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An extremely methodical man who approaches the game with the air of a Ph.D. candidate, Griese likes to equate football with chess: "In a game I think of myself as looking down on a situation from above, like a chess player. I can see moves coming and I'm ready to make them. When you're a rookie you feel just like another one of the pieces. You can't see everybody because you're down among them. But when you have total grasp and knowledge of what's going on, then you feel you can effectively maneuver people around, manipulate your offense to take advantage of what the defense is showing."
Blond, tan, dimpled and movie-star handsome, Griese, going to work in one of his Sears, Roebuck suits (he does promotion for the company), looks like a beachboy turned junior executive. For him, in fact, preparing for a game is "like a businessman going to a meeting. I have a 9-to-5 job like everyone else," he says. Not quite. When he goes home at night, he often lugs along reels of game film and then spends long hours in his den taking notes by the flickering light. His diligence has paid off in a kind of built-in instant-replay system. On the field, he says, "every time a defensive formation moves it reminds me of something I've seen on one of the films the week before."
To his teammates, Griese is a respected if somewhat distant leader. No rah-rah man, his most insistent utterance in the huddle is "Let's get going." Says Griese: "I don't say anything. I just call the plays and make them work." And work and work. Though he is a good swivel-hipped scrambler and has one of the quickest releases in the league, 6 ft. 1 in., 190 lb. Griese is running and passing less and enjoying it more. Once he threw as many as 35 passes a game; against Baltimore last week he threw only eight times. The fact that two of his tosses led to touchdowns supports his theory that nothing sets up a pass as neatly as a well-mixed running attack.
In the play-off battle with the Colts, Griese was expected to trade largely on the running attack of his battering backs, Larry Csonka and Jim Kiick. It would be futile, so the smart money figured, to pass against a zone defense that was reputedly an impenetrable wall. Although Griese used his aerial attack with restraint, the bombs that he threw picked the zone apart in short order.
Miami defensemen got in a few decisive licks of their own. In addition to manhandling Colt Quarterback Unitas, they combined for one of the most exquisitely executed maneuvers-this side of the Bolshoi Ballet. It came in the third quarter after Miami Safety Dick Anderson picked off a tipped Unitas pass. Rallying around him in a kind of free-form flying wedge, Dolphin blockers cut down six Colt tacklers in sudden, shattering succession, as Anderson raced on unmolested for the score. Says Shula, still lost in the wonder of it all: "It was one of the great plays of all time, a classic." The 21-0 Miami victory marked the first time in 97 games that the Colts had been shut out.