The Old Man and the Sea Change

The last time the Raiders and Dallas Cowboys played a game of football here, the final score was 40-38. The game was called on account of tired.

They met again Sunday, and the final score wouldn’t have been 40-38 if they had stayed and played eight quarters.

This time the score was 17-13, in favor of the Raiders, who have never--repeat, never--been beaten by the Cowboys in Texas.

Granted, they won ugly.

To call this game a thing of beauty would be to call Dudley Moore tall. You would never guess that these franchises had been to nine Super Bowls. The way these players played Sunday, they won’t get into the next Super Bowl unless Dominic Frontiere sells them tickets.

This was just the fourth time these NFL superpowers have met, and if they looked a bit less formidable than before, there was good reason for it. Both teams had to play without their usually reliable quarterbacks.

The Cowboys were still missing Danny White.

And the Raiders were still missing Kenny Stabler.

Al Davis was getting such headaches watching his recent quarterbacks at work, he must have been thinking about changing the team slogan to Commitment to Excedrin.

At long last, though, after 30 more spellbinding minutes of the magic of Marc Wilson, the Raider coaching staff finally toddled over to the bench, brushed the dust off of several black jerseys, found the one with the number “16” on it, stood Jim Plunkett upright, grabbed an oil can, lubricated his elbows and knees, then sent him on his way.

Maybe the Cowboys never noticed. Maybe they caught the “6” on the quarterback’s shirt and mistakenly thought Wilson was still in the game. Maybe they stayed a little, shall we say, casual on defense, figuring that the Raider quarterback would be sure to hit the open man, and that some guy on defense would be the man who was open.

Or maybe, just maybe, old man Plunkett knew what he was doing.

Whatever, first he fired a 20-yard touchdown pass to wide receiver Dokie Williams, tying the score.

Then, after a Cowboy field goal, Plunkett pulled out the old “Get Long, Little Dokie” play and hit Williams with another touchdown pass, this one covering twice as many yards.

Well, folks, that’s our offensive highlight package for today. So long, everybody! See you next week!

It took less than 10 seconds Sunday to get an idea of just how offensive an offensive game this would be. No, honestly. With nine ticks off the clock, the Raiders already had a fumble on the kickoff and a penalty for a false start. This whole game was off to a false start.

Think about that for a minute. The Raiders messed up twice in the time it takes to count to 10. Think about it for a sixth of a minute.

(Pause here to permit reader to think.) Sorry, time’s up.

The game proceeded to get longer, not better. In the first half, the wild Cowboys and wooly Raiders joined forces for five fumbles and six interceptions. Football at its finest.

Their coaches were suffering on the sidelines. Cowboy Coach Landry wished he could yank his hat down over his eyes. Raider Coach Flores wished he could don glasses as dark as his clothes. Excedrin time? Not only that. Both Toms needed Tums.

In the second half, things picked right up.

Dallas quarterback Steve Pelluer wanted to make sure he absolutely, positively called the right play, so he called a timeout. The ball was on his own 38. Precisely 53 seconds had expired in the half. A real, real nervous moment in the game, kid.

Pelluer promptly returned to the huddle and called his favorite play: Interception Left.

He zipped it into the mitts of wide-open linebacker Jerry Robinson, whose interception gave the Raider defense, at this point in time, the same number of pass catches as the Raider offense: Four.

As it turned out, the Raider offense caught 11 passes to the defense’s five, although, given half a chance, Pelluer certainly could have thrown six or seven more. He showed that kind of arm.

The trouble with Pelluer was that he lacked the experience and maturity of Plunkett. As a matter of fact, he lacked 14 years’ worth of Plunkett’s experience and maturity. This guy won’t be Plunkett’s age until the turn of the century.

“I think any young quarterback is going to have a game like this,” Landry excused him afterward. “He’s going to have games that aren’t so good.”

He’s going to have them in Canada, if he keeps playing like this.

Texas Stadium was supposed to be the place where the Dallas Cowboys did not get saddled with such defeats. But these are hardly the Cowboys of old. Dallas doesn’t live here any more. The quarterback situation is so shaky, Roger Staubach must be thinking about bouncing back from the insurance business.

Thanks to all the mistakes, this became the first time the team has ever lost at Texas Stadium on a day in which Tony Dorsett rushed for 100 yards.

“I don’t want to call us Santa Claus yet, but we’ve definitely been 45 of his helpers,” Dorsett said.

The Cowboys are going to have to hang tough, just to make the NFC playoffs. “Our backs are not at the wall. Our backs are in the wall,” said Dorsett. “And if we’re not careful, we’re going to fall right through the wall.”

It might help if they found themselves an old, old quarterback. How old is Staubach, anyway?