TAMPA – After standing on the sidelines for a half- hour waiting for Ray Charles sing “America the Beautiful,” and the Backstreet Boys to finish the national anthem, Jason Sehorn didn’t feel quite right.
“I felt out of sorts physically,” he would later say. “You get excited for a game and then you sit there for 25 minutes before the game starts. That’s different. The first quarter was sort of an adjustment period. It was weird.”
Football is said to be a game of adjustments. The Ravens made some in their gameplan, deciding to challenge the Giants’ secondary with a few deep passes to loosen their defense. By the time Sehorn made his adjustment, the Ravens had a 7-0 lead and there were plenty of indications the Giants’ magic carpet ride was about to crash.
It started on the Ravens’ second offensive series when Sehorn was beaten deep by wide receiver Patrick Johnson, but Trent Dilfer’s long pass sailed just beyond his fingertips. One series later, Sehorn’s luck would run out and a long night for the Giants’ defense began in earnest.
On second-and-7 from the Giants’ 38, Ravens wide receiver Brandon Stokley lined up in the right slot and ran a stop-and-go pattern that fooled Sehorn. Stokley streaked right past him, sprinting toward the goal line free and clear, needing only a good pass from Dilfer to score.
With Giants safety Shaun Williams too much toward the middle of the field and out of position to offer help deep, Sehorn was living a defensive back’s nightmare in the biggest game of his career. He tried to catch up and make a tackle, but Stokley caught the ball around the five-yard line and dragged him into the end zone, giving the Ravens a 7-0 lead.
“He made a great throw,” Sehorn said of Dilfer. “It was his only great throw of the day and he threw it on me.”
It set the tone for a night when the Giants’ defense, which had played so brilliantly during the playoffs, looked like a second-rate unit compared to the Ravens’ superior group of defenders. The Ravens’ 34-7 victory was not the outcome the Giants’ defense had in mind. After shutting out the Vikings 41-0 in the NFC Championship Game, they thought they were comparable to the Ravens’ defense. Wrong.
“We were confident we’d play much better than we did,” said Giants defensive coordinator John Fox. “That’s a bitter pill we’ll have to live with throughout the offseason.”
If the Giants were to win Super Bowl XXXV, they had to get perfect play from their defense and get a solid game from Kerry Collins. They got neither.
Sehorn’s early troubles were indicative of a night where the defense made far too many mistakes to win. He was beaten badly three times in the first quarter and was fortunate that only one was completed for a touchdown.
“We were squatting on the short passes,” Sehorn said. “I was playing what I’ve seen on film for two weeks. But they came out a little different in the first quarter. I guess they wanted to soften us up a bit.”
And in the second quarter when it looked like linebacker Jessie Armstead had intercepted a pass and return to for a game-tying touchdown, defensive end Keith Hamilton was somehow flagged for holding, nullifying the score.
“It was a big play,” Armstead said, “a play that could have changed the game.”
Instead, it only fueled the bad karma. On the Ravens’ next series, the Giants blitzed and Dilfer lofted a deep pass down the left sideline for Qadry Ismail, who had flown past cornerback Dave Thomas. Only a shoe- string tackle kept the gain to 44 yards. The play set up Matt Stover’s 47-yard field goal that put the Ravens ahead 10-0.
“We thought we were faster than them,” Stokley said. “We thought we could run by them and that’s what we did.”
When it was over, the Ravens had managed just 244 yards of total offense, with 111 coming on the ground. Not gaudy numbers, but plenty to win Super Bowl XXXV. While the Ravens forced five Giants turnovers, the Giants didn’t record a takeaway.
“We just didn’t take the ball away and that’s one thing we’ve been pretty good at the last 16 weeks,” Sehorn said. “We didn’t make any plays.”
Things have gone so perfectly for the Giants since December that seeing them out of position and making costly penalties seemed like some bad flashback to the days before Jim Fassel’s playoff guarantee.
Sehorn wouldn’t blame Williams for not being deep on the Stokley touchdown, but Fox said, “We were supposed to have double coverage, but Shaun hung in the middle too long and was late getting over.”
Hamilton wouldn’t even blame the officials for the critical holding penalty, but he did call it “a play I’ve made 100 times and it hasn’t been called.”
It was simply a bad night for the Giants, thanks primarily to the Ravens.
“When you’re out on the field and not making plays, you’re just out there,” Sehorn said. “That’s not what you have in mind.”
Said Armstead, “We had opportunities to make some plays. We just didn’t get it done.”
The 2000 Giants defense could have become legend last night had they outplayed the Ravens’ defense and won Super Bowl XXXV. But Dilfer completed two long passes, the Ravens took a 10-0 lead and Ray Lewis and his buddies slammed the door.