COMMENTARY : Lots of Teams to Like in NFL Tournament

To tell you the truth, I’m a little disappointed that the Buffalo Bills aren’t in the NFL tournament. More times than you can shake a stick at, you meet people with clenched faces gloating that the Bills won’t have a chance to choke over the big one again. I met one of those people at the next table just the other day. I could hardly finish lunch.

All right, they didn’t win the big championship pot, but they were there four times in a row. I wanted Jim Kelly and Bruce Smith and Marv Levy to have another shot before their time was up -- like the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers -- but it looks as if they’ll never be the Bills of Winter.

It’s healthy to have a reason to root for or against somebody in the playoffs instead of needing a bet to hold your attention. So now who do we have?

This is a sudden-death tournament, one of those exquisite pain vs. pleasure things that has potential for good theater in a season of parity and mediocrity. The playoffs almost always have more great theater than the grandiose finale of the Super Bowl, anyhow. The fellow at the next table asked me who was going to win the Super Bowl, since it wasn’t going to be Buffalo. How do I know who’s going to win? I may not know about art, but I know what I like.

Take your choice among the eight teams. First, I like to identify the villain. I really can’t define the villain, but I know him when I see him. Somebody like Al Davis. Sometimes it’s fun to root for the bad guy; that’s when the establishment is really the bigger, badder guy.

I like Steve Young in San Francisco. It would be nice to see him get the recognition instead of being forever the man who replaced Joe Montana. The 49ers are always fun to watch with the real threat of a lightning strike to Jerry Rice or John Taylor, or a scramble by Young. And this is the rare team that can be called a dynasty. The 49ers have replaced the likes of Montana, Dwight Clark, Charles Haley, Bill Walsh, and keep on going and going.

I don’t like Barry Switzer or the Dallas Cowboys. He is one of the reasons college football is such a dismal swamp. There’s no blowhard like a Texas blowhard. If that’s not reason enough, there are others. I’d hate to see that owner strut off with another championship like a puffed-up pigskin Steinbrenner.

Dan Marino has been a work of art for the Miami Dolphins for a decade. His Fake Spike Sucker Play trickery against the New York Jets was a delight, even if it was a foregone conclusion that he’d make a touchdown in the 22 seconds he had left, anyhow. Don Shula could be the first coach to win the Super Bowl in four different decades. But I can be turned away by his imperious majesty.

It would have been fun to see the New England Patriots advance past their wild-card game. They’re the great rising tide, and they had a chance until Drew Bledsoe’s pass that should have been caught was deflected into a freakish interception. We know how Bill Parcells tied Phil Simms’ arm behind his back half the time, and they won two Super Bowls. Now, here is this coach letting this kid pass more often than anybody in a single season and the Patriots win the last seven games of their schedule.

Parcells obviously is a terrific coach. He still does some things that fit into the pattern of playing favorites, which disturbed some players with the Giants as well as the general manager. All season Marion Butts was the Patriots’ ball-carrier, however mediocre. For the playoff game Parcells replaced Butts with Corey Croom, who hadn’t carried even once during the season. Didn’t work. And note that one of the postgame Parcells hugs was with Cleveland Browns linebacker Carl Banks, who was rankled in New York by the coach’s reverence for Lawrence Taylor.

But the drafting and development of Bledsoe can be put under the pillow of a Jets fan looking hopefully to the draft.

Draft? How about Ron Wolf going from the Jets to resurrect Green Bay. The fact that the Packers -- a small-market survivor from the pioneer years, thanks to NFL revenue-sharing -- are owned by the community and not vulnerable to ransom demands of some owner, is hearth-warming. From the great years comes the tale of how the throng welcoming the triumphant Green Bay Packers kept Vince Lombardi standing on the tarmac and when he got home and into bed, his wife said, “God, your feet are cold!” And the great man said, “When we are in bed, my dear, you can call me Vincent.”

The Giants were playing in Green Bay and Dick Clemente was covering for Newsday. Clemente went to a barber shop as the barber was shutting his lights. Lombardi, emerging, saw Clemente and told the barber to cut his hair. So the barber did.

It would have been nice for Warren Moon to take the Minnesota Vikings to the next round, but that’s another thought.

The Chicago Bears moved up instead. I was in George Young’s office when the Dear George call came from Dave Wannstedt saying thanks for the congratulations and the interest but he was taking the Bears’ offer instead. Watching him is like wondering about a lost girlfriend.

The Browns advanced on the passing of Vinny Testaverde, who had convinced much of the free world that he’d never get it done. The Browns are coached by Bill Belichick, Parcells’ defensive boy wonder in New York. He’s another of those lost girlfriends, but with no sense of humor.

Cleveland plays Pittsburgh on Saturday in a Rust Belt version of the Yankees and Red Sox. The winner goes to the American Football Conference Championship Game, but says Pittsburgh center Dermontti Dawson, “This game is bigger.”

My favorite football-and-wine story comes from the time Chuck Noll was lifting the Steelers from decades of failure to four Super Bowls in the 1970s. Noll was a connoisseur of wines in a city where fine wine was hard to find; he had a case of choice stuff flown back from California with the team equipment. The case came down the baggage carousel bleeding red from one corner. The trainer rushed to open the box and exclaimed: “Eleven bottles special reserve, one bottle injured reserve.”

San Diego has--uuh--weather. In the old AFL days it had wonderful Lance Alworth, the Bambi of receivers, who caught a Super Bowl touchdown pass in his old age for Dallas.