NFC Can Extend Its Super Streak Over AFC to 14

NFL playoffs have for some time borne a curious similarity in these respects:

* Almost every year there are two Super Bowls. The actual one in late January is typically preceded by what football people call the “real” Super Bowl, which matches a pair of conference finalists two weeks earlier.

* Each winter, the country ardently awaits Super Bowl day. It is something of a national holiday now. The competing teams are the AFC and NFC champions, the two often referred to by people outside the league as the two best teams in football.

* To many NFL people, however, the real Super Bowl nearly every season is the NFC championship game. For the last 13 winters, every NFC winner has gone on to win the NFL title. In 13 earlier seasons--from the late 1960s to the early 1980s--the real Super Bowl game was usually played by two AFC teams in an era dominated by the Pittsburgh Steelers, Miami Dolphins and Oakland/Los Angeles Raiders. Curiously, there has almost never been a year when the two best teams in football played in the Super Bowl.

The trend could well continue this season, with Green Bay and San Francisco favored to reach the NFC title game Jan. 11 in San Francisco.

With their defense and their quarterback, Brett Favre, the 1997 Packers are clearly best of class. But if the 49ers can beat Green Bay, they can beat any AFC team.

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49ers forever: Six times in the the early 1990s, San Francisco played Dallas for the NFC title in the real Super Bowl. And each time, subsequently, the winner dominated the AFC winner in the nominal Super Bowl.

Now in a new era, Green Bay has replaced Dallas in the dominance league--but San Francisco is incredibly still there.

The length and quality and continuity of the San Francisco streak are unprecedented. Starting with their 1981 team, the 49ers have won five Super Bowls and more than 11 of every 15 regular-season games they’ve played for the last 17 years.

The NFL has never seen anything like it.

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One more test: As the NFL’s greatest player for the last two seasons, Green Bay quarterback Favre has met every test but one: He is inexperienced in bringing his team from behind to win a big game with a clutch long drive in the final seconds.

That is, of course, a tribute to his team. In any matchup with a tough opponent, the Packers, as coached by Mike Holmgren, typically start and finish well in front.

Their big-game performances, however, have been no help to Favre in preparing for the unexpected.

Not so long ago, Joe Montana confronted the unexpected regularly in four Super Bowl-title seasons and very often won from behind.

At Denver, John Elway has made a career of late-game rallies. So has Dan Marino at Miami.

If Favre gets the ball one last time in San Francisco Jan. 11--with a minute or two remaining and the 49ers ahead by three--there’s no book on what he will do.

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Best yet: For a brief and shining moment, the 49ers, on a recent Monday night, attacked Denver with an extraordinary three-wide-receiver offense--perhaps the best of that genre ever seen in California.

Joining all-timer Jerry Rice were two tall prodigies, Terrell Owens and J.J. Stokes, who average 6-feet-3, and who have also risen in other ways this year to rank with some of the league’s leading wide-receiver pairs.

If the 49ers could have lined up Rice, Owens and Stokes this winter in the same offense with running back Garrison Hearst and quarterback Steve Young, they would have been something to see in the playoffs. Next year, with Rice and Hearst back, they will be something to see.

In the meantime, the 49ers are missing Rice in two ways, as player and as role model. It is improbable that they can overcome the depression of losing all that.

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The New York Jets, who moved into a contending position this season under the leadership of Bill Parcells, moved out of the playoffs last week on a game-day decision by Parcells.

On the turning-point play of the game--and his season--the Jet coach kept inexperienced quarterback Ray Lucas on the field and he threw the interception that beat the Jets. His loathing for a good veteran quarterback, Neil O’Donnell, knocked Parcells out. Incomprehensible.

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Bad habit: In the final minutes of too many second and fourth quarters this year, NFL coaches have ordered their teams into kneel-down formation. It is a bad habit that’s spreading.

In the world of sports and entertainment, what’s entertaining about an NFL kneel-down play?

Good quarterbacks have been known to score twice in the time it takes any team to kneel down twice.

The whole problem here is that the coaches fear media branding as dummies if they try to run the ball and the play backfires--which has happened.

So there’s an easy solution. A rule could simply require every team to make a legitimate effort to advance the ball on every down. That would take the coaches off the hook and the kneel-down play out of the game, where it belongs.