Raiders Meet Cold Front With Brave Front : Football: They insist the weather in Buffalo won’t make a difference. Several players have performed regularly in frosty environs.

Forecasts in Buffalo call for snowy, blustery conditions on Sunday, with temperatures in the mid-20s, on the day the Raiders play the Bills in the AFC Championship Game.

“Yeah, Bills’ weather,” said linebacker Darryl Talley.

Like a mantra, you can almost hear the Raiders chanting:

“It will not matter. It will not matter.”

Sure, it will be about 50 degrees colder than the Raiders are used to at home in Los Angeles. So what, they say. The Buffalo Bills will have no advantage.

“I think way too much is being made about the weather,” guard Max Montoya said Thursday. “I played in a lot of bad weather games in Cincinnati. It doesn’t affect you if your mind is right. It’s going to be cold for everybody. You’ve just got to get your mind set and make sure you have good footing.”

If any warm weather team is on good footing in the snow, freezing rain and on an icy field that could greet everyone Sunday, it should be the Raiders. In addition to Montoya, a former Pro Bowl guard who was signed as a Plan B free agent, quarterback Jay Schroeder played in Washington; receiver Willie Gault was on the 1985 Super Bowl champion Chicago Bears; the other starting receiver, Mervyn Fernandez, played five years in Canada; and linemen Steve Wisniewski (Penn State), Rory Graves (Ohio State) and Steve Wright (Northern Iowa) attended Midwest colleges.

On the defensive line, Bob Golic played in Cleveland, Scott Davis is from Chicago, Howie Long from Massachusetts and Bill Pickel from New York.

“You just try to block it out,” Schroeder said. “The big thing is you try to protect the football, get an extra good grip on it, don’t let it slip out.”

The Bills flourished on a frozen field last week, outscoring Miami, 44-34. That scares Raiders Coach Art Shell.

“You have to be concerned when a team puts that many points on the board, as bad as the weather was,” said Shell, in his first AFC title game as a coach. “A lot of the advantage goes to the offense in those conditions.

“Whatever plays you design, you design them to take advantage of bad weather. The receivers have an advantage--they know where they’re running their routes.

“We’ve played in cold weather before and we’ve won in cold weather,” Shell said. “If the weather’s going to be nice, so be it. If it’s going to be cold, so be it. At this time of the season, you have to be able to deal with it. . . .

“The biggest thing is, you have no control over the weather.”