NFL Is Having Trouble Maintaining Its Balance

Bad news for the AFC: Your conference has lost the last eight Super Bowls to the NFC by an average score of 37-16.

Worse news for the AFC: The gap between the two conferences seems to be widening.

Worse news still: If September is any kind of indicator, Buffalo is headed back to the Super Bowl.

Fay Vincent had the right idea, just the wrong league. If ever a sport needed realignment, it is professional football, which finds itself in the grossly unbalanced, if rather convenient, predicament of having all the world championship favorites in one conference and all the No. 1 draft choice contenders in the other.

At the moment, the best team in professional football is either the Philadelphia Eagles or the Dallas Cowboys or the Washington Redskins or the San Francisco 49ers.

National Football Conference, all of them.

And the worst team in professional football is either the New York Jets or the New England Patriots or the San Diego Chargers or the Los Angeles Raiders.

All winless, all property of the American Football Conference.

What about the Bills, you say? The 4-0 Bills, a team that is averaging nearly 40 points a game and already has defeated San Francisco, in San Francisco?

Three points:

1. Besides the 49ers, who have the Bills played? The Rams, the Colts and the Patriots. Give the University of Washington the same schedule and the Huskies are 3-1, at worst.

2. The Bills always peak in September. Last season, they started off 5-0--and remember how they finished.

3. They’re the Bills.

After Buffalo, the AFC has five other teams with winning records. They are:

--Miami (3-0), which hasn’t been to the Super Bowl since 1984 and hasn’t won one since 1973.

--Denver (3-1), the Buffalo Bills of the 1980s.

--Kansas City (3-1), which picked up Dave Krieg during the off-season and considered it a major improvement.

--Houston (3-1), the perennially over-hyped Oilers, who lost their opener, under the Dome, to Pittsburgh.

--And, Pittsburgh (3-1), which fell from the unbeaten ranks last weekend by venturing outside the AFC for the first time and losing, 17-3, to the Green Bay Packers.

Two weeks earlier, the Packers lost to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers--repeat, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers--by a score of 31-3.

But if a football conference is only as strong as its weakest link, it is worth nothing that Tampa Bay, which for years has seemed to be an AFC team with bad directions, is now 3-1. And the Rams, the What-In-The-World-Has-Chuck-Knox-Gotten-Himself-Into Rams, are, in the NFL news bulletin of the month, 2-2.

The teams beaten by the Rams?

AFC teams, of course.

Actually, the Rams serve as a useful gauge when probing the depths of AFC wretchedness. Give or take the Phoenix Cardinals, the Rams are probably the weakest team in the NFC. They are breaking in rookie defensive tackles, they are two linebackers short of a linebacking corps, their quarterback left his confidence in a hotel drawer somewhere in 1989, their best offensive lineman is 38 and their best running back is Cleveland Gary.

Bad team, Charles Barkley would say. Bad bleeping team.

Yet, in a curious piece of scheduling, the Rams have opened their 1992 season against four teams from the AFC East and have broken even. Two weeks ago, they shut out the Patriots, their first shutout since 1988. And last Sunday, they so terrorized Jet quarterback Browning Nagle that the Next Namath limped off looking more like the Next Al Woodall.

Put it this way: Put them in the AFC East and the Rams are talking wild card.

Already, the Rams are the dominant professional football team in Southern California. To the north of them are the 0-4 Raiders. To the south of them are the 0-4 Chargers. The charge of the lightweight brigades.

The Raiders have tried changing quarterbacks. The Chargers have tried changing coaches. Oh-for-eight. The Raiders have brought in Eric Dickerson. The Chargers have brought in Bobby Beathard. Oh-for-eight.

The Raiders play host to the Giants Sunday. The Chargers play host to Seattle.

Oh-for-10?

The AFC used to be the conference of the Steel Curtain, Csonka and Kiick, Stabler-to-Biletnikoff, Broadway Joe, “I guarantee it,” Hank Stram chortling on the sideline, Lance Alworth, Bert Jones, Buck Buchanan and the 17-0 Miami Dolphins.

What happened?

At the risk of oversimplification, you can skim the starting lineups and answer the question with another question:

Where have all the quarterbacks gone?

Last weekend, the starting quarterbacks for eight AFC teams were named Hugh Millen, Kelly Stouffer, Neil O’Donnell, Stan Humphries, Todd Marinovich, Mike Tomczak, Browning Nagle and Dave Krieg. If Indianapolis hadn’t had a bye, Jack Trudeau would have been added to the list.

Elsewhere around the conference, Boomer Esiason, once a passer of Super Bowl caliber, was benched Sunday. John Elway hasn’t had a 200-yard game this season, threw for just 59 yards in a 30-0 loss to Philadelphia and hasn’t driven the Broncos to a touchdown in two weeks. His team is 3-1 in spite of him; Denver has been outscored, 50-56.

That leaves Jim Kelly, Dan Marino and Warren Moon, as always, the lonesome troika voted most likely to still be firing come January. They’ll be there, firing, but for what? The opportunity to explain themselves after a thrashing inside the Rose Bowl at the hands of the 49ers or the Eagles?

That is what “AFC” has come to stand for when it comes to Super Bowls.

A Foregone Conclusion.