Falling Short of the Mark : Pro football: If the Redskins go on to finish 18-1, they could be haunted by that loss to the Cowboys.

Before the Dallas Cowboys upset Washington, 24-21, last Sunday, the Redskins’ progress toward an undefeated season evoked bittersweet memories for San Francisco 49er linebacker Michael Walter.

Seven years ago, Walter, the 49ers’ surest tackler, was on a Super Bowl winner that finished 18-1, equaling the best in the NFL since the Miami Dolphins’ 17-0 in 1972.

And, recalling it recently, he said he will never forget the first time he put on his Super Bowl XIX ring, an ornament that is loaded with enough diamonds to supply a jewelry store.

“I’ve got to admit that I looked right past (the diamonds),” Walter said. “All I could see was the 1.”

As in 18-1.

“If, if, if,” he said. “If we’d only done it that day.”

The Redskins, still on course to 18-1, could be headed for a similar disappointment.

Although the Super Bowl is always first prize, “somebody wins the Super Bowl every year,” Walter said. “A 19-0 season has never happened.”

Having lost their shot at 19-0, will the Redskins even get to 18-1? How good is the football team that shocked the parity-stricken NFL in September, October and early November, winning 11 in a row?

“The Redskins are still the Super Bowl favorite,” former NFL coach Sid Gillman said. “They’re basically (injury-free), and they have the coaching, the quarterback and the defense to win most of the rest.”

Even so, they aren’t a dominating team, Gillman and others have said all year. The 1991 Redskins are best described as a typical Joe Gibbs production.

That is, they are an organized team with few great players and few weak points; a team that seldom fails to play as well as it can; a team that has been the NFL’s biggest winner of the 11-year Gibbs era without ever coming close to the greatness that identified the Chicago Bears in the early 1940s, the Green Bay Packers in the ‘60s or the 49ers in the ‘80s.

“The Redskins are this kind of a team: They’re ready (to win) every year if you give them a chance,” Richard Dent, a four-time Pro Bowl player with the Bears, said from Chicago.

“And this is one of those years. The 49ers are down, the Giants are down, the Rams are down, the Eagles lost Randall Cunningham, Dallas hasn’t got it all back yet and nobody knows about (the Bears).”

In a league that presents Lawrence Taylor as its flashiest pass rusher, Dent, a defensive end, is its steadiest. He also is a student of the league and of the Redskins, whom he has opposed throughout a nine-year career, and whom he describes as seldom the best team any year, “maybe not even this year.”

Nonetheless, they are invariably in position to move in (as champion), Dent said, “whenever things are a little shaky” elsewhere.

That was obviously true in 1982 and again in 1987. In both of those seasons, the Redskins won the Super Bowl.

“Those were the years of the two big (strikes-lockouts),” Walter said from San Francisco. “Both years, the Redskins were the team that held their focus.”

From New York, Jet General Manager Dick Steinberg said: “The strike years were confusion time on most teams--but not on Joe Gibbs’ team. They won each time because, as usual, they stayed on an even keel in the confusion that got to the rest of us.”

The Redskins are still on an even keel. In what has been another year of confusion for most NFC teams--from Anaheim to New York--the Redskins have moved into the vacuum.

“They’re always there or thereabouts,” Gillman said.

And so far, nothing’s been lost but a dream.

“It was always only a dream,” Gibbs said. “As long as it lasted, it was great fun. But you knew the odds were against (winning 19 in a row).”

CAN ANY TEAM WIN 19 IN A ROW?

The NFL’s three most famous winners of modern times were the unbeaten Dolphins in 1972 and the once-beaten 49ers and Bears in successive years, 1984 and ’85.

“Everything has to break just right,” Miami Coach Don Shula said of his 17-0 season, which climaxed in Los Angeles in Super Bowl VII with a 14-7 victory over George Allen’s second Redskin team.

A dozen years later, in the 49ers’ 18-1 season, almost everything broke right for Coach Bill Walsh’s second Super Bowl championship team, which started 6-0, then unaccountably lost, 20-17, to the Pittsburgh Steelers.

At 9-7, the Steelers were the only winning team that year in the AFC Central.

“We had them beat until they ran back that interception to our four-yard line,” the 49ers’ Walter said.

Said Walsh: “You know there will be games like this--when it appears that you’ve won and something goes wrong.”

A year later, almost everything broke right for Coach Mike Ditka. The Bears began their 18-1 season with a winning streak that reached 12 before anything went wrong. And then, two things went wrong.

In the 13th week, facing a 12-4 division champion in Miami, the Bears were bitten by injuries.

“We lost two quarterbacks,” Dent said. “Jim McMahon couldn’t start, and then we lost Steve Fuller.”

And then they lost the game, 38-24.

Said Ditka: “Nobody’s invincible. Nobody’s perfect.”

Including the 1991 Redskins.

In the long run, will defeat help the Redskins? Did it help the Bears?

“It will be good for us,” Ditka said at the time.

Said Mike Singletary, the Chicago middle linebacker: “It happened for a reason.”

But teammate Dent will have none of that.

“You always feel better about yourself when you win than when you lose,” he said. “Losing doesn’t help anything.”

Walsh disagrees. He often has said that if the 1984 49ers had beaten Pittsburgh, they probably would have lost to another team.

But Walter agrees with Dent.

“You don’t win one week because you lost last week,” he said. “It’s always best to win them all.”

Best--but improbable. If not impossible. In a 19-game season, if Walsh and Joe Montana couldn’t get there with their 1980s powerhouses, probably nobody can.

SPECIAL PLAYERS FOR A SPECIAL TEAM

The Redskins are unique. What makes them an 11-1 team in a parity year for their closest rivals?

One answer is Pat Haden’s. A Los Angeles lawyer who analyzes the Sunday night pro games for KNX and CBS’ other radio stations, Haden, a former NFL quarterback, said: “The thing that separates the Redskins from most football teams is their stability.

“They have it in the three places that count--stable ownership, a stable coach and a stable quarterback. It isn’t too often that one team has all that.”

Another explanation is Gillman’s.

“Joe Gibbs goes for a special kind of player, and as usual he’s got most of what he wants this year,” the retired Hall of Fame coach said from his home in Carlsbad.

A prime example is 290-pound tackle Jim Lachey, the NFC’s best offensive lineman, who ranks with Anthony Munoz and Bruce Matthews as the league’s best.

Gibbs pursued Lachey, who was drafted by San Diego and dealt to the Raiders, until he got him in the Jay Schroeder trade.

“It’s tough to play in the Redskin line,” Gillman said. “You have to be agile enough to pass block for their long passes and also big enough to punch out holes for the runner in their one-back system. It’s the NFL’s most beautiful offense, but it won’t work without (blockers) like Lachey and Joe Jacoby.”

Another special Redskin is Mark Rypien of Washington State, who has stabilized the quarterback position. Rypien was drafted in the sixth round one year when the rest of the league was looking for bigger names from bigger college football factories.

At 6 feet 4 and 234 pounds, Rypien combines size and long-pass power with the team-oriented attitude of the three wide receivers, each of whom came to Washington in a different way: Art Monk as a draft choice, Gary Clark as a free agent and Ricky Sanders in a trade.

Still, most of Gibbs’ special players are to be found on defense.

“They only have three draft choices in the whole defensive lineup,” Steinberg said.

Three other Redskins came in trades, and five, Matt Millen among them, as free agents--most in 1990-91 Plan B deals. The NFL thinks of them all as hard-working overachievers who blend in as if created for Gibbs’ team.

The new starters were recruited by the Redskins’ new general manager, Charley Casserly, who succeeded Bobby Beathard on May 6, 1989.

Said Casserly: “(Defensive coach) Richie Petitbon and his staff are so good that I always wondered what they’d accomplish if we got them some good players.”

As a realist, Casserly has kept his eye not on 19-0 but on the division and conference championships.

Before the Redskins fell to old rival Dallas, he said: “The thing I like about our players is that they’re mature enough to know they can lose any game--or win any game.”

Redskin linebacker Wilber Marshall, a veteran of the Bears’ 18-1 Super Bowl team, isn’t even chasing another 18-1.

“(That) isn’t important,” said Marshall, who is having another Pro Bowl season. “What’s important is being on a roll going into the playoffs. That’s what I’m shooting for.”