Smith’s Running Effectiveness a Question Mark for Cowboys

As the playoffs began, the central question about Dallas’ defending champions was whether Emmitt Smith had lost the ability to run a football effectively.

On pass plays, the Cowboys are still connecting. And they are still blocking. Four of their offensive linemen have been voted into the Pro Bowl.

But Smith isn’t producing in the customary old Cowboy way.

When they give him the ball, he looks the same as ever--meaning that, intuitively, he still makes the right thrusts, cuts, moves. And that’s half the job.

But the other half is the physical ability to do what instinct dictates--the speed, the quickness, the dexterity, all the physiological functions.

If Smith has lost anything, that’s where he’s lost it.

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Cold-day football: For decades, football critics have been saying that it’s folly to build passing teams in cold-weather communities because you can’t throw the ball satisfactorily in freezing conditions.

Year in and out they were probably wrong. But they couldn’t be proved wrong until this season when the Green Bay Packers began beating all comers with Brett Favre’s passes on cold days at Lambeau Field.

The temperature stood at 30 last week and the wind-chill factor made it 20 degrees colder when Favre threw for 200 yards and completed three touchdown passes as Green Bay routed Minnesota, 38-10.

Although the Packers also gained substantial yardage rushing, they are, under Coach Mike Holmgren, principally a passing team, in the Bill Walsh tradition. For at San Francisco for several years, Holmgren was a 49er assistant. And so, now, he also sets up running plays with passes.

Summer or winter, it has become an NFL truism: On any given day, the team that passes better usually wins.

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Figures can lie: The most frequently discussed football statistics, unlike baseball statistics, are very often not significant.

For instance, in the postgame evaluation of a winning team, it doesn’t mean much, if anything, to say that it ran the ball 47 times and threw only 26 passes.

In play selection, what counts is when you pass or run.

Any team protecting a three-touchdown lead tends to run much of the time in the third quarter and on most plays in the fourth, thus accumulating a mess of rushing yardage that is largely meaningless in terms of how the game was won.

In the first half, by contrast, players who, on third and goal, run power plays from their opponents’ seven-yard line--as Kansas City did last week--are apt to get beat, as Kansas City was.

The NFL’s 1990s winners--Dallas, San Francisco, Green Bay, Denver now and the others--are teams that see the first half as a time to use their ballcarriers not in workhorse roles but mainly for change of pace. When a game is on the line--as it normally is in the first half--they are unafraid to pass the ball. And as Walsh says, the best time to throw is on first down, when defensive teams must deploy their linebackers not for pass coverage, primarily, but in running-play defenses.

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Whenever there is downfield contact between defensive backs and speeding receivers, the playoff season this year will at times bring two kinds of reaction.

As the ball hits the ground:

--Some fans will say: “That wasn’t much of a bump. Let ‘em play football.”

--Others will say: “That would have been a big play if the defensive guy hadn’t hit him.”

Conflicting reaction of this kind is an inevitable result of the nature of football: It is a violent game.

Passing, however, was designed to be different. At a time when football was literally killing people, pass plays were legalized years ago to keep an old game from being too violent.

And with the passing of the years, NFL passing has come to be the most artistic and entertaining aspect of football, as well as the surest way to win.

On a modern pass play, though, close timing is so critical that one little illegal movement of a defensive man’s hand can break it up, leading to an incomplete pass and the end of the artistry.

The defensive backs know that. And some of the best of them have perfected illegal football.

In a year when the defenses are beginning to regain control, anyway, the NFL shouldn’t let the defensive scofflaws get away with it.