“The Catch” — 1981 NFC Championship game
This is Bill Walsh telling Joe before the play that if he doesn’t see what he likes out there, Joe should simply throw the ball away. There’s 58 seconds left in the game, and the Cowboys are up 27-21 on the 49ers for the right to advance to Super Bowl XVI. The 49ers have third-and-3 at the Dallas six-yard line, so if Joe has to throw it away, San Francisco has one more shot.
Doug Farrar: There are so many layers to this drive. Perhaps the most interesting aspect was that the Cowboys were alternating between nickel and dime defenses all the way, which was very unusual for the time. You guys responded by running a ton of sweeps and draws — four run plays, a reverse to receiver Freddie Solomon, and there were just two passes — both to Dwight Clark. There was a sideline pass, and the famous play. Did Dallas’ defensive strategy surprise you?.
Joe Montana: No, I think everybody expected us to go down the field and throw the ball on every down. That’s in Bill’s makeup. If he thinks he knows what you’re thinking — he saw the nickel and dime packages coming in — he would get into, “Okay, what’s the best thing we can do? Run the ball.” Even though we didn’t have a great runner at the time — we had good runners, but not a Roger Craig or a Wendell Tyler [Lenvil Elliott was the back on all four run plays]. but that’s just the way Bill got us there.
Some of the things Bill would do to surprise you… he would draw up a play for a specific place on the field, and he wouldn’t call it until you got there. You would run it in practice, and it would be the worst play you’d ever seen in your life. Then, you’d go to call it in the huddle [in the game], and the guys would look at you like, “No, no, no, no. You can’t do that.” And I would say, No, it’s coming — here we go. You’ run it in the game, and it would work. So, I was never surprised by the things Bill did.
DF: Here’s the famous “Brown Right Sprint Right Option.” It’s an amazing catch by Dwight Clark — he’s got Everson Walls trailing him all over the place, he’s adjusting to your sprint to the right, and he has to get out of two Dallas defenders to even have a shot. Then, he jumps right up to the sky, and it’s ballgame.
Meanwhile, Ed “Too Tall” Jones looks like he’s going to blitz, but then he just hangs there, trying to bat the pass down. So, you have to wait for Too Tall’s hands to go down before you can even make the throw. There’s a lot of [literally] moving parts here.
JM: Couple things. One, [Clark, No. 87] was supposed to set a pick for Freddie Solomon [No. 88] on that, but Freddie ended up falling down. So, we had never really thrown the ball to Dwight on that play, even though he’s the second read. We had always thrown it to the underneath guy. It took [Clark] a little longer to get to the back of the end zone. I told him that he was so slow, if I had to do one more arm pump, my arm was going to fall off.
Then, with Too Tall being there, I had to throw the ball up high and get a little bit of a different trajectory. I had to take enough off so the ball would come back down. When I let it go, I thought it was arm lengths above his head. I didn’t know he’d made such a catch, but under normal circumstances where I would have thrown it a but harder, it would have been hard to catch. If you look at the pictures, he’s literally catching it with his fingertips.
If it was thrown hard, it probably wouldn’t have been caught. So, me having to put a little air under it — not by design, but because of Too Tall — helped him being able to hang onto that thing. But he did get up, and he made a great catch, and that got us where we were. It got us moving to that first Super Bowl.
Super Bowl XIX
DF: Onto the second Super Bowl. This was a fascinating game, because the Dolphins had that great “Killer Bees” defense, and you were basically a running quarterback — there are a lot of plays in which you look like one of the more mobile quarterbacks of today. Kind of like Patrick Mahomes out there! You rolled out on what looked like at least half your pass plays, and you ran five times for 59 yards, which broke Roger Staubach’s record for quarterback rushing yards in a Super Bowl. I’m curious if that was a pre-planned response to Miami’s defense, or if it was a play-to-play reaction to what happened on the field?
JM: Yeah, it was play-by-play. Some of the rollout things were [designed] — one of the first big plays in that game was the touchdown pass to [running back] Carl Monroe…
DF: Funny you should bring that play up, because that’s one of your better throws I’ve seen, which is why it’s next on my list.
JM: Yeah, that was a called play, and a lot of the other ones… anytime you’re stepping up and moving forward, most likely being pushed around by the push of the defensive line — when you step up as a quarterback, and guys are running around everywhere in man coverage, the best thing to do it to pull it down and take off. So, I had a couple opportunities to do that. But most of them [rollouts] were more pass plays that just opened up.
DF: So, the Monroe play; the 33-yard touchdown pass. This was one of the more pinpoint throws I’ve seen you make. What was this call, and how were you able to fire balls in there with such accuracy and defenders converging from seemingly everywhere? And what was the play call there? I know “Brown Right Sprint Right Option, and I know “Red Right Tight F Left 20 Halfback Curl X Up” to John Taylor in Super Bowl XXIII [which we’ll get to in a minute], but what was this?
JM: I can’t remember if it was a rollout or a sprint.
DF: It looks like a rollout.
JM: Yeah. So that would be “Roll Right Halfback Sail,” which is basically a corner route. You have a clear on the outside, and someone would be coming underneath on that somewhere.