SUPER BOWL XXVII : PRO FOOTBALL / BOB OATES : Their Teamwork at the Top Makes Cowboys a Top Team

The thing that makes the Dallas Cowboys what they are is the unique division of labor in their front office:

--Their coach, Jimmy Johnson, whose long suit is personnel evaluation, decides what new players he wants or needs.

--The club’s owner and general manager, Jerry Jones, a bright, dynamic and industrious sort, goes out and gets them.

Other general managers--those with long backgrounds in pro football--are often plagued with doubts during the procurement process.

They worry about whether they might be drafting a college player too high or too low, or whether they are offering too little or too much in trade.

On occasion, they back off when they should be bold, or plunge ahead when they should hold back, to the eventual detriment of the club.

Johnson, perhaps the NFL’s leading talent scout, has those doubts and worries himself--but once he has come to a decision, he is out of the loop.

The rest is Jones’ job.

The owner, with total confidence in Johnson, can put all his energy into getting it done.

There was no possibility, for example, that Jones would be carried away by impetuosity in the days when he was dealing with Raider owner Al Davis for quarterback Steve Beuerlein.

Well ahead of Jones’ preliminary discussions with the Raiders or any other club, he and Johnson make it a point to decide on the upper and lower parameters of what the Cowboys will finally offer or accept.

During negotiations, when a proposition lands in Jones’ target area, bingo, it’s done. There is no last-minute hedging. Because of Jones’ faith in Johnson, it never occurs to him to change his mind.

As a former big-time college football player, Jones knows his subject. He knows as much about talent as many other general managers. His input is always in the study process in the Cowboys’ front office.

But when you have Jimmy Johnson sitting there with his feet on the table, chewing a pencil and staring into space, why butt into the decision-making?

Two ways: When Tex Schramm was running the Cowboys, they went to the Super Bowl one winter with a team that was the envy of the league.

With but one exception, the entire roster of players was drafted by the Cowboys.

That, however, is the slow way to build an NFL power. It can be done faster using all the resources there are--trades, waivers, college free agents, and veteran free agents as well as the draft--provided leadership knows how to proceed.

Thus, Jones got four Super Bowl starters in trades that Johnson wanted to make for defensive linemen Tony Casillas and Charles Haley, strong safety Thomas Everett and former Raider guard John Gesek.

During his Dallas career, Johnson has initiated an average of about 10 trades per year. There is nothing mysterious about his operation. His starting point is that player procurement isn’t an exact science. Even the best of talent scouts miss more than they hit--much more. Johnson’s answer is to bring in and evaluate more live prospects than any other coach sees.

Once in a while, Johnson throws away a good one. With a bit more patience, he could have had Raider all-pro guard Steve Wisniewski. But he is here this week because, applying himself to an inexact science, he gives himself so many guesses in Dallas, and guesses correctly so often.

The record: This is the sixth trip the Cowboys have made to the Super Bowl in 27 years. No other franchise has been represented that often.

Which says something about the way Schramm and Tom Landry ran the club in their day.

A mystery ends: The degree of the Super Bowl hype this week is coming as a surprise to some in the Los Angeles area. The NFL’s traveling show didn’t seem so all-encompassing when it passed through here six years ago.

How did it get so big?

One key thing is that this is a one-game event. By contrast, baseball has a long World Series, and basketball has a sequence of series and tournaments.

Second, the Super Bowl is the championship game of a contact sport. A 21-game winner pitching to a .300 hitter can be absorbing on a certain level. Watching Bruce Smith go after Troy Aikman is something else. Will he get him? Will Aikman get up?

Third, the Super Bowl is played the same week every year. A heavyweight championship fight can be bigger than the Super Bowl--but it might be staged in June or November, and a big one might not happen at all for two or three years. There’s a curious, stimulating rhythm to the annual Super Bowl hype that is lacking for big fights.

Fourth, and most significant, the Super Bowl climaxes a season of NFL games that is closely followed in most of the 50 states.

Pro football’s kind of in-season national attention is often missing in other sports. There is no longer even a network game of the week in baseball. Year-round, stadium crowds are large almost everywhere, indicating wide local interest. But in most sports, the nation at large normally snaps to attention only during the playoffs.

In pro football, by contrast, week in and out, there is something of a national focus on the results and the various races leading toward the Super Bowl. TV ratings are high on Sundays and sky high on Mondays.

“The Super Bowl is like the last chapter of a hair-raising mystery,” former Commissioner Pete Rozelle said.

Strangely, it doesn’t seem to matter that the earlier chapters are usually better.

The dominators: As the game approaches, two Raider records are in danger:

--Al Davis’ team was the last to beat an NFC champion in the Super Bowl--nine years ago.

--The 1980 Raiders, who overwhelmed Philadelphia in Game XV, were the only wild-card team to win a Super Bowl.

If there’s an upset Sunday, the Buffalo wild cards will usurp the place of the Raiders in one distinction and tie them in the other.

The Bills, however, probably won’t match the Raiders in performance.

In their most recent three Super Bowl starts, Davis’ hands dominated Minnesota, 32-14; Philadelphia, 27-10, and Washington, 38-9.

Davis has ruined more Super Bowls than any other owner. At halftime, the Raiders were walloping their three Super Bowl opponents by a combined score of 51-6.

Two NFL eras: Speaking of domination, a Dallas victory Sunday would extend the NFC’s reign to nine in a row over the AFC, which has lost 10 of the last 11.

The 26-year series, throughout, has tended to be that one-sided, but it wasn’t always the AFC on the bottom.

For 15 years, the AFC--known part of the time as the AFL--was the dominant league.

Even during the Super Bowl’s first two seasons, the AFL, top to bottom, was probably a better league than the NFC--known then as the NFL.

The NFL’s Green Bay champions won Games I and II principally because of the personal leadership of Vince Lombardi, who was off by himself as a football coach.

AFL-AFC teams won 11 of the next 13. And as AFL quarterback Joe Namath said at the time, they earned it. Namath wasn’t taking any risks with his Game III guarantee. He was simply the first to recognize a fact.

It was innovative coaching that pushed the AFL in front of the NFL--ahead of everyone but Lombardi--in the late 1960s. At that time, most NFL organizations were hidebound, self-satisfied, and lazy.

By no coincidence was Dallas the only NFC team that could break the AFL-AFC monopoly during the many seasons between the late ‘60s and early ‘80s. The Cowboys, as led by Tom Landry in the ‘70s, had the NFC’s only innovative coach.

By 1980 there were others. And in 1981, the NFC drove ahead with leadership that was generally more imaginative than the AFC’s.

As creatively coached by Bill Walsh and Joe Gibbs, the San Francisco 49ers and Washington Redskins made the NFC the dominant conference, and so it has remained for a dozen years.

The NFC has had the same edge since 1981 that the AFC had before 1981--and for the same reason.

It’s a myth that football is a game of cycles. It is a game of innovation.