We had been moving the ball pretty well all day, so at the start of the drive I wasn’t too concerned. But later on, as we got closer to the end zone… well, the part that really concerned me was the play before Dwight’s when I missed Freddie Solomon wide open in the end zone. That made it third down, and it was getting a little touchy. You don’t get that many easy opportunities to score, and I just completely overthrew Freddie. In a game like that, those are the kind of chances you usually don’t get back.
The play was called “Sprint Right Option.” We scored earlier in the game on the same play. Basically, the quarterback sprints out to the right. The outside receiver tries to get in the way of the defender covering the inside receiver. Then the inside receiver [Solomon] just kind of slips out to the right. Dwight was the outside receiver. If Freddie isn’t open, then Dwight slides along the back of the end zone. We had been taught to throw the ball up high, though not quite as high as I let it go, so that if Dwight doesn’t catch it–he’s 6-foot-4, almost 6-5–nobody does. The ball just goes out of the end zone and you get another shot.
After we snapped the ball, they jumped underneath Dwight and covered up Freddie in the slot–rightly so, because they’d already seen the play before. I rolled out all the way to the sideline. I was just waiting for Dwight. He stops, slides along the back of end zone trying to keep [Cowboys defender Everson] Walls behind him. When I let the ball go, he was just turning to head back across the end zone.
The funny thing is, everyone says, “Oh, you were throwing that ball away.” As a quarterback–well, not even as a quarterback–you know yourself that if you’ve got a piece of paper in your hand and you throw it into a trash can from a distance, you know when you let it go where it’s gonna end up. When I let that ball go, I didn’t see the ending. I got knocked down. I didn’t see the catch at all. But everybody screamed, so I figured, “OK, it was a touchdown.” Then the guys tried to tell me what a great catch Dwight made. I was, like, “C’mon.” I knew where it went. It was just a little above his head. They said, “Naw, naw, he made a great catch! He jumped as high as he could to catch it on his fingertips!” I thought they were kidding around. Until I saw it on the replay. It was a great catch.
