It’s a Good Matchup on Paper

It is, presumably, the best matchup we could get--Buffalo vs. Washington. Finesse vs. brute strength. Dempsey vs. Tunney. Ali vs. Frazier. Power vs. guile. John Daly vs. Corey Pavin.

They play 16 games to get the ribbon clerks out of the pot. But sometimes, they stay in. We have had wild-card teams (i.e., teams that got in on a pass--the Oakland Raiders in 1981, for example), who have won. We have had teams that limped in on a wing and a prayer after early-season successes. We have had teams that backed in--the 1980 Rams with a 9-7 record, for instance.

Baseball used to have a chance to give you, certifiably, the best against the best. They played a 154-game schedule and each team played every other team in its league the same number of times. Only rarely did an unworthy contender make the fall classic.

Football is another matter entirely. In the first place, the schedule is based on last season’s performance. If you did poorly, you not only draft earlier, you play the weaker teams. This philosophy finds, say, the San Francisco 49ers locked in a closet with a hungry orangutan every week while you may get the New England Patriots or the Indianapolis Colts to feed on.

Football being such a violent, take-no-prisoners form of sport, you may find a Super Bowl team taking the field minus a player who brought them there. This has been known to happen in baseball or basketball--but not often. And not nearly so often as in football.

The New York Giants took the field last year without Phil Simms, the quarterback who led them to two Super Bowls. A backup quarterback, Jeff Hostetler, managed to lead them through Tampa but largely because the opposition Buffalo Bills had no effective book on him. Had he played a full season, the Bills might have been more artfully deployed.

Aesthetically, Super Bowl XXVI looks to be four-star production. A Super Bowl isn’t always. For years, we poets of the press lounge used to yearn for a Dallas Cowboy-Raider matchup. We figured the overs-and-unders on that one would be in the low 90s. It never happened. Instead, we kept getting the Denver Broncos or the Minnesota Vikings.

Most Super Bowls are artistic duds. Like that movie Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman made, they look good on paper but bomb in the theater.

This Super Bowl satisfies the Murray criterion in that the quarterbacks are first rate. It has always been the notion here that quarterbacks put you in the Super Bowl, not running backs, cornerbacks or even linebacks. You don’t tackle your way to the Super Bowl, you throw your way into it.

Buffalo’s Jim Kelly fits the profile of a Super Bowl quarterback right down to the geography of his birth--western Pennsylvania. Going into a Super Bowl with Jim Kelly is like going into a World Series with Jack Morris.

Washington is typical of a Super Bowl team in that it has no running back who puts you in mind of Red Grange or O.J. Simpson, or even Earl Campbell. Where it leaves a question mark is at quarterback. No one really knows if Mark Rypien is as good as he has seemed to be this year. Those who have followed his career doubt it.

What Washington has going for it, however, is that it comes from the right neighborhood. No, not Potomac, the NFC. They come from the gashouse district, the bushes at Central Park, the waterfront at Marseilles, so to speak. They mug you. They strong-arm you. They bully you. They kick sand in your face.

When the upstart American Football League was first admitted to the Super Bowl, it as freely predicted it would be badly overmatched by the old, established, permanent, floating NFL. And the first two games--Green Bay 35, Kansas City 10; Green Bay 33, Oakland 14--seemed to suggest this was so.

Then, embarrassment set in for the House of Lords. The AFC began regularly to humiliate the NFC--first Joe Namath and the Jets, then the transplanted Baltimore Colts, then the Miami Dolphins, then the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Raiders. It was like getting bitten by your own dog.

The new league was younger, faster, more innovative--it had to play zone to cover up its deficiencies in depth--more daring. It made the NFC look as if it were playing in wet concrete. It harassed it, tormented it. It was like a pack of hounds bringing down a bewildered, enraged grizzly.

But gradually, order was restored. It began, really, with the San Francisco 49ers. Bill Walsh and his superbly drilled squads neutralized the cockiness, turned it around to the detriment of the bolder but more reckless younger league. The 49ers made them look like collegians.

It has been eight years since the junior loop won one of these things. That’s a lot of Roman numerals ago. Far from being Super, they have been soupy. Not since the Raiders in ’84 have the new kids on the block come off with a victory. Mostly, they have been humiliated--scores of 38-16 (San Francisco over Miami), then scores like 46-10, 39-20, 42-10 and 55-10 (San Fran over Denver).

It has become a contest of concentrated strength against sporadic brilliance--massed artillery vs. cavalry. Any general could tell you how that will come out. Lee or Grant, for instance. Goliath usually wins these things.

Washington looks like your typical NFC Philistine horde--big, deep, experienced--a barrage not a team. Kelly’s heroes, Levy’s lieutenants, are more like guerrilla forces. They have to strike quickly and unexpectedly, get in and out unobserved, cut supply lines, blow up trains, slip out under the barbed wire.

Can they do it? Well, if Denver’s defense could confuse them, Washington’s might have them cutting out paper dolls. They may never get to see the football.

It might be a classic Super Bowl. On the other hand, it might be a typical one. Which is to say, Buffalo should bring plenty of bandages. Also a slingshot.