It was one week after the Immaculate Reception, an unseasonably warm January day at Three Rivers Stadium, and now another unexpected play was taking place.
Heading toward the same end zone as Franco Harris, with a number of Steelers players not knowing what was happening, Dolphins punter Larry Seiple was running 37 yards to the Steelers 12, turning a fake punt into a history-changing moment.
It caught the Steelers so unaware that defensive lineman Steve Furness was running just ahead of Seiple, his back turned, looking as though he was escorting the Dolphins punter down the field.
“They were knocking down our guys and our guys were trying to block them,” Seiple said. “It was kind of like the Keystone Cops. Everyone was after everyone else.”
The Steelers were leading the Dolphins, 7-0, in the second quarter of the 1972 AFC Championship game when the play occurred. It resulted in quarterback Earl Morrall tossing a 9-yard touchdown pass to running back Larry Csonka to tie the game at halftime.
The Dolphins went on to win, 21-17, and advance to the Super Bowl for the second year in a row, where they beat the Washington Redskins to finish with the first and only 17-0 perfect season in league history.
“That didn’t beat us,” former Steelers safety Mike Wagner groused the other day, 44 years later. “We couldn’t stop their running game.”
Perhaps, but at the time, his coach, Chuck Noll, disagreed.
“We had position, momentum, everything, when that happened,” Noll said. “That changed the game.”
And history.
If Seiple doesn’t make the play, maybe the Dolphins’ perfect 17-0 season doesn’t happen.
Edge: Dolphins
The Steelers’ playoff history with the Dolphins is nothing on the order of their past postseason scrapes with the Oakland Raiders, Denver Broncos or even Baltimore Ravens.
When the teams meet Sunday at Heinz Field for an AFC wild-card playoff game, it will mark only the fourth time they have faced each other in the postseason — the first game in 32 years. Whenever they met, the winner advanced to the Super Bowl each time.
The Dolphins have the edge in significant moments.
Seiple’s fake punt helped send them to their first Super Bowl victory and immortality in 1972.
And Miami’s convincing 45-28 victory over the visiting Steelers in the 1984 AFC Championship marked the only time in his illustrious 17-year career Dan Marino made it to the Super Bowl.
Back in the 1970s, the Steelers and Dolphins were the elite franchises of the NFL, combining to win six Super Bowl titles in an eight-year stretch. If it wasn’t for the Steelers, the Dolphins might have been the Team of the Decade in the 1970s.
“When we lost to them [in 1972], it kind of set us up for the years that were to follow,” said Wagner, who played on all four Super Bowl-winning teams of the 1970s. “Just getting that far, the mechanics of playing a long season and the confidence it gave everybody ... we almost got to the Super Bowl. We knew we were good enough, that we’re not a fluke team, we’re not the same ol’ Steelers.”
That wasn’t the case in 1984. After they lost to the Dolphins, the Steelers missed the playoffs the next four years and six of the next seven. They would go 10 more years before they made it back to an AFC Championship game. But they made the conference championship game six more times under Bill Cowher, winning two, and two more times under Mike Tomlin, winning both. They went to four more Super Bowls, winning two.
That’s not been the case with the Dolphins. They never made it to another Super Bowl and appeared in just two more AFC title games, both with Marino. They made the postseason 11 times in the ensuing 32 years, but haven’t won a playoff game since 2000. Today is their first postseason appearance since 2008.
“I look back on it now, I often wonder whether we believed we were closer than we really were, in regards to the overall talent we had,” said former quarterback Mark Malone, who threw three touchdowns and three interceptions in that 1984 title game. “We never got back to that position again. I don’t know if we were as close as we thought.”
It looked as though the Steelers might be close enough when Malone threw a 65-yard touchdown to receiver John Stallworth in the second quarter for a 14-10 lead. But Marino, who set NFL passing records during the regular season with 48 touchdowns and 5,084 yards passing, was just getting warmed up.
He threw touchdown passes of 41 and 36 yards to Mark Duper to give the Dolphins a 31-14 lead, then threw his fourth touchdown — a 6-yarder to Nat Moore — to cap a day in which he passed for 421 yards.
“We were leading and I remember Danny getting heated up and it was bombs away,” said Malone, who threw for 312 yards. “I’m sitting there watching this stuff, thinking it’s going to be a hard game to win, and I’m getting caught up watching this guy play at such a high level.”
Good day, bad sign
The first indication the Dec. 31, 1972 conference championship game might favor the Dolphins was not so much they had won their previous 15 games.
Rather, the weather for the game — sunny, mid-60s — was more like South Florida than Pittsburgh for that time of year.
“It was the worst thing for us, the best thing for the Dolphins,” Wagner said. “We wanted to have some nasty cold wind to make it more difficult for the Dolphins coming from the south.”
The Dolphins, though, were a run-oriented team that featured two 1,000-yard rushers — Csonka and Eugene “Mercury” Morris — and they used that tandem, along with Jim Kiick, to rush for 193 yards on 49 attempts against the Steelers. But the longest run of all was supplied by the punter, who just happened to be a running back in college.
“It was one of those things when we watched Pittsburgh’s punt-return film, we saw that nobody really rushed but one person and it was from the other side away from where they were going to return the ball,” Seiple said.
Dolphins Coach Don Shula alerted Seiple he had the green light to run with the ball, but only on his call. When Seiple saw only one player rushing from his right — Steelers wide receiver Barry Pearson — he took off running.
“I got a little antsy,” Seiple said. “I couldn’t wait. [Linebacker] Bob Matheson blocked out Barry Pearson and when I looked up after that, there was nobody there, absolutely nobody. So I just took off.”
Seiple got all the way to the Steelers 12 before he was tackled from behind by the only player who probably realized what was happening — Pearson.
“He always told me you can run as much as you want as long as you make it,” Seiple said. “If I didn’t make it my [rear] would still be running to Miami. Thank God it worked.”
Seven years later, the Steelers exacted some revenge. They scored touchdowns on their first three possessions and beat the Dolphins, 34-14, in a 1979 AFC divisional playoff game at Three Rivers Stadium that started them on the road to their fourth Super Bowl title.
The decade that began with the Dolphins making three consecutive trips to the Super Bowl ended with the Steelers winning four of the final six.
“They were a great team, we were up and coming,” Wagner said. “Overall, they deserved that championship. Could we have beaten them? Maybe once out of five times.”
Gerry Dulac: gdulac@post-gazette.com.
First Published: January 7, 2017, 6:00 p.m.