SUPER BOWL XXI : DENVER vs. NEW YORK : Giants May Have Broncos Over Barrel : Dan Reeves Will Buck Odds With Elway, Mirrors

All good things must come to an end, including Super Bowl XXI week, which gave us:

--News stories like “Bill Gives ‘em Hell--Angry Coach Lights a Fire Under Giants” and “L.T. Carves Path for Jints to Follow” and “Local Psychics Predict Bronco Victory.”

--New personalities like Mark Bavaro, also known as Mark Bizzare-O, whose interviews went like this:

Question: Your comments about the game.

Murmured answer: I don’t want to talk about the game.

Q: What have you been doing in your spare time?

Murmured A: Nothing

--Speculation about what those Caltech madcaps are up to this time. How about mining the Giants’ Gatorade barrel?

Don’t you just wish it could go on forever? This afternoon at 3, however, they have cleared a little space at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena for a game between the Denver Broncos and New York Giants, also known as Super Bowl XXI, for the National Football League championship.

Warning to consumers: Unless a recent trend is reversed, you could be back watching “Wild Kingdom” by 3:30, having endured the entire week for nothing but an extended pregame show followed by a dramatic rendition of a steamroller running over an egg.

The Giants are 9 1/2-point favorites. Even discounting the warp factors--New York money, the hype attached to the Giants’ 11-game winning streak--the spread would have been a solid 7 points.

This is the not-so-classic matchup of a big, strong, mean team on a roll and one of the longest-running mirror jobs in the game, the Dan Reeves-Joe Collier-John Elway Broncos.

The Broncos have one of the NFL’s smallest offensive lines, one of its lightest defenses and no remarkable team speed. But what the heck, someone had to represent the AFC. The NFC had at least four teams that would have been favored today.

Even so, fans of competitive football should be glad it was the Broncos who got through the playoffs. Can you imagine poor, slow Bernie Kosar sitting in Lawrence Taylor’s cross-hairs all day?

At least this game has Elway and the possibilities inherent whenever he walks onto a field, the incredible heights he can dial his game up to, not to forget the awful lows he can hit if he dials a wrong number. THE INEVITABLE HISTORY LESSON

Is Giant Coach Bill Parcells going to have to persuade his players to get serious?

“We only beat them three points, with six seconds on the clock,” he said last week. “Most of my guys were at the game. I don’t have to do much convincing.”

That was at the Meadowlands, too, on Nov. 23, the Giants winning, 19-16. Elway passed for 336 yards, his season high. The dreaded Giant rush sacked him twice all day, and he scrambled for 51 yards and a 6.8 average. Taylor had him lined up in the backfield once and bounced off, after which Elway scrambled up the field for a 10-yard gain.

However:

The Giants seem to have gotten a lot better since. They’ve beaten their last four opponents, 148-48. They haven’t allowed a touchdown in the playoffs. Their combined playoff score over the San Francisco 49ers and Washington Redskins, both of whom would have been favored over the Broncos, was 66-3. In the playoffs, Giant opponents have converted 2 of 32 third-down attempts.

The Broncos don’t seem to have gotten any better since then, unless you like the theory that they came together and Elway matured on that 98-yard drive in Cleveland. At present, it would be safer to describe that as an event, rather than a trend.

The Broncos went 3-4 to close the regular season. Their running game, a problem all year--leading rusher Sammy Winder had a 3.1 average--died in that stretch. Their All-Pro strong safety, Dennis Smith, started getting put to the torch on a weekly basis.

Then, the Broncos got it together in the playoffs. They’re on a roll, too, but it’s a shorter one. WHEN THE GIANTS HAVE THE BALL

Joe Morris time.

People at the game are going to be lucky. They’ll be spared hearing the TV guys say for the millionth time that Morris isn’t small, he’s just short. He’s 5 feet 7 inches and 195 pounds. Do your own descriptions.

Although he’s a better runner on artificial turf, he’s no stiff on grass. In September at the Coliseum, he became the first runner to get 100 yards against the Raiders since the end of the ’84 season. His turf-grass average--95-65--was pulled down by the game at San Francisco in which Coach Bill Walsh parked his strong safety at the line of scrimmage and dared Simms to beat him. Morris got 14 yards in 13 carries, but Simms beat the 49ers.

The Raiders’ Howie Long once said the Giants’ offensive line “plays well as a unit,” a polite way of saying it gets the job done without having anyone who keeps you awake at night. Right tackle Brad Benson made a reputation this season blocking the Redskins’ Dexter Manley, but the keys to the running game are 225-pound fullback Maurice Carthon and the 245-pound Bavaro. The Giants run heavily toward the strong side, the one Bavaro is on, for good reason.

Simms takes a lot of heat, as will any quarterback in this kind of simplified offense, where you slam away and then throw deep. Simms has been a big-play guy, all right, but for both sides. Even this season, when he saved several games, he finished with 21 touchdown passes and 22 interceptions.

The receivers are OK to good, but the man in the Bronco nightmares is Bavaro. He may be a little on the quiet side of the Sphinx, but he’s something to behold on the field.

You can find tight ends who can block, but those with 1,000-yard receiving seasons come along about once a generation. Bavaro does both. His 15.2-yard average was higher than those of such wide receivers as Al Toon and Art Monk. How a monster his size gets deep so often is hard to imagine.

“The more I see film, the more I think we somehow have got to get a handle on Bavaro,” Bronco linebacker Tom Jackson said. “When we played last time, they only threw two passes to him. He caught one and one was incomplete. Since that time, Phil Simms has gained so much confidence in him.”

Ah, the Broncos . . .

Jackson and the other outside linebacker, Jim Ryan, both give away 25 pounds to Bavaro. The Giants throw linebackers that size back into the draft.

Amazingly, the Broncos habitually hang in against overpowering opposition. The primary reason is not Karl Mecklenburg or Rulon Jones but Collier, a Bronco assistant for 18 seasons and 5 head coaches. He has so many schemes, fronts and looks that no one can quite figure out where the Broncos are coming from next.

Of course, if Collier had his druthers . . .

“If we had bigger linebackers and linemen, I’d just as soon play it (the Giants’) way,” Collier said. “Sometimes, I think we do too many things. If we had big guys, we wouldn’t.”

Said Jackson: “The first thing they tell you here is you have to be smart. And you have to have heart because you’re going to take some licks.”

The Broncos have one unresolved problem: Smith, of Santa Monica High and USC, who was bombed repeatedly late in the season, most recently by Kosar and Brian Brennan for the score that Elway’s 98-yard drive got back.

“I just got beat,” Smith said. “No excuses. I’ve seen everybody in the league get beat, from Mike Haynes on down. It’s not like it isn’t going to happen. You’ve got to deal with it when it does.

“The Cleveland game, that wasn’t a great pass or a great route. (Brennan) adjusted better than I did. (Kosar) threw up a prayer.”

Said Collier: “Dennis is our kingpin. He’s our force man on the run. He plays the tight ends. In a nickel defense, he plays their best receiver. Consequently, he’s in a situation where more things can happen to him. There’s no strong safety in the league who does the things he does--nobody.”

That’s good, because today he gets to spend perhaps half his time with Bavaro. WHEN THE BRONCOS HAVE THE BALL

The question is not so much whether the Giants can stop the Bronco running game, but what happens after they do.

Then it’s John Elway time. If he’s brilliant, we’ve got a ballgame. Otherwise, it’s basketball season.

The Giants have a good front three, a secondary that might grade out at D-plus, but who notices? Behind the line and in front of the defensive backs work the finest, biggest, scariest set of linebackers in captivity, led by the wild dude himself, Taylor; eight-time Pro Bowl pick Harry Carson and Carl Banks, another No. 1 draft choice, the dwarf of the crew at 6-4, 235.

“We ask a lot of our linebackers,” said defensive coordinator Joe Belichick, who was once a Bronco assistant under Collier. “They play tight ends. Our inside linebackers play 270-280-pound guards, and we don’t give them a lot of help. They have to be quick enough and physical enough for that.

“Some of the quicker ones end up in Denver--not that they’re not good players, too. They just don’t fit our scheme.”

The Giant scheme knocked four quarterbacks out of games this season. Taylor won’t discuss whatever internal mayhem he feels, but he spent the last two weeks describing the perfect quarterback sack in some anatomical detail.

Said safety Kenny Hill: “If I was a quarterback and my coach told me, ‘Take the seven-step drop and then read the safeties,’ I’d be a little nervous. I play behind those guys and I’m nervous. I’ve been hit harder by Harry Carson this year than by any running back I’ve played against.

“With L.T. and Carl, you don’t know what they’ll do or where they’ll be.”

Taylor, miked once during a game by NFL Films, was heard emitting blood-curdling yells at teammates, screaming, “Play like wild dogs!”

The Broncos have to go against this?

Their offensive line is small, and Reeves has been thwarted in his efforts to build it up. Rookie tackle Jim Juriga became a starter but went down in the last exhibition. Mark Cooper, a No. 2 draft pick in 1983, was supposed to become the new right guard but was beaten out again by 36-year-old Paul Howard, who then was hurt in the Patriot playoff. Left guard Keith Bishop has just become the first Bronco offensive lineman ever named to the Pro Bowl, and the selection was a surprise.

What does that leave?

Elway, his receivers and Dan Reeves’ bag of tricks.

The receivers are young, but they’re pretty good. Vance Johnson looked fantastic in the exhibition season but injured his knee in the opener, underwent arthroscopic surgery and hasn’t regained his old explosiveness. It would have been noticed more except for the development of two rookies, Mark Jackson, who is another burner, and Orson Mobley, the 256-pound tight end.

Could this be Johnson’s day? Born for the spotlight, he turned up in earrings after the Cleveland game and talked himself onto the Joan Rivers show last week. How could he stay so effusive when some of his teammates dreaded the mass interviews so much?

“That’s the way they are,” Vance said. “Vance likes it.”

Early in the season, Reeves unleashed most of the gadget plays known to man: reverses, flea flickers. When they don’t work and the team doesn’t win, they’re also known as Mickey Mouse high-school-Harry stuff. The Bronco ones worked, starting in the opener when halfback Steve Sewell threw a touchdown pass to Elway in a 38-36 victory over the Raiders.

Lately, the Broncos have only faked the gadgets and run orthodox plays off them, but there’s nothing left to save them for after today.

“When No. 30 (Sewell) comes in, something’s going to happen,” says Patriot backup quarterback Tom Ramsey.

“In our game, he comes in and our defense is yelling ‘He’s in the game! He’s in the game!’ Then they just run their regular offense and crush you.”

Parcells had a 45-minute film of Bronco gadgets made up and showed them to his team.

Reeves was hoping they would show it every day.

“We got 2 1/2 times more trick plays and we’re gonna use all of them,” Reeves said, laughing. “We can’t move the football against ‘em, we might as well try to trick ‘em.”

He was kidding. Or maybe he wasn’t.

Whichever, for better or worse, it seems that it has to come down to one 26-year-old bundle of promise, the kid from Granada Hills, the last barrier before the rising Giant tide.