Pro Football : For Doug Williams, Super Bowl Was No Fluke

One thing that shouldn’t be lost when recalling Sunday’s Super Bowl game is that Doug Williams has been a very good quarterback for many years. From the start, actually.

Some are thinking of him now as a journeyman or worse, perhaps as a mediocre quarterback who either got lucky, or who suddenly came on, after a long career in which he threw the ball too hard or too wild to ever amount to anything.

Such evaluations are basically nonsense. Long ago, John McKay was right about Williams. The 32-year-old quarterback of the champion Redskins was a blue-chip quarterback when McKay drafted him, and he has been a superior quarterback ever since.

Until this winter, Williams has been, simply, unlucky.

He is the living proof of a two-part story about football:

--Regardless of how much talent any quarterback personally has, he needs a good coach to be a really successful quarterback.

--A football coach needs a good quarterback to become a really successful coach.

It has been demonstrated during many seasons on many teams that neither a good quarterback nor a good coach can have much success on his own.

Together, though, the good ones can make history, as Vince Lombardi and Bart Starr did in Super Bowls I and II, as Chuck Noll and Terry Bradshaw did in the 1970s, as Tom Landry and Roger Staubach did with the Dallas Cowboys and as Joe Gibbs and Williams did Sunday.

Archie Manning, the most talented New Orleans Saint in the old Ain’t days, would be remembered perhaps as the finest quarterback of all time if he had played all those years on a real team.

Chuck Knox, coach of the Seattle Seahawks, would have been in at least one Super Bowl by now--and probably would have won at least one--if he’d ever had a Manning or Bradshaw at quarterback.

Whatever his flaws as a National Football League coach, one thing can be said about John McKay: He knew a first-class quarterback when he saw one.

Stuffing John Elway is an achievement that was beyond the 1987 Chicago Bears. It was beyond the Minnesota Vikings, who, possibly, have hired the most talent in the league. Down the stretch, it was beyond any American Football Conference rival this season.

It proved astonishingly easy for the Redskins, who won by stuffing the Denver quarterback, although he had given the Broncos the first 10 points.

When Washington’s defense finally got control of Elway--when, that is, they got the genie back in the bottle after scaring themselves and their friends by letting him out--it was all over for Denver. Then, it was just a matter of time.

With any average quarterback playing error-free football, throwing a few straight passes, and remembering to hand off a lot to Timmy Smith, the Redskins were going to win eventually by 17-10 or 23-10. With great passing, they moved the final score to 42-10.

It was Williams who made it a rout.

It was Washington’s defensive coach, Richie Petitbon, who denied the fans the Elway-Williams shoot-out.

How did Petitbon capture the genie?

With blitzes. On every big-play down, the Redskins rushed Elway with five instead of four--with a safety or linebacker plus their front four. At times they sent in a starting strong safety Alvin Walton or nickel safety Clarence Vaughn, and at times they called on linebacker Monte Coleman.

“We blitzed him to fill up all the lanes,” Gibbs said Monday. “We did it to keep him from finding (an open lane where he could) scramble.”

That was the Redskins’ purpose. But when the Broncos couldn’t deflect the Redskin rush, the rushers poured in on Elway and kept him from passing or running.

Elway is a different kind of passer. He prefers to jam his right foot forcefully behind his body and stretch out his left leg like a baseball pitcher on a pass play. By contrast, most other good passers today, including Williams, use a body-twisting passing motion. Thus, Williams can--and did--throw the ball with blitzers in his chest or his face.

But to deliver the ball the way he wants to, Elway needs a big preliminary step. And it was this that the Redskin blitz took away.

Elway, rushed, didn’t panic, didn’t freeze. He didn’t have a bad day. He simply couldn’t do what he has to do to be effective.

He remains what he was before the game--the league’s great quarterback, the league’s only one-man team. He lost because he is a one-man team.

The Redskins’ five touchdowns in the second quarter were all produced by an offense playing flawlessly on five big plays against a defense that was either guilty on those plays of nothing but minor mistakes or, at times, overwhelmed.

You don’t see that combination too often--certainly not 5 times in 15 minutes.

On Williams’ first touchdown pass, Denver cornerback Mark Haynes broke a simple defensive rule. Curiously, when he lined up in front of receiver Ricky Sanders, Haynes was in an upright stance.

There are two ways for a cornerback to slow down a wide receiver at a time like that--he can deliver a crushing hit or he can make the guy take a big circle route around him--but standing straight up, Haynes could do neither.

The play was a touchdown when Williams threw the bomb with such accuracy.

Next, on third and one, Williams threw another accurate pass 27 yards into a corner to wide receiver Gary Clark.

To the Broncos, that down is a rushing down. They blitzed the offense to run the ball as, on such an occasion, it usually does. Even so, they could have reacted to keep the Redskins out of the end zone but for the perfection of Williams’ throw. Clark played it into a difficult catch, but the ball hit him in the chest.

After Smith’s 58-yard touchdown run--which caught the Broncos slanting the wrong way--Williams, after faking a first-down handoff, threw another accurate mid-range pass that Sanders extended into a 50-yard touchdown.

That time, at the snap of the ball, the Redskins went beautifully and completely through all the motions of a fake run, even pulling a guard, Raleigh McKenzie. When Denver safety Tony Lilly understandably went for the faking Redskin runner, Sanders went by him for the touchdown.

Finally, raising the score to 35-10, the Redskins successfully executed a play they call often on third and four inside the 10-yard line--a pass to tight end Clint Didier running a crossing pattern. This was an eight-yard scoring play that the Broncos might have handled in the first minute of the quarter. They knew it was coming. But after yielding 4 touchdowns in 14 minutes, they were in a state of shock.

The key to the big quarter was Williams’ first pass, the bomb to Sanders. When they lined up for that play, the Redskins had given up on their running game. The Broncos had knocked Smith back for almost as many yards as he went forward in the first quarter. The Redskins had come in to the game believing they had to run to win, and they had found that they couldn’t.

Suddenly, it was all up to Doug Williams. Would he throw the ball straight? Jay Schroeder was on the bench because he couldn’t. Williams could. Exit Elway.