What are you talking about?

Ed Rutkowski recalled a chance encounter http://www.fifa15sale.com with Don MacPherson, a Denver assistant coach, years later in which MacPherson recounted the play-by-play of this game. “I ran into Don MacPherson, and I introduced myself,” said Rutkowski . “He said, ‘You almost cost me my job.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ He said, ‘The year you played quarterback, I was one of the coaches for the Denver Broncos.’ There was a little more than a minute left in the game and I’m at quarterback, and we’re beating them by I think a point. Saban’s on the [Broncos’] sideline and MacPherson’s up in the press box and Lou’s on the phone with him and says, ‘The kid’s killing us—he’s killing us! He’s gonna beat us! He hasn’t played quarterback since high school—he’s gonna beat us!’ Then Saban said, ‘And if he beats us, you’re gone, Mac.’ Mac said, ‘What?!’ Lou says, ‘Yeah, you’re gone. You’re outta here.’ MacPherson says, ‘Gee all I’m doing is charting the plays.’ Lou says, ‘I don’t care, if he beats us, you’re gone!’ Well, what happened was, Floyd Little caught a pass coming out of the backfield and they kicked a field goal with seven seconds left, and they beat us. So MacPherson said, ‘Luckily, I didn’t lose my job.’”

The Bills and their new starting quarterback had just three days to prepare for a Thanksgiving Day match-up with the tough Raiders out on the West Coast. “We played the Broncos on Sunday, and had to play Oakland Thursday—a nationally televised Thanksgiving Day game,” recalled Ed Rutkowski. “So we had Monday off, and we had Tuesday and Wednesday to practice.

“I got together with John Mazur to put together the game plan,” said Rutkowski. “He said, ‘Look, they’re not gonna think you’re gonna be able to do anything. Figure they’re gonna run four defenses against us. For each defense, we’re gonna put together four plays, and I want you to memorize them, and we’re going to audibilize an awful lot.’ Actually, it was brilliant on John’s part— all I had to know was 16 plays. I put together this little note pad, and I took that everywhere—it was like my Bible. I took it with me to the bathroom.”


Rutkowski wasn’t the only Bill playing out fut 15 coins of position because of the mounting injuries. The offensive line was a hodgepodge in which nearly every regular either missed time due to injuries, or played another position as a result of someone else’s. “Howard Kindig was our guy who could play a variety of positions, and one of our guards got hurt,” Rutkowski remembers. “We moved Al Bemiller—who was our center—over to guard because he had played guard before, and we put Howard at center because most of the time the center was double-teaming with somebody else. So Howard has to learn the center posi- tion on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.”