Lions Will Try Redskins Again

One question is: Can the Detroit Lions make it close?

After further review, there really aren’t any other questions today.

The Washington Redskins seldom lose at home, and this season they even shut out three teams in RFK Stadium.

What’s more, the game wouldn’t even have been scheduled here if the Redskins weren’t the better team.

The Lions are likewise a terror at home--but they are 0-15 in recent years here, where they lost in the season opener, 45-0.

So can they make it close this time?

Perhaps not, but they’re getting a boost from the weather gods, who have been blessing Washington lately with autumn-like days--unlike last weekend, when they destroyed Jerry Glanville’s Atlanta team with a cold, driving rain.

A forecast for “sunny and seasonable” is out for today, with a temperature reading in the 40s at 1 p.m. (PST) when the Lions and Redskins get together in the second game of the NFL’s Eastern Seaboard doubleheader.

The weather here in the upper South, so different from Detroit’s, so much milder, has made Detroit Coach Wayne Fontes ecstatic.

“We’re excited about it,” Fontes said after bringing his run-and-shoot team to Washington. “We have a great chance to win this thing, the way we see it.”

This thing is the NFC championship game, from which the winner will emerge to represent the conference of the Rams and the Bears in the Minneapolis Super Bowl Jan. 26 against today’s Buffalo-Denver winner.

Everyone keeps telling Fontes that the run-and-shoot works better on a good day than in stormy weather. And although he disputes this--pointing out that the Lions won twice this winter on freezing fields, in Green Bay and Buffalo--most good coaches, Fontes among them, prefer mild, calm weather.

In other conditions--on a muddy field, say, the question isn’t: Which is the better football team? It’s: Who are the better mudders?

That’s one reason they build domes.

In Washington, Coach Joe Gibbs has another team that expands its offensive potential on a nice day. The posse receivers--Art Monk, Gary Clark and Ricky Sanders--are as concerned about high winds and off tracks as are Detroit’s four wide receivers.

And the posse is half of the Redskin offense.

Still, among most football people, the weather talk these days is all about the effect of a lousy day on the run-and-shoot.

“That’s because they don’t understand it,” Fontes said. “I’ll put it this way. If we lose, it won’t be the weather that beat us.”

To a man, Fontes’ players agree that the Lions are on course to a major upset.

“They say we’re 13 1/2-point underdogs,” Lion linebacker Chris Spielman said. “But we’ve been big underdogs before. The thing they don’t realize is that we’re capable of beating this team or any team.”

Erik Kramer, the young Detroit quarterback who threw three touchdown passes last week in eliminating the Dallas Cowboys, shares a rather prevalent opinion that the Falcons’ run-and-shoot bunch could have won in Washington last week if Glanville hadn’t lost his running backs to injury.

“Look at that (Redskin-Falcon) game closely, you’ll see that Atlanta had some opportunities to win,” Kramer said.

He believes that the Lions won’t be in Atlanta’s straitjacket because, with Barry Sanders, they have the NFL’s finest running back.

That reminds Sanders that if the game comes down to player vs. player, he’ll take the Lions.

“In talent, we match up very well with (the Redskins),” he said, putting his finger on the one aspect of the game that gives Detroit fans the most hope.

For it has been said that Fontes has more talent on his side than Gibbs has in Washington.

What Gibbs has, though, is a team, and that was more than enough to get Washington the championship of the NFC East this season with a 14-2 record.

The Lions (12-4) won the championship of the NFC Central. They and the Redskins were the two biggest winners in their conference.

They’re here for the title game because they seem to be the NFC’s two best-balanced teams, proving it in several ways:

--Although Sanders earned more peer respect this season than any other NFL athlete, the Redskins have a stronger running game with Earnest Byner and rookie Ricky Ervins.

--These are both modern one-back teams with very different but equally well designed ground attacks.

--The passers, Kramer of Detroit and Mark Rypien of Washington, were uncommonly successful last week, when Rypien led the rout over Atlanta, and when Kramer surprised the Dallas Cowboys--and the rest of the league--with one of the most successful passing attacks of recent postseasons.

--Their philosophy is also modern and similar. The Lions and Redskins both want to run the ball, but if they can’t run it, they’ll pass it, at the drop of a helmet.

--The Washington offensive line is more famous than Detroit’s, but hardly more effective. The Lions have been protecting Kramer at least as well as the Washington “Hogs” serve Rypien, whose 1991 sack total was strikingly down after he made a decision to throw every pass away away unless a member of the posse is instantly open.

--Finally, going in, both teams seem to have Super Bowl defenses.

If the game is decided on pass rushing, it will probably go against the Lions’ inexperienced man, Kramer, who wasn’t touched by the Cowboys last week, but who will face a considerably different defense this time, and who has yet to put in a full season against swarms of angry linemen and linebackers.

There are many ways to rush a passer, and if the Cowboys used none of them, the Redskins are ready to use them all.

The one respect in which the Redskins have a clear edge is in physical condition. Their players are all sound of limb.

The Lions, by comparison, have experienced an extraordinary run of injuries this season, losing, along the way, no fewer than five starters--their best defensive player among them, nose tackle Jerry Ball.

Fontes was also minus four other starters for extended periods last week when he became one of the few coaches ever to get his team into a conference championship game without the help of nine starters.

Some of them will play some today.

Fontes has kept the Lions going with good depth and with player emotion. They have won their last seven games--it’s the NFL’s longest winning streak--and the players on the teams they’ve beaten, without exception, have mentioned the emotional fervor with which the Detroit club attacked.

It all goes back to the day last November when one of Fontes’ nine wounded--offensive lineman Mike Utley--was paralyzed on the playing field in a collision with another player.

His teammates have set out to win for Utley. And in a sport that is considered to be one-third coaching, one-third athletes and one-third emotion, the Lions, in December and January, have been unbeatable.

Their problem is that for a decade or more, the NFL championship has been won invariably by the leading contender with the fewest major injuries. That last season was the New York Giants, who only had to replace quarterback Phil Simms, and replaced him with a winner, Jeff Hostetler.

This winter it’s the Redskins who are the NFL’s most remarkably injury-free team.

Put it all together, and the odds are heavily stacked against the Lions, who just refuse to believe it.