Storm Warnings Ahead for Buffalo : Once-Hot Bills Feeling the Heat, and the Raiders

Alarms are going off all over western New York, where the good times have turned bad, a storm has just hit and a dark cloud of another kind, the Raiders, is due, too.

Practiced survivors, the natives mobilized. The highway patrol fueled their snowplows, and the Buffalo Bills closed their practices.

Al Davis has eyes everywhere, the legend goes, though it’s such an old story that the Raiders’ usual opponents never mention it anymore. The Raiders get all the fame/notoriety for secrecy/paranoia, but teams such as the Denver Broncos close all their practices, too, and demand that visiting reporters be off the lot before the first bomb squadder does his first jumping jack.

The Bills, not to be outdone, hired security guards, closed off the road next to the practice field and even barred the Buffalo press corps.

“(The Raiders) have a lot of friends all over,” Buffalo Coach Marv Levy said. “They have a little bit of a reputation of maybe inadvertently losing their way.”

Didn’t he think this suggested an excess of paranoia?

“No,” said Levy, the phrasemaker who holds a master’s degree in English from Harvard. “We have just the right amount of paranoia.”

Now that we have paranoia out of the way, we can get to the real story:

Weather.

The snow is supposed to be as high as an elephant’s eye, the temperature at game time may be as low as 10 degrees, but the real problem may be the wind, which can swirl around Rich Stadium at 40 m.p.h. and make pitchouts adventures, not to mention what it can do to passes.

“It’ll be cold, windy, snowy, icy,” Levy said last week.

“Might be a little sleet, too. In the 20s . . . with a sharp north wind. And that’s indoors!”

Laugh it up, Marvelous. He has an offense designed just for those elements, ground-oriented, conservative, aiming to let Cornelius Bennett, Bruce Smith and the big, bad Bill defense win the game.

After 12 weeks, the Bills were 12th in the league in scoring--and were 11-1.

They clinched their first division title since 1980 3 weeks ago, whereupon their ever-exuberant fans--remember the guy swinging on that cable between the upper and lower decks on a Monday night telecast in the ‘70s?--staged a wild party. Thousands poured onto the field, scaring the fleeing players, tearing down the goal posts that were specially greased to repel them, incurring several fractures and doing $20,000 of assorted damage.

“That kind of celebration would have been OK for V-E Day,” Levy said.

A week later, the Bills went to Cincinnati for an “AFC championship preview” and were beaten, 35-21.

Then they lost, 10-5, at Tampa, perhaps costing themselves the home-field advantage throughout the playoffs that they thought they had locked up. The wailing started for real.

“We keep playing this way, and the only way we are going to make the Super Bowl is if we pay our way,” safety Leonard Smith said.

How did those fans take this one?

“I’ve lived in L.A. and there’s so many other things to divide your attention,” said Levy, who was George Allen’s special teams coach with the Rams. “Everything is heavily here on how the Bills do.

“It almost affects the mood of the city on Monday morning, whether you win or lose.”

What’s the mood now, alarmed?

“I don’t know if they’re alarmed. I think alarmed is too strong a word, really.”

OK, what’s a good word?

“Panic?” Levy suggested.

This game figures to come down to this:

--Which team runs the ball better and has to throw it less.

--Which quarterback doesn’t come unglued.

Jim Kelly, the Bills’ much-admired quarterback, is a rough-and-tumble type with a strong arm, though he doesn’t have enough fast receivers to go deep.

“You could ship Tim Brown here,” Kelly suggested to Los Angeles reporters last week. “You’ve still got plenty.”

For the first time, Kelly has bad numbers--12 touchdown passes, 17 interceptions--and is getting some heat. He couldn’t take the Bills home last week on their final drive, throwing an interception on which he drilled a Buccaneer defender in the numbers.

He’s 1-7 in December games.

When it was time for him to take charge last season, he had a woeful game in another December Rich Stadium gale, losing to the New England Patriots, 31-13, as the Bills finished 1-3 and missed the playoffs.

For the first time, Kelly is showing the pressure, too. Last week, he talked to the Raider press corps by telephone, then skipped out on the hometown reporters. In Buffalo, the party’s over.

Raider Notes

The Bills are 6-point favorites. . . . The playoff situation: Today the Raiders root for the Seattle Seahawks, who are playing the Broncos. If Denver wins--it’s a 3-point underdog--the Raiders might need 2 victories to win the division title. If Seattle wins, the Raiders would win the AFC West by winning next week’s showdown, no matter what happens here today. . . . Key matchup: Buffalo’s Bruce Smith (8 1/2 sacks in 10 games) vs. Don Mosebar. Mosebar is considered the blue-chipper of a Raider line that has been getting progressively worse reviews lately, but he has struggled. Teammates say he’s quietly playing hurt, with a bone chip in one ankle. . . . The Bills will be without top receiver Andre Reed, who has a knee injury. Despite the urgency they talk about, with a playoff spot clinched, they may keep linebacker Shane Conlan out, which weakens their run defense. . . . Jay Schroeder played in Buffalo last season with the Washington Redskins, went 11 for 18, threw for 2 touchdowns and ran 13 yards for another in a 27-7 victory on a relatively balmy day. . . . Bill rookie Thurman Thomas, who kept Barry Sanders on the bench last season at Oklahoma State, has a 4.1-yard rushing average and 748 yards. Tampa Bay held him to 1 yard in 7 carries last week.