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Chargers vs steelers score11/18/2023 “Al was a fabulous guy who I don’t think ever got the credit he should have,” the coach said. Lindsey recalled Pupunu as a reliable, tough player, true to the team’s identity “I think that’s the thing that flipped the game,” Lindsey said. When a Steelers safety lost track of him, Pupunu ran open, and Stan Humphries passed him the ball for the touchdown that cut the Chargers’ deficit to 13-10 midway through the third quarter. His blocking for Natrone Means that year and that day (20 rushes, 69 yards) made him a stealth threat as receiver. Pupunu, an undrafted player from Weber State, did a lot of grunt work. Offensively, the Chargers players who each caught a 43-yard touchdown pass that day - tight end Al Pupunu and receiver Tony Martin - came in for praise from Lindsey. Shaw’s wrinkle, on balance, netted a big gain. While O’Donnell would throw for 349 yards and a touchdown, he never burned them on the weak side as the Chargers feared he might, said Lindsey. The Steelers had three Pro Bowlers blocking for Foster, including massive tight end Eric Green.Īmassing to the strong side, the Chargers knew, left them vulnerable to certain pass plays on the weak side. When lineman Chris Mims forced Foster to fumble in the first quarter, safety Darren Carrington recovered it, preventing the Steelers from adding to a 7-0 lead. The Chargers held Barry Foster to 47 yards in 20 carries, an average of 2.4 that was well below his season mark of 3.9. He’s the one that came up with that defense, and it worked quite well. “I think all of us on the staff have to give credit to Willie Shaw for that thought. “It was a collaborative thing,” said Lindsey, a winner of 77 percent of his games at USD. Coordinator Bill Arnsparger worked Shaw’s plan into his designs. The remedy proposed by Shaw, a graduate of Lincoln High and San Diego State and the father of Stanford coach David Shaw, was to marshal more run support near the strong side of Pittsburgh’s formation. The Steelers, a few weeks earlier in the season finale, had ripped the Chargers for 136 rushing yards despite holding out or limiting the snaps of several frontline players. Shaw, said Lindsey, made a tactical suggestion that ultimately paid big dividends in the defense’s focal effort to take away Pittsburgh’s ground game. Start with Willie Shaw, the defensive backs coach. The purpose here is to note a few Chargers contributors who weren’t front and center in the reports. Fans went to Lindbergh Field and honked at the team bus on highways and surface streets en route to San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium, where a capacity crowd awaited. Tens of thousands of San Diegans greeted the Chargers after they returned. Well-known, too, was the celebratory response to the stunning victory. The Steelers ran for just 66 yards, averaging a meager 2.5 per carry. Seau, working behind a beefy four-man front headed by star end Leslie O’Neal, led a withering defense performance that stoned Pittsburgh’s highly ranked ground game for most of the game. 55, drew national attention and followed Seau into his posthumous induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. The pad-popping collisions engineered that day by Junior Seau, the attacking linebacker wearing No. You probably know linebacker Dennis Gibson preserved the victory with just over a minute left by knocking down the fourth-and-3 pass thrown by Steelers quarterback Neil O’Donnell. The main storylines that played out that January day are known to most San Diegans who cared about the Chargers. “I think they believed in their coaches.” “They did a good job of following what Bobby Ross told them to do,” Lindsey said of the players. The coach, who’d played linebacker in 1960 with the Browns, described the ’94 Bolts as a “good, tough team” that hit hard. “I think the team we had was just solely focused on winning we had just narrowly escaped beating Miami,” Lindsey said, noting that a missed field goal sent the Bolts to Pittsburgh. No one would accuse them of having a glass chin, not after they’d won nine games in which they trailed, including their playoff opener, a contest they took in Mission Valley against the Miami Dolphins despite trailing 21-6. But they were, in Lindsey’s view, a strong-minded bunch able to cope with challenges on and off the field. Those Chargers were not the best offensive team in franchise history, or perhaps even the most talented squad in the “Boss Ross Era” of coach Bobby Ross.
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