One immediate takeaway of the Music City Miracle: boy, the Bills sure got screwed by that forward lateral. The other takeaway: Wade Phillips, what in the blue hell were you thinking?
The 10-5 record Doug Flutie had guided the Bills to in 1999, as well as the playoff berth he was largely responsible for the year before (in relief of Rob Johnson), shouldn’t cause one to conclude that the Bills were in desperate need of a quarterback change heading into the 1999 playoffs. As Wikipedia notes: “Never before, in the history of the modern NFL, had a team chosen to bench a healthy starting quarterback in favor of a backup to open the playoffs.” Yet on January 8, 2000, there was Flutie with his butt nailed to the bench as Johnson got the start for the Bills in the infamous Music City Miracle game. The Titans won 22-16 in the dying seconds on the strength of a cheaterific forward lateral, and although Johnson and the Bills put forth a valiant effort, Bills fans seemed to unanimously sense that the fates of Phillips, Flutie, and Johnson were all sealed that day. Phillips – who will never be confused for a Coach of the Year candidate – was mercifully fired after the 2000 season, Flutie was cut soon after new coach (and fellow “good coordinator, bad head coach” club member Gregg Williams) was hired, and Bills fans suffered through another season and a half of Rob Johnson before he broke his collarbone and was released in the 2002 offseason.
Benching a starting quarterback who had earned a 10-5 record will go down as one of the most curious (read: “idiotic”) coaching decisions of all time, but a closer look at the details suggests that maybe there was a method to Phillips’ madness after all.
Why You Can’t Blame Wade Phillips for Starting Rob Johnson over Doug Flutie against the Titans
1) Rob Johnson had greater potential. (Yes, I said it. The “P” word.) Flutie may have had some sort of “magic” on his side, but clearly had limited potential. He was well into his 30s, he’d bounced around professional football for 15 years at that point without staying with the same team more than four years, and although he was fleet of foot, he had difficulty seeing passing lanes at times due to his short stature. Johnson, meanwhile, was the highly touted prospect who had broken a whole heap of passing records while at USC, a school that’s been known to produce an NFL quarterback or two. He was more of a prototypical quarterback than Flutie, with good size and a stronger arm. He didn’t start regularly in his three seasons in Jacksonville, but only because he sat behind Mark Brunell back when Mark Brunell was considered a viable NFL quarterback. Johnson, not Flutie, was the future – and for a number of reasons, which I’m about to get into, it was time for Johnson to begin fulfilling that potential.
2) Flutie’s quarterbacking that season, from a statistical standpoint, left something to be desired. Flutie posted three straight poor QB ratings to end the 1999 season: 62.5, 82.7, and 79.7. For the season, Flutie’s numbers were subpar to say the least: although he threw for 3,171 yards (good for 10th in the NFL), his TD-to-INT ratio of 19 TD passes against 16 interceptions was poor – and most damning of all was his 28th-ranked completion percentage of 55.2%. Perhaps Phillips and the coaching staff were simply tired of watching Flutie clang wobbly ducks off the ground at his receivers’ feet. And when Rob Johnson shined in the season finale (24 of 32, 287 yards, 2 TDs, no picks), even though it came against a Colts team resting a bunch of starters, maybe the coaches saw enough in Johnson that day to indicate he’d learned enough by riding the pine behind Flutie for the last year and a half. Maybe they finally felt Johnson was ready to be the leader, or at the very least ready to provide something more than they were getting from Flutie. After all, there was the matter of that $25 million contract he had signed in 1998….
3) Rob Johnson was being paid like a starting quarterback. In 1998, NFL teams expected a quality starting quarterback for $5 million a year. Johnson was nearly finished with the second year of that contract, and all the Bills had to show for the money they had spent was Johnson’s buttprint on the bench. If there’s one thing Ralph Wilson dislikes more than spending money, it’s spending money without getting any sort of return for it. Perhaps Johnson’s play against the Colts convinced the braintrust that Johnson was ready to produce a return on that investment.
4) Allegedly, Ralph Wilson demanded that Johnson got the start over Flutie. Coaches are paid to do one thing: win football games. They are not paid to argue with owners who are giving large sums of money to football players whose job it is to help said coaches win said games. This, apparently, is especially true when the owner is Ralph Wilson. Wilson’s firing of Phillips a year later in part due to his refusal to fire special teams coach Ronnie Jones suggests three things to me: that Wilson is in fact a bit of a meddler, that Phillips was being truthful about his claims that Flutie’s benching was forced upon him, and that he was sick of being a yes man.
5) Rob Johnson didn’t blow the game. The special teams (and the referees) did. Lost in the “if Flutie had started the game, we would have won” rhetoric is that the Bills actually held a 15-13 lead over the Titans with just 16 seconds to play. His stats weren’t great by any means – 10 of 22, 131 yards, no TDs, and a fumble lost (against a brutally tough defense, I might add). But by driving the Bills 37 yards in five plays without the benefit of timeouts for the go-ahead field goal, Rob Johnson did exactly what Doug Flutie always had – he put the Bills in position to win the game. It’s not really Rob Johnson’s fault (or Phillips’ fault, for that matter) that the Titans cheated, the referees looked the other way, and eleven men wearing Bills uniforms never bothered to tackle the guy with the ball – all while a Buffalo sports community just nine months removed from No Goal could do nothing but groan “My God, not again.“
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In some ways, I’m defensing the indefensible here. Joe and I talked about that a bit last week, actually. I mentioned to him that I’d received a lot of positive comments about my previous entry (thanks for that, by the way!), and his paraphrased response: “Just wait until you do the piece on Johnson. People hate that dude!”
It’s certainly true to a degree. You probably can’t say the name Rob Johnson without gritting your teeth, right? You groaned when he “earned” a Super Bowl ring as a backup with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the 2002 season. And who can forget Johnson’s return to Ralph Wilson Stadium as Washington’s backup QB in 2003? You got to watch him get pounded into the turf repeatedly after replacing injured starter Patrick Ramsey, and you probably cheered your fool head off. I know I did.
Fifteen years after the retirement of Jim Kelly, the Buffalo Bills are still looking for a quarterback who can adequately replace him. Rob Johnson ultimately failed in that regard just like every other Bills quarterback since Kelly, but Johnson was perhaps the one most suited for that role. He had the physical tools, he had the swagger, but he could never put it all together. (Partly because Robo-sack never figured out how to get rid of the ball and thus spent so much time flat on his back staring at the clouds. Hey, just like the next guy to wear #11, Drew Bledsoe! But I digress.) And I think it’s that failure to turn those superior physical tools into something tangible, with a side helping of that swagger suddenly being perceived as arrogance and cockiness, that caused Bills fans to turn on Johnson so harshly.
It’s that hatred of Johnson, right or wrong, that helps color our view on the stupidity of Phillips’ decision to insert him in place of Flutie. That single decision carries with it a stigma that has dogged Phillips’ career ever since – great coordinator, but a lousy head coach. We look back on that decision now and consider it to be one of the dumbest coaching moves ever made. But what if the Bills had won that game? They were just 16 seconds and one colossal special teams fail away from doing so. Would it still be such a poor decision?
I submit that, had the Bills won, we wouldn’t have cared who the quarterback was in that game. I believe the evidence suggests that despite Flutie’s regular season record, Phillips felt that Rob Johnson was a better option against a nasty Tennessee defense and presented the best chance to win. And for that reason, I think you can’t (totally) blame Wade Phillips for what turned out to be a bad decision.
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Mike also writes about the Sabres at Roll the Highlight Film. You can follow him on Twitter at @mtracz.
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