Quarterbacks Carried the Bills and Chiefs

On a four-game playoff weekend with, clearly, only one superstar, Joe Montana, there were these differences between representatives of the NFL’s two conferences:

--The league’s best pair of teams, the Dallas Cowboys and San Francisco 49ers, won a pair of NFC blowouts, advancing easily to next Sunday’s Super Bowl semifinal at Dallas.

--In two close games, four evenly matched AFC teams fought their way into the last minutes before quarterback Montana could advance the Kansas City Chiefs into the other semifinal at Buffalo against the Bill quarterback who ousted the Raiders, Jim Kelly.

At San Francisco Saturday, the 49ers, losers of three of their last four regular-season games, felt they had something to prove and took it out on the New York Giants, 44-3.

At Dallas Sunday, the Cowboys couldn’t get interested in the worst of the year’s playoff teams, the Green Bay Packers, and made only enough plays to win, 27-17.

The Cowboys’ best offensive player, halfback Emmitt Smith, and best defensive player, end Charles Haley, are both struggling with painful injuries--meaning it’s unlikely now that they can win a game against the 49ers that would be theirs, perhaps, if they were at full strength.

As for Montana, he is a football player who can win at Buffalo, or anywhere--at least anywhere on this planet.

The matchup at the Astrodome Sunday was Montana vs. Buddy Ryan--football’s most successful quarterback vs. the season’s most successful defensive coordinator--and it was Montana who took Ryan out.

Some spectators thought Montana beat Ryan with three touchdown passes, 28-20, but that isn’t correct.

Montana beat him with courage.

At 37, with a long history of crippling injuries, Montana, though blitzed and buffeted around throughout the first half, kept standing in anyway, kept missing long passes, kept taking hits.

And, finally, it was Ryan who gave up. Three long Montana incompletes in the second quarter--each landing close to the target--scared him out of the blitz.

And when Ryan quit attacking Montana with blitzing linebackers and blitzing cornerbacks, it was all over for Ryan’s team.

Of what use is a lion without teeth? What good is a Ryan team without the blitz?

It is entirely possible that Montana’s performance wasn’t the bravest ever in pro football, but it was the most courageous some of us have seen.

The question of the first half, which ended with Houston leading, 10-0, was whether Montana would be seriously injured. The Astrodome floor is cement-hard, and he kept landing on it.

He did seem finished once or twice, but recovered to throw the decisive fourth-quarter pass to wide receiver Willie Davis on a play that some might have thought was a sandlot play of some kind, a hope pass, possibly, lobbed into an end-zone corner.

No chance.

It was a designed play, a perfectly thrown new-style fade pass. It came out of the book of Kansas City offensive coordinator Paul Hackett, whose game plan was extraordinary, plainly, if Montana could live long enough to execute it. He could.

This much can be said for the quarterback Montana outscored, Warren Moon. He was not only playing hurt, along with Montana, he was playing with a hurt offensive line.

There was only one physically ready Houston lineman--All-Pro center Bruce Matthews--and Kansas City sneaked by the others to overwhelm Moon repeatedly.

In spite of that, Moon still had Houston ahead in the fourth quarter, 13-7, and then made it close again with another long Oiler drive, 21-20.

As often happens in late-season football, the quarterback with the healthiest blockers won.

That wasn’t quite the case Saturday at Buffalo, where the Bills outlasted the Raiders, 29-23, when the NFL’s only quarterback play-caller, Kelly, proved more efficient than a coaches’ committee of Raider play-callers.

The Raiders had the weekend’s best quarterback not in a Kansas City uniform--Jeff Hostetler--who might have been the All-Pro quarterback this season if he could have called his own signals.

Denied that, Hostetler was required to keep handing off for running plays in the decisive third quarter at Buffalo when the Bills shifted into an 8-3 defense.

Against a seven-man front in the first half, the Raiders, with their best first-half game plan of the season, had run the ball effectively. It all turned in the third quarter, when, after fullback Napoleon McCallum managed to spin for nine yards on a first-down play, the Raiders twice tried to run it for another yard, failing both times against Buffalo’s revised eight-man front.

Nor did the Raiders blitz Kelly often enough. Even a defense with players as talented as those who play for the Raiders can’t get by without ever blitzing.

It could have been a Raider day even so but for three weird plays: an interference call that wasn’t interference, a long Buffalo kickoff run by a blocker, and a Kelly fumble that gained 15 yards.