PRO FOOTBALL : Defensive Victory for Raiders, but Offense Has Stars, Too

This is the way it sometimes happens in this game: An apparently mediocre team will play another day of mediocre football, as the Raiders did last week after starting 0-4 in September, and still win.

Next time out, it will suddenly be a different team. It will feed off the game it shouldn’t have won to win impressively.

Give the Raiders that this time. They played effectively, both when they had the ball and when they didn’t Sunday. And so doing, they battered a good opponent, the AFC’s two-time champion Buffalo Bills, 20-3.

In the NFL, a victory by that score is invariably a defensive victory--the more so when the players on the other side are Jim Kelly, Thurman Thomas, Andre Reed and James Lofton--but the Raider defense didn’t run up the 20 points.

It was the kid quarterback, Todd Marinovich, and his partners--particularly wide receiver Tim Brown, who scored the big touchdown on a long pass play; and running back Eric Dickerson, who scored the first touchdown on a short pass play.

With those 14 points in the first 20 minutes, the Raiders had the game won, the way their defense was taking away Buffalo’s ground offense.

Controlling Thomas is always a key to beating Buffalo. Although he was injured in the second quarter, when he suffered neck spasms, he carried the ball about as often as usual in the first half, 13 times. But the Raiders held him to 28 yards, a 2.2 average. And he was to add only 24 yards in the second half.

When Buffalo couldn’t run with either Thomas or Kenneth Davis, the Raiders ganged up on quarterback Kelly, and there went the passing offense.

Defensively, on occasion, the Raiders have done some of those same things this year. And occasionally, they have spurted offensively. In the sixth week of the season, for the first time, they put their whole game together, and Buffalo paid for it.

How to beat Kelly: To handle the Bills, the best thing to do is to get off to a fast start. If the Bills start fast, Kelly can beat you, 51-3, as he did not so long ago in a memorable Raider game at Buffalo.

So in the Coliseum on Sunday it was up to Marinovich to get the Raiders going in the first quarter and give his defensive team something to play for.

He drove the Raiders repeatedly. In a first half in which they never punted until the last 17 seconds, the Raiders picked up at least one first down in every series and scored twice:

--To get the game’s first touchdown, the Raiders’ new offensive strategists gave Marinovich an assist with a new twist on an old play--a pass to Dickerson angling out of the backfield on third and goal at the two-yard line. They had thrown to Dickerson only three times this season, never for a touchdown.

--The Raiders’ decisive touchdown play in the second quarter was more artistic. On third and 10 at midfield, a difficult time to pass over the middle, Marinovich did so to Brown, who, running an 11-yard hook pattern, kept going after the catch until he scored.

Marinovich is still learning, but he is doing one thing about as well as any passer. He usually sees the open man--if there is one--and throws the instant he picks him up.

The main Marinovich negative continues to be his velocity. His passes travel slowly. Thus, when he throws to closely covered receivers, he is often intercepted.

In the second half Sunday, aware that his defense was dominant, he didn’t let that happen.

They still have it: Except at quarterback, the Raiders are basically an old team, which means that if they are going to beat a good team, the old men have to perform.

It is worth noting, therefore, that at least three of their aging veterans got up for Buffalo:

--Dickerson ran with much of his old speed, gaining most of his 52 yards in the first half. He would have run farther had he played more of the second half.

--The other running back the club is using these days, Marcus Allen, got the first downs expected of him at clutch moments, notably in the fourth quarter.

--Defensive end Howie Long, who hasn’t always been easy to find this season, was usually found in the right places.

Two things about old football players: They don’t always get a fast start in the September games. But in a long season, if they’ve still got it, they often begin to show it about now.