PRO FOOTBALL / BOB OATES : Defense Gets Them There, but Passers Win Super Bowls

In the week of the conference championship games, the four survivors, the Miami Dolphins, Buffalo Bills, Dallas Cowboys and San Francisco 49ers, share one similarity. All are good passing teams.

All four are led by quarterbacks who throw the ball with authority.

There is one other effective way to win in pro football: playing it safe with tough running and tough defense. But the coaches who prefer that approach are out of the playoffs.

The conspicuous examples of the conservative way--the Kansas City Chiefs and Pittsburgh Steelers, and some would add the New Orleans Saints--challenged for a while, but then, as they usually do in January, fell back.

In the NFL, it’s a rule of thumb that defense gets you to the playoffs, where the quarterback wins.

Again this winter, although the surviving teams are defensively strong, their quarterbacks give them their character, identity and style--and their Super Bowl chance.

The big four or five:

--Dan Marino of the Dolphins remains the game’s most picturesque passer, the most likely to pull out a close game with a 40-yard bomb. What Marino needs is what he has had this season on the occasions when the Dolphins have been comparatively free of injuries: good blocking, a running game, a third target at tight end and better defense.

--Jim Kelly, who has been injured, and Frank Reich of the Bills are spectacularly different. Reich is steadier. To bring the Bills back from 35-3 against Houston, Reich had to complete every pass. The more erratic Kelly probably couldn’t have done that. But Kelly probably wouldn’t have fallen 32 points behind.

--Steve Young of the 49ers, the most accurate left-hander since Ken Stabler, tests defenses with a unique attack. Most defensive teams are right-handed. They are used to rushing the passer from that side--and leaning their defensive backs toward the other side of the field. Young forces them to change. So he makes them uncomfortable. And never more so than when he is running with the ball.

--Troy Aikman of the Cowboys is the game’s most productive short-to-medium range passer. Aikman has spent a lifetime practicing passing in those ranges, and accordingly has become one of the league’s most dangerous quarterbacks inside an opponent’s 20-yard line, where there is room for nothing but short passes and where bomb throwers often misfire.

Aikman has one other distinction. He is the only quarterback in either championship game whose offense isn’t built around him.

At Dallas, Coach Jimmy Johnson builds on running back Emmitt Smith. Only when Cowboy opponents overload against Smith, the league’s leading ground gainer, does Aikman normally take a hand.

That gives Aikman--and also Smith--an advantage that other playoff teams lack. Johnson is out to show that it can be done that way in the Super Bowl, which has never been won by a team with the league’s leading rusher.

Two downpours: On Sunday, when the San Diego Chargers’ third-down receiver, Ronnie Harmon, dropped a pass from quarterback Stan Humphries, it was intercepted by an out-of-position Miami cornerback, Troy Vincent, who sprinted in, dived and made an exceptional catch of a slick ball.

That happened during the second quarter, when the Chargers, playing acceptably in the driving rain, were still in the game. The Dolphin lead was only 7-0. The San Diego defense, whenever it had reasonable field position, had been giving Marino all he wanted.

A moment later it was 14-0, and the Chargers never recovered.

That isn’t to say that the Florida downpour beat San Diego, but along with the Marino downpour, it helped.

Rain changes football into a different game. On a rainy day, the question isn’t who can play the better football, it’s who can play the better football in the rain, as Vincent did when Harmon didn’t.

Dome answer: A day earlier, in the muddy going at Candlestick Park, a different kind of weather problem made the same kind of difference.

It’s debatable whether the 49ers could have come back to win if, on Washington’s long fourth-quarter drive, two Redskins, Mark Rypien and Brian Mitchell, hadn’t fumbled while attempting to execute a simple handoff.

In the Candlestick mud, the Rypien-Mitchell turnover, the last in a sloppy series of four by the 49ers and four by the Redskins, proved decisive.

Although dome football has many critics, the NFL game, on a winter day, is more truly played indoors. And that ought to be the league’s determining factor in staging championship events. The two conference championship games should be played where the competing sides have an equal chance to win.

That means an indoor site--a domed stadium--where the players, not the weather, make the difference.

Most of the NFL’s owners resist that idea. On the off chance that they might get such a game at home sometime, they want to preserve it for their season-ticket holders. The losers are their thousands of other fans--and, someday, possibly their own team.

It might not rain in Florida on Sunday, but it probably will in San Francisco, where you will see a miracle if the winners are the better team instead of the better mudders.

Rice key: To beat Dallas this time, the 49ers will need a better game out of wide receiver Jerry Rice than they got last week.

His admirers keep calling Rice the greatest receiver of all time, and he might be, but against the Washington defense, it wasn’t always easy to see.

During Young’s critical fourth-quarter drive, for example, Rice, a friend and supporter of former quarterback Joe Montana, dropped an easy pass--which could have been costly had there been a Troy Vincent in the Redskin secondary to pluck it off his muddy shoes.

Even worse, on an end-zone play, Rice made a halfhearted move that cost the 49ers a touchdown. That one would have been a difficult catch, but it wasn’t impossible.

Not for the greatest receiver of all time.

Quote Department:

--Steve Bono, reserve quarterback, on the 49ers’ talent: “Actually, the majority of guys are not superstars. We have a lot of role players.”

--Jay Leno on the last days of Chicago Bear Coach Mike Ditka: “There was a touching moment in the Bears’ locker room when he screamed goodby to his players.”

--Joe Gibbs, Redskin coach, on his club’s problems rushing this season: “Ricky Ervins was a little bit off.”

--Kevin Ross, Kansas City defensive back and defensive captain, on his future with the Chiefs: “I will be prepared to sit out (next season) because I’m not going to go through this again. We have a good team with talent--but we don’t utilize what we have.”