Silver (and Black) Lining

By MIKE PENNER

Aug. 26, 2000 12 AM PT

How many pro football fans in the Los Angeles area raised their beer mugs last January and flung them in blood-boiling disgust at their television screens as they watched Georgia Frontiere fondle a shiny new accessory called the Vince Lombardi Trophy and bray shamelessly into the microphone that “This proves we did the right thing” by carjacking the Rams from here to St. Louis?

Los Angeles’ relationship with pro football has been mostly sadomasochistic, but what could be worse than the the sight of the woman who gutted a franchise and sold out a city claiming credit for a Super Bowl championship that fell into her lap when the NFL went haywire last season?

The vision of those moving vans carrying the Rams and the Raiders into the sunset in the spring of 1995?

No, by then, after years of mutual disdain and mistrust, all of us needed to take a break.

The news that Houston had outmaneuvered Los Angeles for the 32nd and last-for-the-foreseeable-future NFL franchise?

Not when the going rate for spackling over a civic inferiority complex is $700 million.

Year after year of stomach-wrenching playoff defeat when the Rams had the best team in the NFC but could never get a handle on the maddening scrambles of Fran Tarkenton and Roger Staubach?

Not even close. Christmas holidays in Los Angeles might have been ruined like clockwork, but each time, at least the effort and the intent were noble.

How about this then:

January 28, 2001, on a platform at Tampa’s Raymond James Stadium, NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue smiles unconvincingly for the cameras and hands over another silver trophy . . . to Al Davis.

Yeah, right.

The Raiders haven’t been within two time zones of the playoffs since 1993.

And the Super Bowl champion Rams went a full decade--1989 to 1999--between playoff appearances.

The Raiders, with their rewritten team motto, “Commitment To Mediocrity,” went 8-8 in 1999 . . . and 1998 . . . and 1995.

And the Tennessee Titans, before winning the AFC title last season, finished 8-8 in 1998, 1997 and 1996.

The Raiders have a 30-something journeyman starting at quarterback.

As did the Atlanta Falcons when they reached the 1999 Super Bowl with Chris Chandler in the lineup.

This is not your father’s NFL, when teams could be trusted to adhere to clearly defined roles, when the Cowboys always contended and the Falcons always lost and it took years to progress from doormat to apprentice to challenger to champion. Success was built the old-fashioned way, through careful drafting and clever trading and patient trial-and-error in the playoffs.

That playbook was dependable and reliable, but it didn’t make it to the end of the 20th century. Now, teams go from worst to first as fast as you can say “fifth-place schedule,” and nobody even seems worked up about it any more. The Rams and the Falcons played in the last two Super Bowls. The 49ers finished 4-12 and the Broncos wound up in last place last year. Up is down, down is up, and no one is a sure bet to win the Super Bowl, which is why the Raiders are as good a bet as any.

Once, the keys to winning in the NFL were offense, defense and special teams.

Now, the building blocks for success are schedule, divisional alignment and a league that underestimates you.

The 2000 Raiders, as with the 1999 Rams and Titans and the 1998 Falcons, have it all.

Schedule: Last year, the Rams completed a nine-game turnaround, improving from 4-12 to 13-3, largely by capitalizing on a last-place schedule. During the 1999 regular season, the Rams played only two teams that would wind up with winning records, the Titans and the Detroit Lions, and lost to both of them. With a 13-3 record, the Rams received a first-round bye and the home-field advantage in the playoffs, resulting in victories over Minnesota and Tampa Bay that might have been reversed had the games been played outside St. Louis.

At the same time, the Raiders were burdened with the NFL’s most difficult schedule in 1999, based on opponents’ 1998 won-lost records, and lost five games by a total of 14 points. The Raiders finished 8-8, same as the Chargers, but wound up with a fourth-place schedule in 2000 because San Diego had a better record within the AFC West.

So this season, the Raiders will play only two teams that made the playoffs in 1999, Indianapolis and Seattle, and three teams that finished above .500, Indianapolis, Seattle and Kansas City. Overall, the Raiders’ 2000 opposition combined for a winning percentage of only .427 in 1999.

Division: Last year, the Rams belonged to the weakest division in the league, with no other team finishing with a winning record. That meant two games with the 8-8 Carolina Panthers, two games with the 5-11 Falcons, two games with the 4-12 49ers and two games with the 3-13 New Orleans Saints. Bottom line: the Rams went 8-0 within their division, 5-3 outside it.

This year, the AFC West looks like the weakling of the league. The Raiders will play two games against the Seahawks, who went 9-7 last year but have since lost Joey Galloway; two games against the Chiefs, who went 9-7 last year but still have Elvis Grbac; two games against Denver, which went 6-10 last year and still has yet to replace John Elway; and two games against the Chargers, who are still the Chargers.

Element of surprise: This time last year, most predictions favored a Minnesota-Denver or Minnesota-Jacksonville final. St. Louis-Tennessee? In which sport, arena football?

The Raiders have not won a playoff game since 1990, have a 34-year-old with an average arm starting at quarterback, have a tailback-by-committee in charge of the rushing attack, have a 34-year-old go-to guy at wide receiver, have huge question marks at linebacker and safety, have a 37-year head coach voted most likely to implode leaving nothing but a smoldering headset on the sideline, and used three of their first four selections in the draft to pick an overweight kicker with a police record, a defensive back they want to convert to wide receiver and a punter.

In the old NFL, this was called a 7-9 season waiting to happen.

In the new NFL, the Raiders have the rest of league right where they want it.

This is how it works in the new NFL:

The Falcons, with exactly two playoff appearances to their credit from 1983 to 1997, make the leap from 7-9 in 1997 to 14-2 in 1998--a seven-game improvement in one year.

Then, early in the second game of the 1999 season, a single ligament tears, Pro Bowl tailback Jamal Anderson is out for the season and the Falcons are back in the old neighborhood, going 5-11 against a first-place schedule and spending January out of the playoffs.

The Rams, 4-12 in 1998 and supposedly saddled with an old coach hopelessly behind the times, rocket to 13-3 in 1999 and Dick Vermeil is unanimously hailed as a crafty veteran wise enough to stay out of the way of his young assistants. Including their three postseason victories, the 1999 Rams win more games (16) than they had in the 1996, 1997 and 1998 seasons combined.

Similarly, the Titans, who hadn’t been to the playoffs since they went 12-4 as the Houston Oilers in 1993, reached their first Super Bowl last season--an 8-8 to 13-3 jump--after 40 years of wandering across the desert from Houston to Memphis to Nashville.

It would be easy to write off 1998 and 1999 as a two-year aberration--the NFL, now in its 80s, just having a seniors moment.

But look at 1996: New England rose from 6-10 to 11-5 and the AFC championship.

And 1994: San Diego climbed from 8-8 to 11-5 and its first Super Bowl appearance.

The NFL stopped being a league you could count on in January 1994, when the Buffalo Bills played in their fourth consecutive Super Bowl. That was the last time the league had any kind of stability, any type of predictability. Each year, Buffalo would make it to the Super Bowl and get blown out. You could set your calendar to it. Those Bills understood their place. They were not supposed to beat the proven powers of the era--the Cowboys, the Redskins, the Giants. So they didn’t.

That, pretty much, was how the NFL operated for decades. You paid your dues, you took your lumps in the playoffs, you slowly groomed a Hall of Fame quarterback, you enjoyed your hard-earned time atop the league until the next challenger was ready.

The line of succession began in the 1960s with the Green Bay Packers, who won until the Cowboys figured out that the best way to get to the Super Bowl was to avoid playoff games played at minus-17 degrees, and that the best way to do that was to get the home-field advantage.

The Cowboys won until the Dolphins figured out that having Bob Lilly sack Bob Griese for 30-yard losses was not the most efficient way to go about winning Super Bowls.

The Dolphins won until the Steelers figured out that while Immaculate Receptions off Franco Harris’ shoe tops are fun for the moment, defense is forever.

The Steelers won until the 49ers drafted Joe Montana.

The Rams won . . . well, a lot of games in the 1970s . . . and five consecutive NFC West titles at one point . . . and should have been anointed as the Next One somewhere around 1975 . . . and should have qualified for about three Super Bowls during the first Chuck Knox era . . . but didn’t get there once because they couldn’t buy a break in the playoffs . . . and it has been 26 years since that offside call on goal-to-go against Minnesota and Tom Mack still hasn’t moved.

Occasionally, the playbook backfired.

During the ‘70s, parity was still merely a plaything in the recesses of Pete Rozelle’s imagination. But late in the decade, the league adopted two structural changes--a primitive, restricted form of free agency in 1977 and an initial experiment with a reward-the-weak schedule in 1978--that laid the groundwork for the chaos to come in the late 1990s.

The first blip on the radar screen was in 1981, when San Francisco and Cincinnati went from 6-10 in 1980 to the Super Bowl the following year, resulting in the league’s first all-out-of-nowhere championship matchup.

But even at that, the sudden rise of the 49ers and the Bengals could be rationally explained. Both were led by great quarterbacks--San Francisco by Montana, Cincinnati by four-time Pro Bowl selection and 1981 league most-valuable-player Ken Anderson. That, it seemed, was one currency that would never change: In order to reach the Super Bowl, you needed a proven, seasoned, successful quarterback.

From Montana to Anderson to Dan Marino to Joe Theismann to John Elway to Jim McMahon to Doug Williams to Jim Kelly to Steve Young to Troy Aikman to Brett Favre, it was the last of the NFL’s tried-and-truisms.

Until the last two years of the 1990s.

Of the four quarterbacks who started in the last two Super Bowls, one was a 33-year-old who had bounced from Indianapolis to Tampa Bay to Phoenix to Anaheim to Houston to Atlanta (Chandler); one was an Arena Football League veteran with all of four NFL completions to his credit before 1999 (Kurt Warner); and one was a rough-around-the-edges scrambler from Alcorn State who missed the first five games of the ’99 season recuperating from back surgery (Steve McNair).

If that’s the new blueprint for Super Bowl quarterbacks, the Raiders are in fine shape with Rich Gannon, who previously carried clipboards in Minnesota, Washington and Kansas City before, at age 33, breaking through last season with inexplicable totals of 3,840 passing yards, 24 touchdown passes and a completion rate of nearly 60%.

With venerable Tim Brown catching 90 of those passes and the tailback tandem of Tyrone Wheatley and Napoleon Kaufman combining for more rushing yards--1,650--than Edgerrin James, Emmitt Smith, Marshall Faulk and Eddie George, the Raiders in 1999 actually outdistanced the AFC champion Titans in net yards (5,693 to 5,296), first downs (326 to 294) and third-down conversion efficiency (39.4% to 38.2%).

The ingredients are all there for simmering young Coach Jon Gruden--they call him the Seether--to take the Raiders to the next level. Especially if first-round draft choice Sebastian Janikowski weathers this nagging little deportation crisis--what’s a bribing-a-policeman charge in the grand scope of Raider crimes and misdemeanors?--and solves a field-goal kicking problem that directly cost the team four victories last season.

Yes, if the Rams and the Titans and the Falcons have taught us anything the last two years, it’s that it’s bound to be the Raiders in 2000.

Unless it’s the Bears.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Super Bowl Odds

Odds for NFL teams to win the Super Bowl:

ST LOUIS RAMS: 3-1

WASHINGTON REDSKINS: 7-2

TAMPA BAY BUCCANEERS: 7-1

JACKSONVILLE JAGUARS: 8-1

DENVER BRONCOS: 10-1

INDIANAPOLIS COLTS: 12-1

TENNESSEE TITANS: 12-1