COMMENTARY : Broncos Battered by 800-Pound Gorilla From San Francisco

Reasons to be thankful in the aftermath of this latest Ultimate Game:

* The invention of remote control.

* Your wife wouldn’t let you buy that big-screen TV.

* You gave the points.

Let me suggest that if Super Bowl XXIV had been a football game, they would have stopped it.

It wasn’t, of course. It was nothing more than the latest stop on the San Francisco 49ers’ victory tour. We now understand why they call this town the Big Easy.

It was Joe-Montana-to-Jerry-Rice easy, and it doesn’t get any easier than that. The final tally Sunday was 55-10, and that’s only because the 49ers refused to run up the score. Some of us were hoping they’d make 100. I’m sure Billy Tubbs was. In any case, this was a Michael Jordan slam dunk of a 49ers’ football game.

If you missed the game, all you really need to know is that the biggest hand in the Superdome came at the two-minute warning. That was not the first warning, however, of a debacle in the making. Pundits across America had been suggesting for weeks that the Denver Broncos could better spend their time planting oats than playing the 49ers. The Super Bowl might be the last institution in America where the experts are usually right.

Which brings us to John Elway, a.k.a. Johnny Rotten.

It was Terry Bradshaw who said this week that Elway, who was once thought to sip only on nectar, was not a great quarterback. You talk about understatement. Bradshaw, who couldn’t spell vindicated if you spotted him v-i-n-d-i-c-a-t-e, came out looking better than Elway, if not quite as good as Joe Montana, who spent the evening breaking most of Bradshaw’s Super Bowl records.

It was clear that Bradshaw had not come to praise Elway, although it was the 49ers who did the actual burying. But certainly, Elway did his part to help, too. He even brought a couple of shovels (more on that later).

In the Broncos’ first possession, he threw one pass low, the next Rocky Mountain high, and then he had to scramble before getting caught from behind, culminating a 55-second drive that set a trend of sorts in the all-important time-of-possession statistic. The question is--and we’ll have to watch the film to be sure--who spent more time on the screen Sunday night: the Broncos’ offense or Bud Bowl II?

The consensus is that the Broncos panicked, but who can blame them? The 49ers are an 800-pound gorilla escaped from the zoo. It’s hard to stay calm when every time you look up, Montana is hitting Rice somewhere down field or Roger Craig is slipping around your end. Nobody stops the 49ers. In their three postseason games, the halftime scores read: 27-3, 21-3, 27-3. Didn’t anybody explain parity to these guys? How about ratings?

Midway through the second quarter Sunday night, the 49ers had already beaten the 12 1/2-point spread that Elway had guaranteed the Broncos would cover. They didn’t look back. They didn’t have to. Nobody was gaining on them.

OK, maybe it’s hard to keep your composure in the face of such long odds, but does that explain Elway’s 1-for-9 start? Or how about the shovel pass? You don’t see two shovel passes a month in the NFL, and the Broncos trotted out three Sunday night on one first-quarter drive, two in a row. Elway completed only one, which is sort of like serving three drinks to friends and dropping two. Probably what happened was that Bobby Humphrey, the intended receiver in each instance, couldn’t believe they’d keep making the call. He’s only a rookie, but that doesn’t mean he’s dumb.

You can imagine how the folks in Denver are taking this latest humiliation of their Broncos, who were actually closer at halftime Sunday night than they were two years ago in Super Bowl XXII.

Some of the faithful, fearful of another orange crushing, had suggested that the team might be better off losing in the AFC championship game. Actually, the AFC might be better off not having a championship game at all. Did you like Cleveland in this one?

The Broncos, best in the AFC, would have finished fourth in the NFC East. And we know how concerned the 49ers were with those guys.

But you can be sure that in some corners of this world--and the game was telecast in 55 countries; what must they have been thinking?--the news went down well. The sound you heard was Bud Grant smiling, and not because of a soft-drink reunion commercial. The Minnesota Vikings now have company as four-time Super Bowl losers.

And the 49ers, of course, join Pittsburgh as four-time winners. That’s the game people would like to see, the old-time Steelers against these 49ers. Could that great Steeler defense have stopped Montana, who keeps building an argument to be considered the best ever? Montana is 83 for 122 for 1,142 yards and 11 touchdowns in four Super Bowls, and it seems like Rice caught every one of them.

We’ll never know how they would have matched up with the Steelers, but we know how they match up with the Broncos. We just wish we didn’t.