McNabb Presents a Giant Challenge in Third Meeting

Of all the offensive players, the most dangerous to a defensive is an athlete who combines a superlative two-way talent for advancing the ball as a running back and passer.

And that is Philadelphia quarterback Donovan McNabb’s edge entering today’s playoff game against the New York Giants.

Although the Eagles have lost twice to the Giants, McNabb is, as a first-year starter, more experienced than he was in the previous two meetings.

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POWER RUNNER: At 6 feet 2 and 230 pounds, McNabb, the son of an electrical engineer, is possibly the smartest, swiftest and most athletic of quarterbacks.

As he looked against the Buccaneers last Sunday, McNabb was a wise passer and running back who scrambled not to run but to pass.

He enters the second week of the tournament as the only passer and the only runner the Eagles have--an all but unimaginable distinction for an NFL player--unless, that is, running back Chris Warren continues to improve.

Aaron Brooks, the New Orleans starter who eliminated the Rams last week, 31-28, is another classy runner-passer who in time might outdo McNabb, and even Minnesota’s Daunte Culpepper, as an NFL quarterback--but never, at 205 pounds, as a ballcarrier.

McNabb runs with fullback power--a quality that helped him become a four-time all-conference quarterback and the Big East’s three-time offensive player of the year.

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REID HELPS: It profits McNabb immensely that as a virtual NFL rookie, he has played in a pass-sensitive system, the so-called West Coast offense, which Eagle Coach Andy Reid brought with him from his seven-year berth as a Green Bay assistant on the staff of Mike Holmgren, the present Seattle coach.

But without the threat of a running back--the Eagles lost that when Duce Staley got injured--Reid has simply plugged McNabb into Staley’s niche.

Thus McNabb has become the playoff season’s most dangerous threat.

When McNabb rolls out, there’s no way whatsoever for the defensive to guard against the run-pass option.

McNabb has helped Reid become a candidate for coach of the year, which comes as no surprise to those who have know Reid over his 42 years.

Before Holmgren introduced him to the West Coast offense, Reid spent 12 years as a college offensive lineman (at Brigham Young) and offensive line coach at San Francisco State, Missouri and elsewhere.

Reid is demonstrating anew that as the training ground for head coaching, a lot of line-coaching and a lot of pass-coaching are unbeatable.

EVEN GAMES: A consensus Super Bowl favorite has yet to emerge in the month of the event, which this year will be a Jan. 28 happening at Tampa, Fla.

Indeed, going into the second round of the 2000 playoffs this weekend, three of the four matches looked even.

All week, the pro games that seemed too close to call were Baltimore at Tennessee, New Orleans at Minnesota, and Philadelphia at New York.

The other Super Bowl co-favorite, Oakland, has continuously seemed better than Miami, but so did Indianapolis last week.

And Indianapolis is no more.

How could Miami quarterback Jay Fiedler have beaten Indianapolis quarterback Peyton Manning?

One answer is that the flamboyant Manning’s coach is the deeply conservative Jim Mora.

But Fiedler’s coach, Dave Wannstedt, is similarly conservative, a fact that ruined the game for most fans but not for Fiedler, the Dartmouth-educated so-so passer who has the mental outlook and courage of a Steve Young or Joe Montana.

Old pro players in the crowd spent the first half clamoring for Fiedler’s head.

The Dolphins won because they weren’t listening.

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WIND MANAGEMENT: It has for years been true of the NFL that as the action picks up or slows down in the last three or four minutes of the regulation 60, good clock management wins often for the brighter teams.

In the Baltimore-Denver wild-card game last Sunday, Raven Coach Brian Billick won with good wind management.

As Billick knows, the worst thing about winter football isn’t the cold weather, it’s a gusty gale, and so when the wind was fair for Baltimore--in the third quarter of a game the Ravens were then narrowly winning, 14-3--they worked the ball forward carefully on exchanges of punts.

They improved their field position not on runs or passes but on wind-blown punts from the Baltimore 34 to the Denver 49 to the Denver 29, whence, on second down, Jamal Lewis ran in the final points, 21-3.

So Raven quarterback Trent Dilfer didn’t have much to do in a game in which many critics expected him to stumble against Denver quarterback Brian Griese.

When Griese’s bad shoulder kept him away throughout the afternoon, it was all over for the Broncos, whose backup quarterback, Gus Frerotte, was no match for Dilfer.

In the biggest game of his life today, it will be Dilfer, Lewis and defense against Tennessee’s Steve McNair, Eddie George and defense.

Some say these are the NFL’s two best teams.

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RAMS PASS OUT: As the final days of Super Bowl racing begin, the St. Louis Rams are being defined as the NFL’s best team in absentia.

The Rams are out of the race--knocked out in New Orleans last week, 31-28--for one curious reason: They underwent a philosophical change of heart there that failed.

They had been a passing team.

They had come to fame throwing the ball relentlessly--throwing it on almost every down when any game was on the line, throwing it beautifully, powerfully, winningly.

That’s what made them great.

That’s what made them champions.

That’s what made them different.

No other NFL winners have ever passed their way to the championship as the Rams did last year, and as they seemed to be doing again this season, when, uniquely for a defending champion, they started with a six-game winning streak that only ended when quarterback Kurt Warner broke a finger on his passing hand.

At New Orleans--with Warner physically fit again, as he was to prove in the fourth quarter--the Rams nonetheless lost their way in the first half and lost the game when they stopped throwing the ball.

For three quarters, on the first-down plays that mean everything to a passing team, the Rams tried to run it with running back Marshall Faulk--against a steady running-play defense--and that’s what beat them.

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LIGHTNING RECAPTURED: At the time when the Rams awoke in the fourth quarter , the Saints, commanded by an exceptional virtual-rookie quarterback, Aaron Brooks, had a 31-7 lead and a seeming lock on the game.

At that late hour, Warner finally got the green light to proceed by the means he knows so well, and, five minutes later, he had thrown the Rams down the field three times, changing the count from 31-7 to 31-28.

Those lightning-like Warner drives--remembered so well from last season, not to mention this season, before and after the fracture--began with one that was typical of what the Rams would still be doing in the playoffs if they had only done it earlier at New Orleans.

Giving up on their running-play nonsense, they drove 80 fast yards in four plays, all passes, as follows:

* First down: Screen pass, 20 yards.

* First down: To Faulk, crossing, 31 yards.

* First down: To Ricky Proehl, crossing, 12 yards.

* First down: To Proehl, touchdown.

There probably would have been a fourth such drive--sustained at least into tying-field-goal position--if Az-Zahir Hakim had held the final New Orleans punt, which he dropped with a minute and a half to play.

But it wasn’t a muffed punt that lost that game.

It was Ram play-calling.

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UNILATERAL DISARMING: This was a game in which the Rams unilaterally disarmed.

The decision to run instead of pass on the decisive plays of the afternoon was made by their head coach, Mike Martz.

As the Ram play-caller, Martz previously in consecutive seasons had shown that he has a better understanding of pass offense than any NFL peer or predecessor in a century of football.

It was Martz who, to begin with last year, designed the fast-firing attack that freed Warner’s many swift receivers on the many, many pass plays that, for two full seasons, have made the Rams the most feared NFL team (for opponents) and by far the most entertaining (for sports fans).

Martz’s theory, as executed by his many gifted football players in both the 1999 and 2000 seasons, is that on almost every first-down play, defensive teams must line up against runs and passes both--in most cases against running plays first of all.

So that’s the ideal time to pass.

When some if not most defensive energy is expended on running plays, why run?

Why not pass?

That is the theory.

The worst time to pass, the theorists say, is third and long, when defensive players tend to ignore running backs while focusing, first of all, on pass rushing and pass coverage.

Thus for most of two years, Martz has aimed to pass on first down and stay out of third down.

The idea is to pass on first down FOR a first down, and then pass again, and again.

No other team has ever won a Super Bowl that way.

As the first NFL coach to ANNOUNCE that he’d pass--and then pass--successfully--Martz had come up with a unique, winning formula.

That leads to a question.

At New Orleans, why did he give up on this winning approach?

Martz’s answer is that the defenses that have lined up against the Rams this season have tended to surprise them with new-look, first-quarter alignments.

At game time, therefore, he says, he needed time to adjust.

But as a viewpoint, that flies squarely into the face of what the Rams have been up to for two years, when, as a matter of winning strategy, they have been dictating to defenses.

They haven’t been fretting about defensive surprises.

They have surprised the defenses.

Their change of heart in the Superdome last week can be attributed, quite possibly, to the pressures of coaching an NFL team, pressures that Martz is by no means exempt from.

The glare of the spotlight in an NFL game, when it hits the coach, is not only bright but hot, very hot.

Specifically, as a passing coach, Martz necessarily calls a lot of passes that are intercepted, and the pressures any play-caller feels after interceptions are cumulative as well as intense.

Offensive coordinators, of which Martz was one last year, aren’t greatly bothered by such misplays.

Had Martz been an upstairs coordinator at New Orleans, instead of a sideline-bound chief executive, he would surely have stored his first-down ground-play game plan by halftime if not long before.

It will be remembered that as an offensive coordinator, Norv Turner called the first-down touchdown passes that made Troy Aikman and Jimmy Johnnson famous at Dallas in the early 1990s.

Later, as a head coach in the Washington pressure cooker, Turner turned conservative in a move that had much to do with his departure there during the 2000 season.

The difference in St. Louis is that Martz had been a head coach for less than a year when he changed styles at New Orleans.

No coach learns everything the first year--not Vince Lombardi, not Bill Walsh.

Martz has time to recoup, and, as the finest pass-offense philosopher of all time--the first ever to design a 7,000-yard NFL offense for one season of games--he can be expected shortly to regain stride.

In Warner, he has a young quarterback who will give him more help than most coaches have or have had.

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THE FAULK STORY: One thing that threw the Ram staff off stride at New Orleans was Faulk’s regular-season success running the ball.

He ran his way to NFL MVP--no small feat.

Even his teammates voted him MVP.

Most of his net yardage came, however, on plays when the defenses he faced were worrying about Warner’s passes.

Faulk ran his way to MVP on draws or draw-type plays or in other situations when the linebackers opposing the Rams were drawing a bead not on Faulk but on Warner.

People on Martz’s staff were among those who were deceived--who thought Faulk, great as he is, was doing it on his own.

They should all have learned better at Tampa on the night of Dec. 18 when, as the Rams led by four points, 35-31, with time running out in the fourth quarter, all this happened:

o Martz’s defensive coaches called the plays that stopped the Buccaneers dead at about their 40-yard line, forcing a fourth-down Buccaneer pass that failed.

o Next, the Rams, instead of strengthening their lead with the pass plays that had shattered the Tampa Bay pass defense, asked Faulk to run the ball on the three consecutive plays that led ignominiously to a poor Ram punt.

o Reprieved, the Bucs rebounded to win.

At New Orleans, incredibly, Martz kept hoping that Faulk, who couldn’t run the Tampa run defense down, would run the Saints’ run defense down.

When he didn’t, the Rams were done.

THIRD-DOWN PENALTIES: In part, the Rams might also have been done in by something else at New Orleans--by a group of three penalties that were called against them in a sequence of three close plays in the first quarter.

Warner was ahead, 7-0, and ready to take the ball and make it 14-0 in a hurry, possibly--taking the Saints out early on--when two consecutive third-down penalties went against the Ram defense as Brooks retained possession to keep New Orleans moving, if cautiously.

The Rams had stopped him to begin with on third and one, and then on third and nine, when the flags flew on calls that could have been made either way.

Only then did New Orleans score to tie it, 7-7.

The next penalty came shortly against the Ram offense on the game’s big play, Faulk’s second-down 57-yard sprint to the New Orleans 26-yard line.

A magical run, that one featured a Ram drive toward what could have been a 21-0 lead minus the falling flags.

This infraction, like the first two, seemed minor if it were there at all.

It was a holding call against a Ram who kept both arms close to his body as he blocked a Saint.

Normally, holding is only called by NFL officials when the blocker extends his arm or arms, reaching out.

But this is the kind of penalty damage that all visiting football teams are used to on the road, where the home crowd likes to help officiate, and does so loudly.

The Rams, when traveling, have for two years been a team that can and does overcome such home-town adversity.

This time they couldn’t and didn’t.

They lost the touchdown there, but no matter, they immediately resumed running on first down.

And in no time, they first downed their way out of the playoffs.