SUPER BOWL XXIV : SAN FRANCISCO 49ERS 55 DENVER BRONCOS 10 : A Back-to-Back Breaker : Super Bowl: Montana throws five touchdown passes and 49ers defeat Broncos, 55-10, for their second consecutive NFL championship victory.

This time, the Denver Broncos said, it would be different. And they were right. This time, it was even worse.

The San Francisco 49ers won their second consecutive Super Bowl in Game No. XXIV here Sunday, before a crowd of 72,919 persons, each of whom expected entertainment and instead got a figurative blood-letting. The final score was 55-10, and it could have been worse. Denver, fittingly nicknamed the Orange Crush, went flat like a bunch of tin cans for the third time in four years in this game. The Broncos have now lost those games by a total score of 136-40.

Never have so many players from one team played so badly in front of so many people. All this team needed was Wrong Way Corrigan.

Joe Montana passed for a Super Bowl-record five touchdowns and the 49ers, as expected, were awesome. But many of Montana’s passes were completed to receivers who were open enough to be in a different time zone. Even Montana isn’t that good.

With slightly more than 10 minutes left in the game, Montana gave way to his backup, Steve Young. By that time, he had completed 22 of 29 passes for 297 yards and established all sorts of Super Bowl game and career records.

Montana set career records for touchdown passes, completions, yards, passing attempts and MVP awards. In his four Super Bowls, Montana has completed 83 of 122 passes (68%) for 1,142 yards. He also completed a record 13 consecutive passes Sunday. It was the third time he had been named the MVP.

His team, now certain to be touted as the best ever in the NFL, had broken Chicago’s Super Bowl point record. The Bears beat New England, 46-10, in 1986.

The 49ers, who outscored their opponents in the playoffs, 126-26, led 27-3 at halftime, and the only question that seemed to remain was just how embarrassing it would be for Denver this time.

The beleaguered Broncos had already lost two Super Bowls in the 1980s, and each one was in the category of a drubbing. They are 0-4 in Super Bowls.

The New York Giants kicked them around, 39-20, in the ’87 game in the Rose Bowl; then the Washington Redskins used them like a battering ram in the ’88 game, 42-10.

So Sunday’s 27-3 halftime deficit, representing the second largest such spread in Super Bowl history since the Redskins took a 35-10 margin into the locker room at San Diego in 1988, was an all-too-familiar feeling for Denver.

While Montana was doing what Montana does, passing for three touchdowns and knocking off some more of Terry Bradshaw’s Super Bowl records, John Elway, the man who seems to be super only when he is playing a game that doesn’t carry that label, appeared to be in some kind of stupor.

Elway finished the half with six completions in 20 attempts. His big gainer via the airways was a two-yard shovel pass in the backfield to Bobby Humphrey, which Humphrey turned into a 27-yard gain. The Broncos eventually turned that into a 42-yard field goal by David Treadwell.

Elway seemed to like that approach so well that he tried three other shovel passes in the half, but those have always worked better at Stanford, where he played in college, than they have in the NFL. At the half, he was one for four on shovel passes, an unacceptable statistic even in Palo Alto.

Elway finished with 10 completions in 26 attempts for 108 yards, two interceptions and he fumbled once.

So, while Elway was adding more negatives to his Super Bowl legend, Montana was calmly taking his to new heights.

He passed 20 yards over the middle to Jerry Rice for a 7-0 lead and the first of Rice’s Super Bowl-record three receiving touchdowns. Then on a naked roll-out later in the first quarter, he passed to Brent Jones as the lead grew to 13-3. In the second quarter, he used nearly seven minutes in 14-play drive that resulted in a one-yard scoring run by Tom Rathman.

Then just for good measure, Montana decided not to run out the clock with a minute or so left in the half, choosing instead to go for another score on second and one from the Denver 38. Rice beat Denver’s Dennis Smith by only 15 or 20 yards and the 49ers had sent the Broncos into their locker room with a limited number of choices: come back out of pride or slip quietly out the back door and catch a plane before anybody noticed.

In addition to shredding the Broncos, Montana had several notable accomplishments in the first half:

--A screen pass to Roger Craig early in the game gave him a record total of 62 completions in Super Bowls, breaking a mark held by him and Roger Staubach of the Dallas Cowboys.

--His scoring pass to Jones late in the first quarter gave him 937 yards passing in Super Bowls, breaking the record of 932 held by Terry Bradshaw of the Pittsburgh Steelers.

--And his scoring pass to Rice just before the end of the half tied him with Bradshaw with nine Super Bowl touchdown passes.

Craig, the 49ers’ star running back, also set a record with his 17th Super Bowl reception, topping the mark by the Steelers’ Lynn Swann.

At the half, Montana was 15 for 21 for 189 yards; Elway had thrown for 64 yards.

Perhaps the most impressive moments for the 49ers came in their drive for a 20-3 lead. Montana went repeatedly to his other running back from Nebraska, Rathman, who made catches of 18, 12 and nine yards, including a one-handed grab over the middle that took the ball to the Bronco three. From there, Rathman plunged through for a first down on fourth down, and, after Craig had been given a chance to get it into the end zone, Rathman squirted through on the same play that brought the first down.

Going into the game, Rathman, who caught 73 passes this season, had only one rushing touchdown in the ’89 season and six in his career, one in postseason play.

One telling statistic of the first half was time of possession. San Francisco 20 minutes 55 seconds, Denver 9:05.

As if the first half wasn’t enough, the 49ers quickly turned the game from a joke into a farce.

Elway’s first pass of the second half was intercepted by linebacker Michael Walter, and on the first play after that, Montana passed to Rice for 28 yards and a touchdown that made it 34-3. Members of the press sitting in the box were almost as close to Rice as any Denver defensive back.

Quickly, Chet Brooks intercepted another of Elway’s passes and returned it 38 yards to the 35, from where Montana, again on the first play, drifted back and hit John Taylor coasting toward the end zone. Once again, the proximity of a Denver defensive back was fairly nonexistent.

Denver responded with a long drive that ended when Elway ran three yards to score from the shotgun formation, but the 49ers countered that early in the fourth quarter with a four-yard run by Rathman for 48-10, and a one-yard scoring run by Craig after Elway was sacked deep in his territory and fumbled, Daniel Stubbs recovering. That made it 55-10, with 13:47 still to play.

By that time, Montana had established career and game records for the Super Bowl game, with 11 scoring passes and five for the game. And, obviously, for the third time in four years, the bad joke was on the Broncos.