NOTES : Both Coaches Prefer 2 Weeks to Prepare

The well-rested Buffalo Bills dropped their bags and their gloves Monday night, ready to take on the world.

This week their world revolves around the Washington Redskins.

It’s quite a contrast from a year ago before Super Bowl XXV, when the Bills had only a week to prepare for the New York Giants.

This year, the NFL has returned to a two-week break between conference championship games and the Super Bowl.

Buffalo Coach Marv Levy even showed up for his mandatory first-day news conference. Citing time restraints, Levy skipped the event last year, didn’t inform a soul and left 1,000 or so writers with blank pages.

Levy, though, was prompt and courteous Monday night, thankful for a week’s rest between games.

“It’s night and day, and I think it’s a far better game, in my opinion,” Levy said, “for teams to put their best foot forward--and their best football forward, too, for that matter.”

Redskin Coach Joe Gibbs, whose team won Super Bowl XVII with one week of preparation and is 1-1 with two weeks of Super Bowl prep time, said he definitely favors having the extra time.

“We’ve had both. I’ll tell you with one week, it’s pretty much just grab it and throw it out there,” Gibbs said. “You can’t get all of it done in one week, making all of the preparations, the travel. It’s very hard to do.

“I prefer two weeks. I think you need it. There’s a lot of things going on, a lot of things to get out of the way. . . . I’d really forgotten how much there was until you get into it again.”

Leonard Smith, Buffalo’s starting strong safety, is suffering from a knee infection and has been listed as questionable for Sunday’s game.

Smith started feeling ill about two days after the Bills’ 10-7 victory over Denver in the AFC title game.

If Smith can’t play, he will be replaced by Dwight Drane.

It took about five minutes for a reporter to ask Levy why the NFC has won seven consecutive Super Bowls.

“They’ve probably had better teams, in my opinion. “ he said. “And I’m not trying to be a smart-aleck.”

Still, Levy noted how close his team came to beating the Giants last season, losing, 20-19, when Scott Norwood missed a 47-yard field-goal attempt in the final seconds.

“I’ll say it again,” Levy said. “We lost by one point. We gained 370 yards in 19 minutes of ball possession. We didn’t stop them very well, but came within a whisker of winning. We didn’t. That’s a fact.”

The Raiders are partly to blame for Buffalo’s Super Bowl loss a year ago.

What?

Levy says the Bills were not the humblest of teams after their 51-3 defeat of the Raiders in the AFC title game.

“I don’t think it was helpful to us last year to have won the game by quite such a large margin,” Levy said. “I tell our players this all the time: You’re never as good as people are saying you are, and you’re never as bad as they’re saying you are. But it’s hard for them to believe it with 51-3. . . . Why this is the greatest team since the Red Grange era of the Chicago Bears.”

No such problem for the Bills this year after their three-point victory over Denver a week ago.

“I think we might have been a little complacent last year, winning that big and coming into the game thinking we could score as many points as we did,” Bill receiver Andre Reed said. “It might have loosened our strings up some, and we probably were a little overconfident.

“(This year’s Denver game) brought us down to earth. Right now, I’m thinking that we only scored 10 points, so we feel that this next game here is a lot different.”

Pop star Prince, a Minnesotan who rose to prominence in the rock clubs of Minneapolis, will not be leaving tickets any time soon for Redskin defensive end Charles Mann. “I have a lot of respect for several musicians,” Mann said in Monday’s Minneapolis Star Tribune, “but Prince is not one of them. I don’t like what he stands for. I would not like to hear the names Charles Mann and Prince come out in the same breath of anybody’s mouth.”

Times staff writer Tim Kawakami contributed to this story.