Sanders Continues to Thrive and Cowboys Keep Winning

As the 1996 Dallas Cowboys keep winning with hardly any offense, they are being led by their right-side cornerback, Deion Sanders, who keeps strengthening his status as both the NFL’s best defensive player and America’s best athlete.

Despite the agonies of a bad back that thousands of bad-back Americans can relate to, Sanders has continued to thrive in his country’s roughest spectator sport.

His contribution is unique in a league of gifted athletes. With close coverage of the receivers who come his way, he forces all Dallas opponents to play the game mainly on the other half of the field.

That enables his teammates to crowd the other team’s pass-receiving threats. And the results have been awesome. High-scoring Green Bay, with Brett Favre at quarterback, scored only six points at Dallas. And, last week, high- scoring New England lost to the Cowboys, 12-6.

No other pro clubs are talented enough in any one position to make their opponents play on half the field.

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Great ones: The NFL, conceivably, has had two all-time all-pros in action at the same time all year: Sanders and San Francisco wide receiver Jerry Rice.

And that ranks as a rare good break for contemporary viewers.

For one thing, on Los Angeles television, it has been a pleasure to repeatedly watch Rice making his big plays most Sundays--thanks to the tripleheaders that have replaced live pro games at the Coliseum.

In a league that has been in business for 77 years, perhaps only an old-time Green Bay end named Don Hutson was in this man’s class. And Hutson never had to do it with aggressive millionaires clawing at him play after play.

Don’t take Rice for granted.

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Where are the mighty now? Well, if there are no upsets this weekend, the 49ers and Cowboys will be the two home teams next weekend in NFC wild-card games.

Wild-card favorites? The 49ers and Cowboys? Could be.

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There’s a remedy: The success this season of such no-offense clubs as Dallas, Jacksonville and Minnesota makes it seem at least possible that pro football’s defensive strategists are about to overtake the offensive coaches again.

For the last 15 years, NFL teams playing football the Bill Walsh way--with short, ball-control passes to backs and ends, as first coached by Walsh in San Francisco--have won most of the Super Bowls.

In high-scoring games with Troy Aikman and Steve Young at quarterback, Dallas and San Francisco have, for instance, repeatedly won that way.

The odds, moreover, are that passes will also win next month’s Super Bowl.

But so far this season, defense has done most of the winning for most NFL winners, carrying, among others, Dallas, Carolina, Buffalo, Oakland, San Francisco, Pittsburgh and even, at times, high-scoring Denver.

But in the words of an NFL maxim: Defense always catches up with offense.

And the same remedy is always necessary: Change a rule.

One question is whether the NFL’s new club owners will match the league’s former leaders in readiness to move with skill in that direction.

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World class: The NFL, which has mostly ignored the World League as a personnel feeder-line, has finally welcomed a group of WL graduates to the big top this season--with happy results for some coaches.

Two of the AFC’s three top kickers are WL products, and one, Cary Blanchard of Indianapolis, is Pro Bowl-bound. The other is Adam Vinatieri of New England. In addition, five old World Leaguers are now punting in the NFL.

It has long been obvious that one pro football problem over the years, compared to major league baseball, is the NFL’s lack of a farm system. Contrary to some beliefs, college football doesn’t adequately fill that void. College football is for college athletes, of whom only a relatively few make it as pros.

The NFL, for best results, needs a post-college football factory of some sort--and the World League seems ideal for that, particularly for quarterbacks, who can only learn by doing.

And this year, finally, NFL coaches have accepted six WL-trained quarterbacks: Brad Johnson, who has taken Minnesota into the playoffs; Paul Justin, who has helped keep Indianapolis afloat; Scott Mitchell, the regular in Detroit, and three others who, with less opportunity, have played effectively--Kerwin Bell of Indianapolis, Doug Nussmeier Of New Orleans and Jamie Martin of the Rams.