January 21, 1979: Super Bowl XIII is played at the Orange Bowl in Miami. The Dallas Cowboys, NFC Champions and winners of Super Bowls VI and XII, faced the Pittsburgh Steelers, AFC Champions and winners of Super Bowls IX and X -- and beat the Cowboys themselves in Super Bowl X.
With 2:46 left in the 3rd quarter, the Pittsburgh Steelers were leading the Dallas Cowboys 21-14. But the Cowboys were driving. It was 3rd and 3 on the Steeler 10, and Cowboy quarterback Roger Staubach faded back to pass. He saw tight end Jackie Smith wide open in the end zone.
Smith had played 15 seasons for the St. Louis Cardinals -- the football team that now plays in Arizona, not the baseball team of the same name -- and made 5 Pro Bowls. He had retired after the 1977 season, but accepted an offer from the Cowboys, who were dealing with injuries at his position. He didn't catch a pass all season long, but was praised for his blocking.
In a Playoff game against the Atlanta Falcons, he did catch a touchdown pass from Danny White, who was filling in for an injured Staubach. Although the Cardinals had gone 9-5 in 1963 (his rookie season), 9-3-2 in 1964, 9-4-1 in 1968, 10-4 to win the NFC Eastern Division in 1974, and 11-3 to win the NFC East, that game against the Falcons was the 1st winning postseason game in which he'd ever played.
Now, with less than 18 minutes in regulation to play in a game for the World Championship, and with his team down by 7 points, Jackie Smith was wide open in the end zone, and the target of a pass by one of the greatest quarterbacks who had ever played.
He dropped it. It looked like he slipped, his legs collapsing underneath him, and the pass popped out of his hands.
Had he caught the pass, the Cowboys would have been a successful extra-point attempt from tying the game. Instead,
Verne Lundquist, then the Cowboys' main radio announcer, said, "Aw, bless his heart, he's got to be the sickest man in America!"
Instead, the Cowboys had to settle for a 27-yard field goal by Rafael Septién, whose father Carlos
Septién had played for Mexico in 2 World Cups. The Cowboys were trailing 21-17, the same score by which the Steelers beat them in Super Bowl X.
They could not build momentum on this. Franco Harris added to the Pittsburgh lead with a touchdown run halfway through the 4th quarter. On the ensuing kickoff, Roy Gerela slipped, causing him to squib the kick. This should have been a lucky break for the Cowboys.
Instead, Randy White, a future Hall-of-Famer and co-Most Valuable Player with Harvey Martin in the previous year's Super Bowl, tried to pick it up at the 24-yard line, but was wearing a cast to protect his broken left hand, and fumbled it. Dennis Winston recovered it, and the Steelers had the ball at the Dallas 18. On the very next play, Terry Bradshaw threw to Lynn Swann, and he didn't drop it.
That made it 35-17 Pittsburgh with less than 7 minutes to go. The Cowboys didn't give up. Staubach threw a touchdown pass to Billy Joe DuPree with 2:27 left. They recovered an onside kick, and with 22 seconds on the clock, Staubach threw another touchdown pass, to Butch Johnson.
It was 35-31. Had they gotten the Smith touchdown instead of the Septién field goal, presuming Septién had made all the extra points, it would have been 35-35. But the couldn't recover the last onside kick, and the Steelers had won.
It was Jackie Smith's last game, and the last pass he was ever thrown. He caught 480 passes for 7,980 yards, the latter a record for tight ends that stood until 1990. But it took 11 tries after becoming eligible for the Pro Football hall of Fame for him to be elected. It certainly looked as though the voters held it against him.
Today, Smith is 80 years old, and is also a member of the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame, the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame, the St. Louis Sports Hall of Fame, and the St. Louis Walk of Fame. He still holds the record of most yards per catch for any tight end, 16.1.
And yet, people remember him most for a pass that he dropped. He was the Bill Buckner of football, nearly 8 years before Buckner's moment under a cloud.
To their credit, something I don't often give them, Cowboy fans generally don't blame Smith for losing the game.
Who should they blame?
Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame Jackie Smith for the Dallas Cowboys Losing Super Bowl XIII
First, a couple of reasons that didn't make the cut: The Best of the Rest.
The Officiating. Cowboy fans are like Notre Dame fans: They never lose, time just runs out on them. And when they lose, it's because the officials screwed them. As if they haven't gotten the benefit of dozens of dodgy calls over the years.
Cowboy fans point to to moments, early in the 4th quarter, with the score 21-17 in Pittsburgh's favor, after the Smith drop. Bradshaw threw a pass to Swann, who collided with Cowboy cornerback Benny Barnes, and didn't catch the ball. Referee Fred Swearingen called pass interference on Barnes. The instant replay suggested that the contact might have been incidental, but there was then no provision for challenging a play through instant replay. Even if there had been, it has to be conclusive that the call was wrong. It wasn't. The play would have stood.
Swearingen was also the referee in the 1972 Playoffs when the Steelers beat the Oakland Raiders on a play known as the Immaculate Reception. Anybody who wasn't a Steeler admirer wanted to believe that Swearingen got that call wrong, and that he got the one 6 seasons later wrong as well.
Two plays after the interference call, the Steelers had 3rd-and-4 on the Cowboy 17. Cowboy linebacker Thomas "Hollywood" Henderson, who had predicted a 31-0 Dallas win, and had told the media, already inclined to believe that Bradshaw wasn't very bright, "Bradshaw is so dumb, he couldn't spell 'cat' if you spotted him on the C and the A" -- sacked him for a 12-yard loss.
Except Swearingen had blown his whistle before the snap, and called a delay-of-game penalty on the Steelers. The replay showed that not only had the whistle been blown, but pretty much everybody on both sides had heard the whistle, except Henderson -- hence, the comparative lack of protection for Bradshaw.
So now, instead of 4th and-16, at a spot where a field goal attempt would have been 51 yards, it was 3rd-and-9. And Harris scored a touchdown.
Cowboy fans complained about these 2 calls. But the 1st was inconclusive, and the 2nd was absolutely correct. That's why "The officials screwed us" doesn't make the Top 5 here. It rarely does, even when it appears to be true. Here, it appears to be a big stretch, at best.
Age. Smith was 38. And also Staubach had led the Cowboys to win the Super Bowl the year before, and it just got in the back in, he was about to turn 37. Plenty of quarterbacks have done well at that age and higher, but perhaps he had also begun to decline.
Now, the Top 5:
5. Jackie Smith. By the admission of most anybody in the cowboy organization at that time, they wouldn't have gotten into that Super Bowl without him.
4. Expectations. It wasn't just that Smith was old for a receiver. While he did catch a touchdown pass from White in the Playoff game against the Falcons, Staubach was quarterbacking again, and had hardly thrown to him all year. Now, in the biggest game of them, all, Staubach was throwing to him? He shouldn't have expected himself to receive that pass, and nobody else should have been expecting him to receive it, either.
3. Randy White's Injury. If he hadn't been hurt, he wouldn't have fumbled the Roy Gerela kickoff. If he had simply held onto the ball anyway, it would have been 28-17 Steelers with 7 minutes to go. Would the Cowboys have scored twice more anyway? Maybe. But he didn't.
Nobody talks about this play. Maybe if it had happened first, they would. But all anybody remembers is the Smith drop.
2. The Doomsday Defense. Until this very game, which the Steelers won despite allowing 31 points, the most points any team had allowed in an NFL championship game, under any name, was the 28th at the 1950 Cleveland Browns allowed to Los Angeles Rams. It would take until Super Bowl 52 for a team to allow more than 31 points in an NFL championship game and still win. Face it, the Cowboys defense failed. If they had done their job, Smith's drop wouldn't have mattered.
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1. The Steelers Were Better. They had already won back-to-back Super Bowls in the decade, including beating the Cowboys just three years earlier. The Steelers were 14-2, and beat a pair of 10-6 teams to get into the Super Bowl: The Denver Broncos and the Houston Oilers. The Cowboys were 12-4, and while they beat a 12-4 Los Angeles Rams team in the NFC Championship Game, their previous Playoff win was against the 9-7 Atlanta Falcons.
The Cowboys had 6 players who have been elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame: Roger Staubach, Tony Dorsett, Randy White, Rayfield Wright, Cliff Harris and... Jackie Smith. Many observers would argue that Drew Pearson and Charlie Waters should also be in. That would be 8.
The Steelers have 10: Terry Bradshaw, Franco Harris, Lynn Swann, John Stallworth, Mike Webster, Mean Joe Greene, Jack Lambert, Jack Ham, Mel Blount and Donnie Shell. So even with the Cowboys'"should" players, the Steelers have more. And that's without considering the Steelers' own "shoulds," such as Larry Brown, Jon Kolb and L.C. Greenwood.
And while it's true that their own Steel Curtain defense didn't exactly get the job done either, their offense scored 35 points, tying what was then a Super Bowl record. Not since the 1961 Green Bay Packers had a team sport more points than that in an NFL Championship Game, under any name. Look at the number of Hall of Famers that each team had, or should have.
VERDICT: Not Guilty. The problem wasn't that Jackie Smith dropped a key pass. The problem was that the Pittsburgh Steelers of the 1970s may have been the best football team ever assembled. The problem wasn't that the Cowboys, or anybody thereon, failed. It's that they were beaten by a better team.
After the game, Bradshaw told the media, "Ask Hollywood how dumb I am now." He was named MVP of that Super Bowl, and the next year's, with the Steelers going into the 4th quarter trailing the Rams and coming back to win. Henderson's drug problem drove him out of football, just as an elbow injury and clinical depression ended Bradshaw's career. Both men recovered, and can laugh about it now.
But don't laugh at Jackie Smith. And don't blame him, either.