The Game Within Is Match of Speed

Rules dictate the clutter: Twenty other players must also be on the field today when the Minnesota Vikings play the Dallas Cowboys at Texas Stadium, but in comparison to the explosiveness offered by Deion Sanders and Randy Moss, they are duds.

“Let’s have a track meet,” said Jerry Jones, the Cowboys’ owner. “What a matchup.”

Is there any more expectation for greatness in the NFL these days than watching Sanders wave his arms like a conductor before an orchestra, dancing in place to music only he can hear while waiting to return a punt the length of the field?

Is there anyone who has brought football fans leaping from their seats more often than Moss this season, the ball in the air--underthrown, overthrown--but never out of his long, leaping reach?

Put all that athletic talent, speed and flair for the dramatic on the field at same time, and to heck with the game, just keep showing the replays over and over.

“Think of it like two guys meeting on the playground,” Viking Coach Dennis Green said. “Deion is going to tell his other guys in the secondary, ‘I got him . . . no, no, no, get out of here, he’s all mine. I want him because everyone is talking about him, because everyone says he’s the next whatever, and I want to show everyone I can check him.’

“And then you’ll have Randy coming down saying, ‘I’m glad. You and me, bring it on.’ It’s just going to be great.”

Unfortunately, it’s only another promising game if Sanders’ big toe is too sore to let him play or handicaps his performance. He’s not expected to return punts, and to save him, maybe the Cowboys will have him run less and cover Cris Carter.

He played only 15 snaps Sunday against the Seattle Seahawks after injuring his toe a week earlier, has not practiced this week--and try jumping as high as Moss without pushing off your toes.

“But if Deion’s healthy,” said Babe Laufenberg, a Dallas broadcaster and former Cowboy quarterback, “we’re going to get a show.

“Deion is so athletic, and while I hate telling this story on myself, when I was playing quarterback for Dallas we played Atlanta and Deion was playing for the Falcons. They were blitzing all the time, so we were running short routes, so I know Deion’s going to pounce on that, so I waited an extra half-second, Deion bit and I lofted the ball over his head to Kelvin Martin.

“It was a great throw, and I’m thinking we’ve just hit a big play and out of nowhere this one hand goes up and it’s Deion’s and he intercepts the pass. I went to the sideline and told Troy [Aikman], if I just had thrown it six inches higher . . . and Troy said, ‘Deion would have jumped six inches higher.’ ”

Superman versus Superman, now that’s a battle.

“You have teams that don’t want Randy Moss to do what he did against Cincinnati,” Green said after Moss exploded for a long touchdown catch. “If you looked up into the stands like I did after he scored, there wasn’t one person sitting down. That touchdown--with the speed, the acceleration, the catch--it brought 64,200 people to their feet and just electrified the place.

“If you’re the opposition you don’t want Moss to get turned on, because if he does, it’s like a 360-degree dunk in basketball, and everyone’s going to go crazy.”

Moss needs six catches and 76 yards in his final five games to blow past Jerry Rice’s rookie totals of 50 catches and 926 yards. Cowboy wide receiver Michael Irvin was left behind long ago (32 catches, 654 yards). Moss’ first 10 receptions all went for first downs.

“It’s the same week after week,” Moss has said. “The DBs, they don’t have nothing to do with it.”

He can beat anyone, he says, and after doing so recently, he told reporters, “They [defensive backs] were poor as usual.”

But can he beat “Neon Deion”? “Prime Time” is the league’s best defensive player because he takes away an entire side of the field from the opposition, which would rather throw into double coverage than risk fencing with Sanders.

“He’s the best athlete in sports today,” said Ron Wolf, the Packers’ general manager. “Better than Michael Jordan . . . he hit .300 playing baseball.”

So who wins in such a matchup?

“Deion will be right on his hip, step for step,” said A.J. Smith, the Buffalo Bills’ director of pro personnel. “But if Randall Cunningham throws that ball up high like he’s been doing and they jump and Deion goes this high and Moss jumps just as high, that still puts Moss higher into the air to make the catch. That’s a mismatch, and Moss wins.

“But every pass is not going to be perfect, and if the pass is not right there, Deion will be.”

Cunningham, who has the arm to throw the ball from Minneapolis to St. Paul, has been unable to overthrow Moss. He also has been saved by Moss on passes thrown up for grabs, but brought down by Moss.

“Every day he just does something that makes you go, ‘Gosh, that’s something special,’ ” said Brian Billick, the Vikings’ offensive coordinator. “He just has that kind of ability. You couple that with, to use a basketball metaphor, his court sense. Some guys just have a natural sense about them. They just know where things are and where they are in relationship to the ball. They just see things. They see more. Things happen in slow motion for them.”

Moss is 6 feet 4 and skinny, while Deion is a fragile 6-1 and not eager to tackle anyone. They are the two fastest players in the game, and nothing is more exciting in this game than what speed delivers.

“If the NFL excitement meter goes to 100, I put Deion at 115,” Irvin said this season. “I can’t relate to him because I can’t run like that. The only time I can relate is when I’m in my [Mercedes 500] SL on the highway.”

In addition to the star on the helmet, speed helped bring the Cowboys into the homes of America when Olympic hero “Bullet” Bob Hayes played wide receiver for the Cowboys.

“Deion and I are two guys from Florida, but I’m the one with Olympic gold medals,” said Hayes, the NFL’s original “world’s fastest human.”

Hayes’ speed brought on the introduction of zone defenses to allow for double coverage deep, and still it wasn’t enough. He caught 71 touchdown passes for Dallas, the most by a wide receiver in Cowboy history, and has the team record for average gain per catch, a staggering 20 yards.

“From what I’ve seen with Moss, he’s there in terms of speed,” Hayes said from his home in Florida. “I’m still the fastest man to ever play the game, though, and speed against speed, well, I know how much people love these kind of matchups. It changes the game.

“Deion has that kind of speed that raises fear in people: ‘You can’t keep up with me.’ Moss has that too, but he’s still got to prove himself over a 10-year span of time. There’s still a lot of football to play.”

Beyond Sanders, the man best suited to covering Moss is a Pro Football Hall of Famer who works for Callaway in Carlsbad. Mike Haynes, a bigger version of Sanders who played for the New England Patriots and Los Angeles Raiders, made a career out of smothering the opposition’s best receiver.

“It’s hard to believe Moss is just a rookie what with the confidence he plays with,” Haynes said. “He doesn’t seem to get too high or too low. Anything he does, it seems like it’s not a big deal to him.

“I’m not sure both teams will put the game on the line with Deion and Moss; this isn’t the time to take the risk to find out who would win that battle. They need to win the game, so if Deion is on Moss, I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t go that way.”

A few weeks ago, Sanders said he could not understand why anyone would tune in to watch him and Moss run up and down the field, suggesting it might be better strategy for Sanders to shadow Carter, because Carter keeps the chains moving for the Vikings.

But no one understands hype like Sanders, and unless he stubs his toe in pregame warmups, there will come a time when he struts out wide to challenge Moss.

“Deion is a master at baiting you, and his superior athletic skills always surprise you,” Billick said. “You think you have him beat and you don’t.

“Randy has some of those same qualities. You think you have him covered, but you don’t. Randy always thinks he can go deep and so far he hasn’t been wrong. Our biggest problem is getting a range on him. The throw against Cincinnati was the first time we extended him a little bit and he still caught the ball into his chest rather than stretching his arms out.”

This week, Sanders took home videotape of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ victory over the Vikings to study Moss, but Moss doesn’t watch video.

“That’s an interesting thing about Randy,” Billick said. “He doesn’t watch film [not] because he’s lazy, but because he doesn’t know what to watch. Right now he’s just doing his thing. When he went up against Darrell Green [of the Washington Redskins] he knew he had the physical skills to beat him because of the age difference, but Green used that age difference too, and what it meant in veteran experience.

“They went at it pretty good and Randy had only a couple of catches before the half. He learned a lot from that experience, and this being the first time, I imagine Deion will get the better of him, but this kid learns quickly.”

The Cowboys could have drafted Moss, but passed like so many other teams concerned about off-the-field antics, allowing Moss to drop to the Vikings with the 21st pick.

“With everything I’ve been involved in we couldn’t draft Randy Moss,” Irvin told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “Because of me, Jerry [Jones] had to go out on a limb over character issues.”

The Cowboys had Moss No. 1 on their draft board, Jones said, and while convinced his earlier problems would not have an impact on his pro career, the team could not afford to take him because of the stand the team had taken on cleaning up its image.

Even so, on Jones’ recommendation, Moss spent an entire evening with Sanders before the draft.

“Deion would have been a good influence on Moss,” Jones said. “Deion came to us before the season and told us how committed he was, the changes in his life [finding religion] and that baseball was in his past. You can see that in his play this season, and he’s a real leader on this team now.”

Moss, tutored by Carter, has received unqualified praise from his peers, who also marvel at his skills. The Vikings believe that Moss was prepared for the NFL spotlight because of the exposure he received as West Virginia’s two-time prep basketball player of the year.

“A superstar basketball player is night and day from being a superstar football player,” Green said. “You get to go from Rand, W.Va., to Honolulu to play basketball, whereas a superstar football player gets a trip to Wheeling, W.Va.

“Basketball guys are treated a certain way, and they travel all over the country. By the time they are 15 years old they’re playing in junior this and junior that. They get a lot more attention than a football player.”

The attention will only intensify, especially if the Vikings march through the playoffs. A Sanders-Moss rematch in the playoffs--maybe the NFC championship game--still looms.

“I’m not looking at this game as only Deion Sanders,” Moss said. “And hopefully Deion is not looking at this game as me being a rookie and showing the world what he can do with me.”

That’s exactly how “Prime Time” is viewing this holiday fare.

“We have so many other guys who can hurt them,” Moss said. “There’s no way Deion can be all over that field at one time.”

Who cares about the other guys?

It’s a game of turkey today--one on one.