PRO FOOTBALL / BOB OATES : With Ryan, Houston May Be Ready to Defend AFC Honor

Enough. Enough of typecast AFC teams. They are never going to win. What’s needed most is something altogether new. And as sure as sunrise, you will see it a year from now.

The Houston Oilers will be in the Super Bowl next winter with a new kind of football team, one offering both innovative offense and competitive defense. Consider:

--With Buddy Ryan as their new defensive coordinator, the Oilers will be the era’s first AFC contender with NFC-style defense.

--Their seasoned offensive scheme is the run-and-shoot, which, in its most recent explosion--before the Houston defense capsized--ran up a 35-3 halftime score on the Buffalo Bills.

That should do it. That should make a spectacular regular-season change in AFC football, and also in Super Bowl football.

The Oilers’ choice of Ryan the other day means that with an aggressive, pressure defense, they will at last have exactly the right defensive fit for their offense, which tends to score easily and quickly.

The thrust of Ryan football, as practiced during his years as coach of the Philadelphia Eagles and as defensive coach of the Chicago Bears, is to get the ball back quickly by attacking furiously and steadily.

During Jack Pardee’s time as the Oilers’ coach, their problem has never been run-and-shoot blemishes, as their critics have often charged. Their problem has been a defense that has a lot of stars--four on the front line alone, Ray Childress, William Fuller, Doug Smith and Sean Jones--but not the defensive know-how to hold a 35-3 lead.

Ryan gives them that, and more. He is also a fine talent scout.

With Warren Moon as the quarterback of the NFL’s most feared offensive team, the Oilers would have been in at least the last two Super Bowls had they picked up Ryan the moment that Philadelphia cut him.

Better late than never.

Two of a kind: At Super Bowl time for many winters, it has been plain that the AFC’s great lack is NFC toughness and ingenuity.

A threat to the NFC’s nine-year reign, however, could be closer than it seems.

The AFC’s crying need for 10 years has been an NFC-trained Ryan or an NFC-trained Bobby Beathard--and now it has both.

Beathard is the general manager who had the San Diego Chargers on the march this season. As the Washington Redskins’ former general manager, he knows how the NFC does it.

For years, in fact, he did a lot of it.

As did Ryan--who isn’t just a tough guy.

He and Beathard are ingenious tough guys.

Before Houston brought in Ryan last week, the Chargers, looking ahead to the 1993 season, appeared to be AFC title-bound. But their future has changed.

It isn’t likely now that in the AFC championship game next January, the Chargers can beat both Moon and Ryan.

Talent hour: The winning coach, Jimmy Johnson of the Dallas Cowboys, brought a strange, new, simpler kind of football to the Super Bowl Sunday.

Johnson’s theory is merely to get the best players, and then put them in simple strategic schemes, both on offense and defense, and use their talent to overwhelm the other team.

The theory is most clearly seen when running back Emmitt Smith has the ball. Strategically, the Cowboys don’t do much of anything to spring Smith. They just hand off to him, and there he goes.

Had Smith played in the first several Super Bowls a quarter-century ago, he might never have been stopped. The weight rooms have changed football so much that the early Super Bowl games offer no comparison. Nobody then had the leg strength they all have today. And by comparison with the way they all hit today, nobody in the 1960s was a hard hitter.

The Smith of today, playing the way he plays today, would have plowed through Vince Lombardi’s best teams for hundreds of yards--in each half. And even against weight-hardened modern players, Smith has the thigh strength to win most of the one-on-ones.

He is Exhibit A in the talent advantage that Johnson has in a league he joined only four years ago.

And the Johnson advantage can only increase. Lacking the need that Hall of Famer Bill Walsh felt to continually fine tune his strategic approach to football, Johnson can use all his energy on what he does best: rounding up the best talent.

That is a sobering prospect for the rest of the league.

The tall offense: Troy Aikman of the Cowboys, a typical Johnson player, is the NFL’s first quick big quarterback. At 6 feet 4, playing at about 225 pounds, he is as quick as most good quarterbacks who come in 20 or 25 pounds lighter and three or four inches shorter.

Taking mostly seven-step drops, Aikman gets back quickly, sets up instantly, and whoosh, the ball is gone. Gone on a line. A fastball pitcher, he throws mostly line drives.

The Cowboys have taken advantage of a quarterback with those precise assets to construct the most unusual passing offense the Super Bowl has seen. It is the simplest title-winning offense in many NFL years.

There are only two basic ingredients: timing passes and short slant or square-in patterns.

A timing pass is one that is thrown to a precise spot on the playing field at a count of four or eight or whatever. The passer and receiver call the count silently to themselves, and if all goes well, the ball and the receiver arrive simultaneously at the planned spot.

A 12-yard square-in or turn-in pattern is one requiring the receiver to take 12 strides forward, and then break inward two steps. If all goes well, the ball hits him on the second step.

And with that as their basic offense, the Cowboys routed the Bills in Super Bowl XXVII, 52-17.

At times, Dallas play-caller Norv Turner called simple variations, some turn-outs and a long pass or two. But the play that Buffalo couldn’t stop--the play that made everything work for the Cowboys--was their timing pass to a wide receiver turning in at 10 or 12 yards, or, once, 20 yards.

It is the simplest pass to throw in football. But if thrown on time, from a big quarterback to a big receiver, it is all but indefensible.

That is because, when the receiver turns in, he puts himself between the passer and the defensive back who is guarding him in the coverage.

Most defensive backs today, chosen for their quickness, are on the small side. Buffalo’s all go 5-10 or 5-11. By contrast, the Dallas coach, Johnson, prefers big receivers. Michael Irvin and Alvin Harper are 6-2 and 6-3.

Thus, against Buffalo Sunday, when they turned in, the tall Dallas receivers effectively screened out the shorter Bills and came down with easy first downs--whenever Aikman hit the spot.

Which was almost every time.

In this simple offense, the reads for Aikman were also easy. When, for example, he saw a Buffalo linebacker in the secondary--between him and, say, Irvin--that meant that either tight end Jay Novacek or running back Smith would be uncovered. And so, Aikman threw a quick, hard, short one to one or the other.

Defensively, the Bills came out Sunday in a bump-and-run scheme, which is the best way to disrupt timing passes, but gave it up when they couldn’t do it and simultaneously keep the ball away from Novacek. They gave up too easily. The Cowboys would have had a hard time winning on 27 passes to Novacek. Except for size and sure hands, he doesn’t have much, and doesn’t do much.

But for a Johnson tight end, it doesn’t take much. The Cowboys are a team that specializes in very small things to make very big plays. In an all-Texas Super Bowl, the contrast next year between innovative Houston and steady, bare-bones Dallas will be stark.