Patriots Are Up for the Showdown in Denver

On their best days this season, the Denver Broncos have seemed like a Super Bowl team. They think they’re a Super Bowl team. And they may be.

A lot depends on whether they can beat the New England Patriots at 1 p.m. PST today as the National Football League’s four-game weekend ends at Mile High Stadium.

These are the champions of East and West in the AFC. But because neither side runs the ball with power or style, either John Elway of Denver or Tony Eason of New England is expected to figure in the final decision.

“When you need a big play out of the quarterback position, I’m always glad we have John,” Bronco Coach Dan Reeves said last week.

New England’s Raymond Berry, who coached his players into the 1986 Super Bowl and breasted a drug scandal to get them back to the 1987 playoffs, said: “I’ll take Tony.”

He’ll take him, he meant, over Steve Grogan, but if pressed to extend the argument, Berry might take him over anybody.

Berry is an Eason fan. Last year, when much of the New England community and many Patriots were ready to die for Grogan, Berry picked Eason and went on to win the AFC championship.

This week, when Eason recovered from the injury that disabled him in the Patriots’ final regular-season game at Miami, Berry instantly picked him to start at Denver--though it was Grogan who took over to beat Dan Marino and the Dolphins.

That was more than the Rams could do the week before, when Jim Everett carried Marino into overtime before losing.

Grogan beat him in regulation time in the game that New England had to win just to make the playoffs.

This season, New England overcame the Rams, too, on a Hail Mary pass, 30-28. Meanwhile, the Broncos overcame the Raiders twice, 38-36 here and 21-10 in Los Angeles, taking the Raiders out of the playoffs as surely as the Patriots took the Rams.

Reverse those three scores, and the L.A. teams aren’t watching today, they’re playing. In a season that lasts only 16 games, football players don’t have the same margin for error that makes baseball a more scientific game.

Science isn’t football’s long suit. If it were, this game would be on a neutral field somewhere instead of on a mile-high field in the Rockies, where the Broncos were 7-1 this season. At mid-season they lost a can-you-imagine-that game here to the stumbling San Diego Chargers, 9-3.

Contemplating the adventures he has had in Mile High Stadium, Berry said: “This is a noisy place to play, but it isn’t the noise, it’s the altitude (that bothers teams visiting Denver).”

To get the Patriots partially acclimated, Berry brought them to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs last Tuesday for their week of practice on a field in Denver’s altitude. “I think it was a help to us,” he said.

He listed all his players as physically ready or probable, including Eason, who had left the Miami game in the first half with a stretched nerve in his throwing shoulder.

Like Joe Namath long ago, Eason was injured trying to make a tackle.

Reeves said that at the beginning, he will be minus one Denver regular, safety Dennis Smith, who may play later, although Randy Robbins starts.

The Patriots are picking the Patriots for two reasons:

--Excluding the Super Bowl, where the Chicago Bears wiped them out last January, they’re 10-1 in their last 11 games on the road. This includes a 3-0 record in the playoffs last winter and a 7-1 regular-season road record this season, when they lost only in Denver, 27-20, after leading at halftime, 13-3.

--Long a defensive power, Denver has strangely given up an average of 34 points a week in its last four games. It didn’t sack a quarterback in its last two.

Lengthy passes have been the undoing of the Broncos recently after they had established long leads.

And Eason is a brilliant long passer.

But, then, so is Elway.