Recalling "The Play" That Made History
November 13, 2014 | Football
Chestnut Hill, Mass. -
Written By Reid Oslin
Thirty years later, it still ranks as not only the greatest play in Boston College football history, but as one of the top plays in all of college football history.
"The Play" of course, is the still-talked about 48-yard "Hail Mary" throw from Doug Flutie to Gerard Phelan earning BC a miraculous 47-45 last-second victory over Miami on November 23, 1984. Televised nationally on CBS, the game - which was called by ace broadcaster Brent Musberger - was the highest-rated college football broadcast of the year in 1984. The Eagles soared into the nation's top 10 after the dazzling win and Flutie brought home college football's top individual prize, the Heisman Trophy, in balloting which closed days after the classic contest.
As the 30th anniversary of the BC-Miami classic approaches, Phelan offered his recollections of that famous football moment.
"It's amazing," he said of the on-going reaction to his famous catch. "It comes up just about every single day. I'm a sales person by trade, so I am always meeting a lot of new people, and many times, when I am being introduced to someone, I get identified with that play."
No wonder.
Phelan said that BC coach Jack Bicknell had drilled the notion of a passing shootout into his team in the days leading up to the Friday-after-Thanksgiving game.
"Coach Bicknell was a little more animated about this game than he had been with others in the past," Phelan recalled. "He told us before the game, `We're going to throw the ball all over the field.'"
He wasn't kidding. Flutie wound up connecting on 34-of-46 passes, completing his first 11 throws of the game, for 472 yards and three touchdowns without yielding an interception.
The game itself was an offensive shootout of biblical proportion. In addition to Flutie's starry totals, Miami QB Bernie Kosar was 25-of-38 for 447 yards and two scores. He was picked off twice. Together the teams generated an eye-popping 1,282 yards of offense - including 627 for BC - and the lead switched hands nine times throughout the game - three of those changes coming in the final four minutes.
"They had so much talent on their offense that we knew they were going to score a lot of points," Phelan said. "It was pretty clear to us that we would need to score a lot of points, too. Just about every time Coach Bick addressed the team during the week - at practice, on the bus, in the locker room before we took the field for the game - he reminded us of that."
It was an overcast, dark day with frequent bursts of rain in Miami on November 23, 1984 and a crowd of 30,235 occupied just about half of the famous but aging Orange Bowl stadium.
"It was wet and rainy so we actually figured that would slow Miami down," Phelan admitted. "That was a little bit of an advantage for us.
The shootout appeared over when Miami capped a long, 79-yard drive with fullback Melvin Britton launching into the end zone from a yard out to give the Hurricanes a 45-41 advantage with just 28 seconds remaining on the clock. Miami's kickoff was ruled a touchback, and the Eagles started a last-gasp drive at their own 20 with two timeouts in their pocket.
Flutie's first pass to tailback Troy Stradford gained 19 yards. The next throw, a 13-yarder to tight end Scott Gieselman advanced the ball 13 additional yards, to the Miami 48 with 10 seconds to play.
Another Flutie pass - this time to tight end Peter Caspariello, fell incomplete along the left sideline, leaving just six clicks on the clock.
When the Eagles lined up for a final play, referee Paul Schmitt inadvertently threw a flag. He quickly nullified the error and BC lined up again for a final try. Flutie had never needed to use either of his team's timeouts.
The play called by Bicknell - and he had no other option - was called "Flood Tip," which sent wide receivers Phelan and Kelvin Martin and running back Stradford to the right side of the end zone - all trying to corral the final desperation fling. Fullback Steve Strachan, who was assigned to block in the backfield, noticed that the Miami pass rush was cautious, so he too high-tailed it to the goal line. The plan was for any receiver who could get a hand on the ball to tip it up into the air so that it might be caught for a score.
BC had practiced the play every Thursday throughout the season. Twice, Bicknell had called it in game situations with a 50 percent success rate: Phelan caught a Flutie "Flood Tip" pass on the final play of the first half in the Temple game on October 13; another "Hail Mary" effort at West Virginia a week later was broken up by a defender in the closing seconds of the first half.
"I was able to catch it in the middle of a crowd against Temple," Phelan recalled. "So I was drawing off that as we lined up in Miami.
"But I was surprised [vs. Miami] that I was able to run into the end zone by myself. I ran by the defenders at about the 10- or 12-yard line, and my initial thought was `I have got to get into the end zone. There are only seconds left and there is no use trying to catch anything out here.'
"Eventually, the pack drifted back towards me and it seemed to me that there would be a situation where they were going to jump up and tip it or it was going to hit somebody on the way down," Phelan said. "I was as surprised as anybody in the stadium that it came through clean.
"I watch it on film all the time," Phelan added. "And it seems like it is all one motion: Doug throws it, I catch it and fall to the ground. In reality, it was coming at me pretty fast and when everybody jumped in front of me, it disappeared from my view.
"In the last second, the ball reappeared and just grazed off the bottom of my facemask and started traveling down my body," Phelan admitted. "The catch was a little unusual; I really wasn't trying to catch the ball, I was really just trying to stop the ball from going through. I got my elbows on it and held it to my waist. That's part of the reason I fell backwards."
Phelan, of course, had landed within the end zone markings.
"I wasn't even sure where I was," he admitted. "I had gone in the end zone and then came back out and the ball came down and I was on my back. Then, I saw the writing in the end zone. My initial reaction was that `There is no way they will let us get away with this. There's got to be a penalty or something,'" Phelan said. "Then I got mobbed by our players and that thought went away pretty quickly [laughter]."
Phelan held on to the ball all the way back to Boston. Years later, he gave the prized pigskin to the Hajjar Museum in the Yawkey Center where it remains on display for all Eagle fans to see and relish.
The talented wide receiver from Philadelphia was drafted by the New England Patriots after his magical senior year, but a serious knee injury abruptly ended his football career.
He is currently a sales executive for RR Donnelly Co., a national leader in the financial printing and digital information management industry. He recently celebrated his 25th anniversary with RR Donnelly and Bowne, a similar firm that was acquired by the parent company.
Gerard and his wife, Lisa - also a Boston College graduate - live in Walpole, Mass., and are the parents of three children: Alex, a former Massachusetts High School Player of the Year at Xaverian Brothers High School, who went on to play both quarterback and wide receiver at Brown University before launching his own career in investment banking; Taylor, a senior at Boston College who has just accepted a position with Price Waterhouse; and Hannah, a junior at Bishop Feehan High School in Attleboro where she is a highly-recruited springboard diver.
"Hannah has great spatial awareness," Phelan says proudly. "I'd like to think she got some of that from her dad."
