Throwback Thursday: The Body Bag Game

(Editor's note: Each week VICE Sports will take a look back at an important sports event from this week in sports history. We are calling this regular feature Throwback Thursday, or #TBT for all you cool kids. You can read previous installments here.)

Twenty-five years removed from broadcasting a game between Philadelphia and Washington so laced with physical menace that it earned a Tarantino-esque nickname and altered the rules of professional football, Merrill Reese does not recall that evening as being so much out of the ordinary. The game played on November 12, 1990 wasn't the most violent contest of that vintage Eagles defense era; that would come the next season, in 1991, during a contest against the Houston Oilers known as the "House of Pain" game. It was not the most bloodthirsty crowd Reese had ever witnessed at Veterans' Stadium, either, because every crowd in Veterans' Stadium, particularly for a Monday Night Football game against a division rival, was laced with a near-riotous energy.

"I don't know if that game had that kind of significance," says Reese, the longtime Philadelphia play-by-play announcer, when I ask him to put the contest known as the Body Bag Game in historical perspective. "I don't believe it was a dirty game. Other than the tremendous hitting, which was the main characteristic of a Buddy Ryan defense."

And yet the game matters, because Philadelphia has clung to the pugnacious romanticism of the Buddy Ryan era in the years since, and because this game has become a signature of the city itself—as one local morning-show host said a few years back, the Body Bag Game was representative of what Philadelphia sports fans truly desire, which is not just winning games but "proving your manhood." It matters because all these years later, Eagles fans—and NFL fans as a whole—are still wrestling with that idea, and with the notion of what modern football is becoming. And it matters, too, because if something like the Body Bag Game occurred today, it would no doubt raise a furious uproar about the viability of professional football itself.

What happened that night stuck in the public consciousness for a few reasons—in large part because it was a nationally televised Monday Night game between NFC East rivals—but the main one was this: Washington, already down a quarterback with Mark Rypien injured, lost two more quarterbacks that night when starter Jeff Rutledge broke his thumb and backup Stan Humphries sprained his knee. That left kick returner Brian Mitchell, who stepped in to play quarterback late in the Washington's 28-14 defeat. In the wake of that confluence of events, the NFL would implement the third-quarterback rule, which allowed for an emergency quarterback to enter the game in a situation like this one.

In all, six Washington players were lost due to injury that night, and several more were forced to leave the game, including wide receiver Joe Howard, who was carried off on a stretcher after suffering a concussion. At some point, Eagles safety William Frizzell shouted at Washington's bench, "You need any more body bags?"

With that, a myth was born.

"I don't think I've ever been involved in a game where so many players went down," Washington coach Joe Gibbs would say afterward. "It seemed like every play."

Said Eagles defensive lineman Jerome Brown: "They acted like they didn't want to play us anymore."

That, of course, was the reputation Buddy Ryan had been seeking to craft for the Eagles ever since he'd arrived. Ryan was a more pointed version of his goofball offspring: an inveterate shit-talker, a guy who encouraged his players to knock out quarterbacks (and maybe kickers, too) and sucker-punched fellow coaches; Ryan was also endlessly entertaining, in large part because he spent much of the week before the game attempting to work his way into the heads of his opponents. He said stupid things and ridiculous things and crazy things, and he didn't care how they went over; he was the polar opposite of the meticulous and workmanlike Gibbs, who responded to Ryan's insults with near-complete silence.

The Body Bag Game came during Ryan's fifth season in Philadelphia. The Eagles had made the playoffs the past two years but had yet to win a postseason game. Their defense was unequivocally ferocious: Perhaps the signature highlight of the Body Bag Game that doesn't involve some kind of medical crisis was one of Reggie White's three career interceptions. In a way, the game was the apex of the Ryan era, because at that moment the Eagles appeared to have surpassed their division rivals. Two weeks later, the Eagles would blow out the 10-0 Giants by a score of 31-13, and in the first round of the playoffs, they would again face Washington. This is where everything took a turn.

In the days before that rematch, Ryan bleated away, predicting that Washington running back Earnest Byner, still fresh off the 1987 fumble that likely cost the Browns the AFC Championship, would fumble three times. Washington's players and coaches said nothing in response, because Gibbs did not allow them to respond. Instead, they dominated the line of scrimmage and won the game, 20-6. The next season, 1991, Washington won their first 11 games and eventually the Super Bowl. Buddy Ryan, having alienated mercurial Eagles owner Norman Braman, was fired after that playoff loss and replaced by Rich Kotite. And nothing would ever quite be the same, either in Philadelphia or in professional football.

"Football has evolved, and the rules of the game were different back then," Reese says. "Today you brush against a receiver on a pattern and a flag flies. I don't know how many quarterbacks the Eagles knocked out of games during that period, but today the rules legislate against that. And I'm not saying it's wrong, because you have to protect the quarterback, and you have to make the game less violent. But at the time, that was within the framework of the rules."

Years later, Eagles fans are still chafing against the ethos of the Chip Kelly, a coach whose philosophy and are perceived as nearly the opposite of Ryan's. The NFL has indeed evolved, and in a way the Body Bag Game, even the name itself, feels like a relic of a bygone era, a throwback to a time when professional football could revel in violence without simultaneously wrestling with its conscience. That it backfired on Buddy Ryan—that all the threats and takedowns ultimately amounted to nothing—was perhaps a sign of where things were headed.