Thinking About Going Unbeaten in the NFL

No one dares to hope a Major League baseball team will go 162-0. The National Hockey and National Basketball League teams understand there is no chance for a perfect season. But football is a different beast.

“Because of the schedule, because we have a week between games to gather ourselves, it can be done,” New York Giants center Bart Oates says. “Going undefeated isn’t something you think about during the off-season, but as it evolves ... well, everybody knows what’s going on.

“You go 10 weeks without losing, and it becomes something you want to protect. Believe me, it is a huge motivation. Guys have been reluctant to talk about it publicly because they’re afraid we’ll jinx ourselves. But it’s there. It becomes a dominant part of your thought process.”

After beating Detroit 20-0 Sunday to move to 10-0, Oates said the Giants were motivated less to defeat the Lions than to stay unbeaten. The San Francisco 49ers entered their game with Tampa Bay needing a victory to tie the NFL record of 18 consecutive victories, but after their 31-7 dusting of the Buccaneers, 49ers tight end Brent Jones said, “We didn’t go into the game thinking we needed to keep a streak alive. We wanted to win to stay undefeated.”

The Giants and 49ers are the 13th and 14th teams in league history to start a season 10-0. The Giants haven’t lost since a Jan. 7 playoff game last season, when the Los Angeles Rams’ Flipper Anderson disappeared into the west tunnel at Giants Stadium with the winning touchdown in overtime. The 49ers haven’t lost since Nov. 19, 1989, when Green Bay beat them 21-17 at Candlestick Park.

Barring a tie, one of these teams will lose Monday, Dec. 3, when the Giants and 49ers meet at Candlestick Park. That’s assuming the two teams scrape past their divisional archrivals Sunday, which is no safe bet. The Giants travel to Philadelphia to face the Eagles, who have won four in a row. The 49ers meet the Rams.

The odds against going undefeated are so long the sports books in Las Vegas don’t even offer the bet at the beginning of the season.

“Because of the parity in the league, the odds are astronomical. It would be a big, big price,” says Fred White of Leroy’s Sports Book, one of 19 legal books in Nevada. “Since they face each other, it comes down a bit now. If I had to book the odds now, I’d use somewhere between 250- and 300-to-1.”

Since the league schedule expanded to 16 games in 1978, no team has gone 16-0 over the regular season. A total of 336 teams have had the chance, and the 1985 Chicago Bears came closest. They were 12-0 when they lost to the Miami Dolphins 38-24 Dec. 2, 1985 at the Orange Bowl.

“I think it was much more important to the Miami Dolphins for some historical sake to prevent some other team from going undefeated than it ever meant to us,” former Chicago and Yale safety Gary Fencik says.

The Dolphins were protecting the reputation of their 1972 team, a Don Shula-coached team that won all 14 of its regular-season games, then swept through the playoffs to go 17-0 -- the only perfect record in 70 NFL seasons.

“Winning,” Giants safety Dave Duerson says, “is an attitude. So is losing. They are both contagious.”

As a former Chicago Bear, Duerson ought to know. He is one of the few, if any, men in NFL history -- the accounting is sketchy -- to play for two teams that began a season 10-0.

There are several factors the Giants and 49ers have been able to overcome in their drive to 10-0.

For starters, both teams have been able to rise above injuries because of exceptional roster depth. The Giants lost Carl Banks, Mark Collins, Odessa Turner and Jumbo Elliott for at least four weeks each and countered successfully with Johnie Cooks, Reyna Thompson, Stephen Baker and Bob Kratch. In a similar vein, the talent of quarterback Joe Montana and wide receiver Jerry Rice has obscured the 49ers’ inability to run the ball.

The Giants and 49ers also have been able to overcome, for the most part, week-to-week inconsistency. Of course, the Giants had to scramble to beat Phoenix Oct. 21, but they have only trailed significantly in two games. The 49ers have come from behind in six games.

“It’s a confidence that builds and builds,” Oates says. “Regardless of what you do, you know you’re going to win the ballgame. We’ve always had that consistency in the defense, but now you see it on offense and special teams.”

“We didn’t have to play all those teams at the same time,” Hall of Fame quarterback Bob Griese says of the Dolphins’ streak. “Spread them out and give them to us one at a time, and we could beat every one of them. It just so happens that we did.”

With Shula providing a strong weekly focus, the 1972 Dolphins managed to obliterate the New England Patriots 52-0, then come back with a grueling 28-24 victory over the New York Jets for their ninth and 10th victories.

“I don’t see us getting too excited from week to week,” Giants nose tackle Erik Howard says. “And that’s good. We’re kind of like the offense. We ball-control it. Nothing too flashy, just solid. We just keep rolling along.”

Shula wonders if the media attention that has swirled around the Giants and 49ers will affect on-field play.

“The pressure now, everything is highlighted a lot more,” Shula says. “TV and radio and print media all want to get into your huddle to find out as much as they can about your team. You’re just bombarded, and when things are going well you have a tendency to get caught up in that thing, thinking they’re going to continue to go well.”

Balancing that external pressure is the internal pressure players feel to maintain a perfect record.

“All the eyes of the league are on you,” the Giants’ Howard says. “That motivates you.”

Still, even six games short of a perfect regular season, 49ers safety Ronnie Lott discounts the possibility. “Each team now has an athlete who can dominate the game,” he says. “That guy could have the most unbelievable game and you could lose just because of one athlete.”

Giants Coach Bill Parcells voiced a similar sentiment after beating Detroit. “I don’t think we’ll go undefeated, he said. “I honestly believe that, but I may be the only guy in the locker room who feels that way.

“We’ve worked real hard to get in position to make a run, but people think it’s automatic. I don’t think our team is a dominant team by any stretch.”

Howard smiles. He has heard this sort of thing from Parcells before.

“We’re not dominant,” Howard says, “but we’re undefeated. If it keeps going that way, what’s the difference?”