Day 6 of the 100-day countdown revisits the playoff game where Roger Staubach’s desperation pass to Drew Pearson became a permanent part of football vocabulary and changed how late-game passes are described.
Roger Staubach’s last-second 50-yard touchdown pass to Drew Pearson forged the phrase “Hail Mary” into football language.
Dallas overcame a 14-10 deficit with a final drive that began at its own 15 with 1:51 left and no timeouts.
The game featured stout Minnesota defense, an earlier Vikings turnover on a punt, and a crucial third-down sack of Fran Tarkenton by Charlie Waters that forced the decisive punt.
This entry covers the Cowboys' wild-card playoff win at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, Minnesota, on December 28, 1975. The final score: Dallas 17, Minnesota 14. The matchup pitched a 10-4 Cowboys team against a 12-2 Vikings club led by MVP quarterback Fran Tarkenton and a stingy defense that allowed the fewest yards in the NFL that season.
The first half was defense-heavy. Minnesota's Chuck Foreman scored on a short run after a punt bounce put the Vikings at the Cowboys' four-yard line. The Vikings led 7-0 at halftime. Dallas answered in the second half with a drive capped by Doug Dennison's four-yard touchdown run to tie the game. Toni Fritsch later gave Dallas a 10-7 lead with a 24-yard field goal early in the fourth quarter.
Minnesota responded with an 11-play, 70-yard drive that Tarkenton finished with a one-yard run by Brent McClanahan, putting the Vikings back up 14-10 with 5:24 left. Minnesota then appeared positioned to run out the clock. On a third-and-two just before the two-minute warning, Charlie Waters beat a block and sacked Tarkenton for a three-yard loss, forcing the Vikings to punt.
Staubach's postgame remark that he had said a "Hail Mary" after releasing the ball gave the play its name. The phrase became shorthand across football for any last-second desperation pass into the end zone. Beyond naming the play, the sequence is a compact story of late-game adversity, clutch execution on fourth-and-long, and a single catch that rewrote part of the sport's vocabulary.
It is Day 7 of our 100-day countdown to kickoff. We are looking back at the 100 most iconic games in Dallas Cowboys history. The countdown will leads us right up to the opening game of 2026. Our look back doesn’t depend on just one criteria for our rankings. We take into consideration things like […]
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