PRO FOOTBALL : Bills Incorporate Best of Offenses Into Mighty Force

In the long history of the NFL, few defensive teams have been as spectacular as the one the New York Giants have fielded this season.

And few offensive teams have been as powerful as Buffalo’s.

The Bills were virtually unstoppable in a 51-3 victory over the Raiders Sunday when the Giants again held the San Francisco 49ers to one good offensive play and beat them with five field goals, 15-13.

And so doing, they set up a strange kind of championship game.

When the Bills meet the Giants in Super Bowl XXV Sunday in Tampa Stadium, will Buffalo quarterback Jim Kelly be able to move through the Giants as readily as he charged through a good Raider defense?

Or will the Giant defense rip Kelly as successfully as it has twice inhibited 49er quarterback Joe Montana this season?

In all-around strength--on offense and defense as well as in special-team play--the Bills seem the stronger team by far, as they were as recently as Dec. 15. That day, knocking quarterback Phil Simms out for the season, the Bills were a 17-13 winner in Giants Stadium.

The Bills have been installed as five-point favorites by oddsmakers Glantz-Culver, but there are two major differences now:

--Whereas the Giants won a Super Bowl game only four years ago, the Bills have never played in that notoriously high-pressure event. Only one first-time visitor has ever beaten a seasoned Super Bowl team, and that was the dynastic Pittsburgh Steelers, who in 1975 were a 16-6 winner over the third of the Minnesota Vikings’ four losers.

--As an AFC club, the Bills will be facing the champions of a conference that has been stronger--at least at the top--for most of a decade. Forget the Dec.15 Bill-Giant regular-season game. NFC champions have won the last six Super Bowls.

Moreover, the Giants have Jeff Hostetler at quarterback now. If their conservative coaches had only taken the wraps off Hostetler, they wouldn’t have needed Roger Craig’s fumble Sunday to end the 49er dynasty.

The Buffalo offensive team has found a new way to play football this season--with players who attack the defense on every down, alternating passes and draw plays in a no-huddle, shotgun formation--and it is likely that the game won’t be the same again, at least in the AFC.

For you will have to out-score the high-scoring young Bills to beat them next season. And that will be hard to do, possibly impossible, with old-fashioned football--once the Bills have perfected this novel system.

It was the Raiders’ older offensive concept--power running and long passing--that wasn’t good enough, by comparison, Sunday.

A year ago, the Bills were as conservative as the NFL’s most conservative teams, but they were learning. They learned from the 49ers first, and they kept studying the league’s other wide-open offenses, and as of Sunday the Buffalo attack was as awesome as it is new.

It blended the best of the NFL’s three other forward-looking offenses:

--The Bills borrowed first from the 49ers. They incorporated the quick passes and the short crossing patterns that led the 49ers to four Super Bowl championships with Montana.

--Next, the Bills borrowed from the run-and-shoot teams. They have been spreading defenses with four wide receivers, or three and a tight end. And to set up the run, the Bills have adopted the run-and-shoot’s pass-first philosophy. In the early stages of the Raider game, when the outcome was more or less in doubt, the Bills, when they ran the ball, ran only draw plays by Thurman Thomas.

--Then the Bills borrowed Cincinnati’s no-huddle, attacking style.

And finally they added the Kelly factor--the thing that makes Buffalo unique. The Buffalo coaches, Marv Levy and Ted Marchibroda, put Kelly in charge on the field, making him the first to call all the plays for his side since the Raiders’ Super Bowl quarterback, Jim Plunkett.

The Raiders this season came up one year late with a sound, tough, old-fashioned team. They could have made the Super Bowl last winter if they had had this group then--before Buffalo changed and matured.

In Sunday’s game, it was the the Raiders’ strength that Buffalo took away--in particular the Raiders’ superb pass rush.

The Bills, attacking with great success on play after play, first destroyed the Raiders mentally, and then physically. Before halftime they had exhausted the Raiders. For nothing is harder than rushing the passer on down after down--and never getting there.

It is a football axiom that if the rush doesn’t get there, defensive backs are in trouble against any offense. A receiver is sure to be open. And if it happens repeatedly, here comes the avalanche.

A week ago, the Kelly avalanche rolled over the Miami Dolphins the same way. The Bills led, 44-27, before settling for a 44-34 victory over a Dolphin team that played more creatively on offense than the Raiders.

The fact is that Buffalo in the final weeks of the season has been gradually building this inventive powerhouse.

Against the same foes earlier, the Bills lost to Miami in September, and trailed the Raiders in October into the fourth quarter.

In personnel terms, the Bills, to be sure, are probably better than any other AFC entry. They are certainly better balanced. No other team in the league has Buffalo’s strengths in all departments.

Nonetheless, it was Buffalo’s offensive concept that made the rout. The Raiders are a 1950s team throwing the ball and a 1960s power team running it. By contrast, the Bills are a 1990s team.

In San Francisco Sunday, the Giants were in command from the first with the best defensive club the NFL has seen since Buddy Ryan’s 1985 Chicago Bears.

But with ultraconservative football, the Giants almost beat themselves.

Their new quarterback, Hostetler, now 6-0 as a starter, was throwing mostly straight passes and scrambling effectively for a team that kept trying to run the ball instead.

In Hostetler’s last two starts, the Giants had thrown a number of first-down passes and otherwise behaved themselves like a somewhat modern offensive team.

But this time, their coach, Bill Parcells, reverted to form. Apparently fearful of Montana, Parcells aimed mainly to control the ball and kick field goals, a strategy that succeeded only when the 49ers, leading in the last three minutes, 13-12, fumbled the game away.

The 49ers have disintegrated as an offensive team this season. Their 14-2 regular-season record obscured their slow collapse, but it was a collapse all the same, and it probably happened because they have been getting away from Bill Walsh football.

Specifically, the 49ers have given up on their running game, and they have been asking Montana to throw too many passes.

It is true that, statistically, the 49er running game has been a disappointment all season. But in 1981, Walsh created his first Super Bowl champion with running backs named Rickey Patton, Earl Cooper and Bill Ring--none of them to be confused with Roger Craig in his prime.

Still, to win Super Bowl XVI that season, the 49ers ran for 127 yards against Cincinnati to Montana’s 157 yards passing.

Walsh used to line the 49ers up in the same split-backs formation on almost every down. And on almost every series, he integrated all six of his skill players--both backs, both wide receivers, the tight end and quarterback--into the offense.

With this construction, the 49ers developed the least predictable offense in the league. At the same time they became the league’s most versatile and tactically confusing team.

By contrast Sunday, the 49ers were seen in many one-back formations and in many three-receiver formations, among others, and over long periods of time against the Giants they called passes on every down.

The new Buffalo philosophy, pass-first, is probably right today. The new 49er philosophy, pass-only, is probably wrong. And so the 49ers, after all these years, are finally out of the playoffs.

And Buffalo is still in--pending a matchup with the world’s greatest defense.