ONE FOR THE ROAD
Joe’s final win on B’way came versus Bucs
THERE were 46,427 people at Shea Stadium that afternoon, and it’s quite possible — likely even — that few of them ever realized they were watching history. Hell, by that point in New York’s football history — Nov. 14, 1976 — it was amazing any of them were still watching football at all.
It feels grim in 2017 because it is grim. The Giants are 1-7, which is dreadful in any league. The Jets are 4-5, which by comparison feels like a trip to ’72 Dolphinland. But it isn’t as grim as it was 41 years ago. The Giants were 0-9 heading into that day’s game against the Redskins at the Meadowlands. The Jets were 2-7, facing the 0-9 expansion Buccaneers.
Lou Holtz was the Jets coach. He lasted another three weeks before fleeing back to college. Later, on Johnny Carson’s couch, he would quipped, “Fayetteville, Ark., isn’t the end of the world, but you can see it from there.” But in December 1976, Fayetteville looked like Paris to Holtz compared to New York City. He left behind, quite famously, a fight song, to the tune of “The Caissons Go Rolling Along”: Win the game, fight like men We’re together win or lose New York Jets go rolling along … Like I said. It was grim. Yet that afternoon, late in the first quarter of a scoreless game — the first-ever meeting between the Jets and the Bucs, who will renew that relationship Sunday in Tampa — history really did happen on the dusty wasteland in Flushing. Holtz nodded to Joe Namath, who began the game on the bench, tutoring rookie Richard Todd. Todd hadn’t done much. The Jets had forced a turnover deep in Tampa Bay territory.
Namath limped in. He emerged from the huddle, handed the ball to Clark Gaines, and Gaines ran 12 yards for the touchdown. The Shea crowd went wild — for Na- math, who still could do no wrong in the locals’ eyes.
Over the next three quarters Namath did a lot of handing off — and also a lot of falling down, since the Jets hadn’t yet mastered the new shotgun formation installed by Holtz that week and apparently were unaware you could still block when the ball was snapped instead of hiked from center. Namath also threw 12 passes, completing seven of them, including a 3-yard touchdown to Richard Caster.
The Jets won the game, 34-0 (incredibly, just the second shutout in the team’s history to that point). Just before the game ended, word arrived and was flashed on the Shea scoreboard that the Bucs would pursue (and ultimately achieve) a winless 0-14 season solo: the Giants had stunned the Redskins 12-9 on a late 50-yard field goal by Joe Danelo. It was the Giants’ first win at Giants Stadium (and also the first time in four years the Giants and Jets won on the same day), so a little history was made on the Jersey side, too, one everyone understood in the moment.
But as Namath trudged to the locker room two bridges east, nobody could know that a different kind of history had been forged there: It was the last game Namath would ever win as a Jet.
“I know exactly what I do day in and day out as a football player,” Namath said a few minutes later as newsmen crowded around him in the right quarters of the Jets’ locker room. “So I know exactly where I stand. Over the years, I’ve had criticism, but I get out of it better now. I don’t want to feel bad, and I don’t allow myself to feel bad.”
Said Todd: “Joe is still my hero. I want him to throw a thousand more passes before he’s done.”
It was a nice, deferential thing for a kid and a fellow Alabama quarterback to say, but everyone knew Todd was the future that day, Namath most of all. He only threw one more TD as a Jet while playing in three blowout losses. A few months later Namath was a Ram. He left behind him a career record of 60-61-4 as a Jet, a number which still seems impossible no matter how many times you look at it.