Dolphins in Super Bowls. If you should figure it out, give them a buzz. The fact is, even winning at the ends of the 1972 and 1973 seasons, in five Super Bowls now they have gotten steadily worse in each quarter:
First quarter—Dolphins 38, opponents 10.
Second quarter—Dolphins 29, opponents 38.
Third quarter—Dolphins 7, opponents 20.
Fourth quarter—Dolphins 0, opponents 35.
Shula’s methods were proven to develop tough, smart, highly conditioned men who were fortunate to play for him. But, for whatever reason, they left too much intensity against the best of opponents inside the locker room. Maybe the All-Pro punter Reggie Roby cut to the heart of the problem in explaining his awful punting that day. “I was trying to kill the ball, and I kicked it bad.” he said. “I didn’t hit one well. I was scared—scared to make a mistake.”
There was still time to alter this pattern, but Shula was infatuated with having a quarterback like Marino, and it became his crutch. Rick Volk, who had been there when Shula fell into the unrelieved hell of the Jets loss, said, “Look, no one knew better than Don that you couldn’t win it all without a running game. He knew that with Unitas. He had it with Csonka, Kiick, and Morris. But when he got Marino, he didn’t want to waste that arm. He became a different kind of coach.”11 Marino was willing to take the hit, saying, “I didn’t play as well as I could have. Sometimes I had a chance to move, and I didn’t.” But Shula felt no apologies were necessary. Altered reality or not, he believed that all he needed was for Marino to gain some more experience, and that both of them were sitting on top of the future of the game in yet another era of change.
Marino’s hard fall set an unfortunate precedent and future trope: the “curse” of the great quarterback class of ’83. Of those who made it to a Super Bowl, only Elway would win—twice, in the last two years of his career. Other than that, they collectively lost all nine of their Super Bowls, four of which were the most lopsided Super Bowl losses in history. As their careers played out, Marino had already risen highest, although Kelly made a small ripple in the USFL by passing for 44 touchdowns and over 5,200 yards, winning Rookie of the Year and MVP honors. Given Kelly’s fat contract, Marino was not about to accept the contract he had signed as a 27th pick—especially when Bernie Kosar gave up his remaining eligibility at Miami and, taken in a supplemental draft by the Browns, was lavished with a $5.2 million deal. Having paid his dues smashing all those records, Marino wanted a new deal, on a par with Montana’s $1.3 million salary, which made him the highest-paid quarterback. Robbie made an offer of $6 million over six years. Marino, livid, walked out of the ’84 summer camp.
Robbie and Shula huffed that he would be fined $500 for every day he missed. Shula—who, with Strock also a holdout, began camp with no established quarterbacks—said the situation was “as disruptive as [anything] I’ve encountered in my coaching career,”12 somehow forgetting Csonka, Kiick, Warfield, and Morris. Marino wouldn’t budge, and began taking hits in the press as the preseason began. He seemed selfish, and a Herald readers’ poll favored Robbie. Marvin Demoff said Marino would report if Robbie agreed to binding arbitration; Robbie said no. Demoff said he’d come in if Robbie took out an insurance policy on Marino; Robbie said no. The holdout stretched for 38 days, Marino incurring over $7,500 in fines.
He finally buckled a week before the season opener in Houston, his only recourse to play out the original deal and take Robbie at his word that one more year of excellence would get him his top-shelf salary. Days later, he was in the starting lineup, having arguably his worst game as a pro. Rusty and indecisive, his right elbow slightly injured, he was intercepted twice and came out in the fourth quarter for Strock, who got the lead before the Oilers won it on a late touchdown, 26–23. Marino was revived the next week, laying 329 yards and two touchdowns on the Colts in a 30–13 win. The Dolphins won four in a row, had a midseason slump, then won their last seven. Marino didn’t come close to his record-setting numbers; his passer rating fell to 84.1, his picks ticking up to 21. But he turned in another first-team All-Pro season with 4,137 yards and 30 touchdowns.
Shula had made an attempt to cultivate a powerful ground game. However, his first draft pick, Florida running back Lorenzo Hampton, carried just 105 times for 369 yards, which even so was second on the team to Nathan’s 667. Despite the criticisms of imbalance, the Dolphins ran less, dropping in yardage from 16th to 18th. The defense also fell to 12th, leading Shula to acquire Tampa Bay’s former All-Pro outside linebacker Hugh Green in midseason. But the team was defined by Danny the Wonder Boy. Three-time All-Pro Dwight Stephenson wore the honor of the man who “keeps Danny off his fanny.”13 That would earn him a new deal, too, Robbie tearing up his contract in ’85 and raising him to $300,000 a year.
The sole drama of the season came when Mike Ditka’s Bears, en route to a championship chiseled by defense, won their first 12 games, then, as if on cue, came to Miami on a Monday night. On that evening, before a huge national audience, Shula motivated his men by loading up the sideline with players from the ’72 team, whose honor they would defend. Stoked, the Dolphins stopped the Bears like the Romans repelling the Etruscans on the Tiber bridge. Marino riddled the Bears’ historically stingy 46 Defense with touchdown passes to Moore and Clayton, filing away a 38–24 win. It was a statement game, and it allowed Shula to walk off every bit a Caesar, if for but one night.
The Dolphins finished an impressive 12–4, and Marino, unlike the precocious frat boy of the previous two years, wore a lean, hungry look. His ability to keep his cool in the clutch was obvious; even while throwing three picks against the Steelers, he led a late drive to pull out a win. But the Dolphins were walking on a razor’s edge. The first playoff match was against the Browns, an 8–8 team that was 21st in offense despite the arrival of Kosar, two 1,000-yard rushers in Earnest Byner and Kevin Mack, the wondrous tight end Ozzie Newsome, and three All-Pros on defense. By the third quarter, with Byner having run for 21- and 66-yard touchdowns, leading a 251-yard rushing avalanche, Cleveland was ahead 21–3. Still, the Dolphins stole it with three straight touchdowns, lifting Shula to yet another AFC championship game by the skin of his teeth.
He had made it back to that game again with a chasm between the pass and run—the Dolphins only ran the ball 19 times against the Browns. The conference title match brought in the Patriots, a wild-card team that had beaten the Jets and Raiders. Ironically, under Shula’s old Hall of Fame receiver Ray Berry, they were a pound-it-out bunch, a throwback to Shula’s pre-Marino Dolphins. In fact, the success in ’85 of the Pats and Bears would reflect a brief reincarnation of Stone Age football. Berry had Tony Eason do little but hand off to All-Pro fullback Craig James (1,227 yards) and halfback Tony Collins, passing only when needed. The defense was sixth-best in the league, outside linebacker Andre Tippett a first-team All-Pro, while inside linebacker Steve Nelson and cornerback Ray Clayborn made the second team.
The Dolphins were five-and-a-half-point favorites and had beaten the Pats 18 consecutive times in the Orange Bowl. But even amid the usual frenzied pregame rituals, they came out of the tunnel with the same puzzling lack of four-quarter intensity that had crippled them in the last two Super Bowls. The normal oven-like conditions in Miami, which almost always gave Shula a definitive home-field advantage, were cooled by rain, and the turf was muddy. And it was the Dolphins who floundered. Nathan fumbled on the first drive, setting up a Pats field goal. Marino did grab the lead with a 10-yard strike to Dan Johnson in the second quarter. But thereafter, he made errant passes, two of them picked off. Five times the Dolphins fumbled, losing four, one by Marino deep in Pat territory. Another by Hampton on the second-half kickoff led to a Patriots touchdown. Yet another, by Joe Carter, did the same. Dolphin kicker Fuad Reveiz, who had dependably replaced von Schamann this season, missed a 31-yard field goal.
The year before, Rod Rust admitted his defense couldn’t stop Marino. Now, they smothered him and his receivers. Marino could do no better than 20-for-48, his 248 yards mostly in his own territory. Shula’s neglected runners ran 13 times for 68 yards. By contrast, the Pats owned the ball, doubling the Dolphins in possession time. During the week, New England’s All-Pro wideout Irving Fryar was stabbed in the hand by his pregnant wife (an accident, he insisted), taking him out of the game. But Eason needed to throw only 12 times, completing 10 for 71 yards, his passer rating a superb 130.9 (to Marino’s 54.9). He threw three short touchdowns to go ahead 24–7 after three quarters. Marino could only shave it to 24–14 with a 10-yard pass to Nathan, but another Pat drive iced it at 31–14.
“They made the big play, I’m disappointed we didn’t,” Shula lamented. “We never did the things we needed to do to win a game of this caliber.”
Coming from the highest-paid, highest-regarded coach in the game, words like these had become much too familiar. Once, a home playoff defeat would have been stunning, almost unthinkable, requiring an “epic” performance. Now, it seemed a replay of the same dreary episode, with Shula in his teeth-gritted pose, wondering aloud where his team’s heart and soul had gone, but vowing they would be back, with the proper corrections. Perhaps no other coach could have sold this menu for long. But for Shula, it was as if his players were mortal, not him, and what he promised to deliver was always just another season away.