The Top Passers Spread the Field

Some of the most entertaining offensive football ever seen has been played this month by three NFL teams, the San Francisco 49ers, Denver Broncos and, at times, Green Bay Packers, who are collectively averaging 35 points a game.

And one explanation is that their passers, Steve Young, John Elway and Brett Favre, throw the ball from constantly changing platforms.

Young, for instance, beat the Washington Redskins on Monday night, 45-10, by launching San Francisco’s 32 passes from six sites: slightly to the left or right after sprintouts; farther left or right after rollouts, and in the pocket after short and deep drops.

It was his moving platform that derailed Washington’s defensive linemen, who couldn’t rush Young boldly or confidently because they never knew where he’d be.

The 49ers’ West Coast offense thus embarrassed a team whose defensive linemen are probably more skilled than San Francisco’s offensive linemen.

Denver and Green Bay also play brilliant West Coast football but no offense can surmount serious injuries. The running back Green Bay needs, Dorsey Levens, broke a leg last week, and Elway pulled a hamstring.

Nor could the 49ers expect to survive without Young and his four aces, runner Garrison Hearst and the three receivers, Jerry Rice, Terrell Owens and J.J. Stokes.

Although these five seem all but unbeatable now, injuries play their part in determining Super Bowl championships.

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THE NOISE CAPITAL of the universe is any 1990s NFL stadium where the other team has the ball on critical downs while thousands of home fans scream insanely for one purpose only: to disrupt the opponent’s signals.

If you want a gross example of unjust, unsportsmanlike conduct, that’s it.

And it happens all the time.

The NFL’s leaders, if they put their minds to the problem, could surely find a way to, in the idiom, level the playing field.

One way: Put radios in the players’ helmets.

On today’s NFL teams, the quarterbacks are already wearing radios, which are used not only to hear talk shows, presumably, but also to get the signals from the bench. It would cost but a few cents more to wire the whole team.

In the meantime, the San Diego Chargers can look forward to their turn as victims of high-volume, dishonorable conduct this weekend in Kansas City, where 79,000 fans of the Chiefs always raise a commotion that beats a 727 coming in to land just over your head.

The decibel level for an approaching 727 is 106. By comparison, the decibel level for snow blowers or leaf blowers, which raise some of the harshest sounds in civilization, is 85.

In Kansas City’s stadium, when the other team has the ball, it’s 116.

What’s fair about that?

At the moment, the spirit of fair play seems to be missing in America, but maybe the NFL could help get it back.

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NOTE DEPARTMENT: The loss of Levens costs Green Bay its best chance on first and goal this year. The Packers scored all 30 times in that situation last year. . . . Young is on pace to break the “unbreakable” record he shares with Sammy Baugh, most years leading league in passing, six. . . . The 49ers’ next victory will be their 100th of the 1990s. No other team has won more than 87.

Detroit’s Barry Sanders, with 99, is on pace to break Marcus Allen’s rushing-touchdown record of 123. . . . This is the 65th anniversary of the rule change that made modern football possible: legalizing the forward pass from anywhere behind the line of scrimmage. . . .

The history of the two-point conversion shows that it’s more likely to to be successful running the ball, 47%, than passing, 44.3%. . . . Of the NFL’s 115 black coaches this year, three are head coaches--Tony Dungy of Tampa Bay, Dennis Green of Minnesota and Ray Rhodes of Philadelphia--and 10 are offensive or defensive coordinators.

The NFL’s youngest head coach, 34-year-old Jon Gruden of Oakland, is two years older than youngest-ever Harland Svare, who was 31 when he first led the Los Angeles Rams in 1962.