Columnist Dean Juipe: Great day, great year for Flutie

Dean Juipe

Monday, Nov. 30, 1998 | 10:20 a.m.

If his team hadn't been swindled out of a victory Sunday, it's possible the leading contender for the National Football League's Most Valuable Player award this season would be a small, 36-year-old man who hadn't played in the league since 1989.

But, through no fault of his own, Doug Flutie's chances for the trophy are a little less today than they were prior to the officials deciding the outcome of the Buffalo vs. New England game at Foxboro Stadium. In a season seemingly plagued by inept officiating, the Patriots were virtually handed a gift touchdown on the game's penultimate play to escape with a 25-21 win.

For all but the most rabid of New England fans, the interference call that set up the Patriots' final score was an outrage. For that matter, so was the officials' call on the play that preceded it, and if either of those calls is made correctly the Bills win and Flutie is once again a hero.

He's still a hero to those smitten with modest, unpretentious underdogs.

Driven out of the league at the outset of the decade under the guise that he was too short (5-foot-10) and too lean (170 pounds) to play at the top level, Flutie took his game to Canada before returning to the depleted and desperate Bills last summer.

Almost singlehandedly, he has made Buffalo a playoff contender despite the fact it started the season 0-for-September. Even with the loss to the Patriots, Buffalo is 7-5 and in the running for a wild-card spot with games remaining against Cincinnati, Oakland, the New York Jets and New Orleans.

Flutie is on the short list of MVP candidates, as are Denver's John Elway and Terrell Davis, Green Bay's Brett Favre and Minnesota's Randall Cunningham. (The Vikings' Randy Moss also rates consideration but is a long shot as a rookie.)

Throwing for 339 yards against the Patriots, Flutie came within a controversial call or two of raising his Foxboro record to 11-0. A product of the Boston suburbs who later played at Boston College, he was the dominant player in Sunday's "homecoming" game and is the reason the Bills have returned to respectability after finishing 6-10 last year and out of the playoffs for only the second time in the 1990s.

Flutie has completed 60 percent of his passes and thrown 15 for touchdowns (against seven interceptions). He's a quick and nimble runner who is rarely sacked, and as a passer has a nice touch and surprisingly effective velocity.

He's a leader and a player with an important intangible: "heart."

And while it's obvious he improved greatly during his stretch in the Canadian Football League, it's also hard to believe -- especially in retrospect -- that the NFL turned its back on Flutie after the Patriots let him go following the '89 season.

He really is a heady player, making the right moves and avoiding the quick-trigger mistakes that are the undoing of many an unpolished quarterback.

He has also put people in the seats, with the Bills looking at capacity crowds (80,024) at Rich Stadium this year after averaging only 60,000 last season.

He's a little big man from the school of hard knocks, a Napoleon without a personality disorder.

Too bad the officials imposed their own Waterloo on what was looking like a storybook run for a diminutive scrambler.