Defense Wins Games in Pro Football, but Offense Wins Fans

Given a chance to take sides in opinion polls, sports fans always vote enthusiastically for offense over defense.

They’d rather watch Rich Gannon than, say, Ray Lewis.

Gannon is the quarterback whose touchdown passes and runs have placed the Oakland Raiders where they are.

Lewis is one of the 11 players who make the Baltimore Ravens what they are: defensively awesome.

But defensive teams are beloved only at home--where any way the home team wins is a good way.

In the other 48 states, it’s offense that seasons the football season.

Thus, in the NFL’s semifinals, most of the country will be pulling for the Minnesota Vikings this morning and for the Raiders this afternoon against, respectively, the New York Giants and Ravens.

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LATE HITS: Contrary to the wants of football fans, offense is on the wane and defense on the move this season because most of the great old quarterbacks have departed and because the most promising new ones have been subject to an often-lawless campaign of violent intimidation by the league’s many eager, active defensive players, whose new game is “Get the Quarterback.”

Last week, for example, Tennessee Titan passer Steve McNair was never the same physically or psychologically after a late hit by the defensive star at Nashville, Raven linebacker Lewis, who plowed into him after he’d thrown the ball in the second quarter, smashing at McNair’s throat, and driving him into the ground.

That tilted an even game toward the Ravens, who won, 24-10.

In Oakland, meantime, the Raiders brag that they have knocked out most of the quarterbacks who have dared take the field against them this season.

One Raider victim was Brian Griese, the Denver Bronco quarterback who was driven into the ground and out of the playoffs, taking away Denver’s grip on the division title--which then went to Oakland.

Smashing into a quarterback and driving him fiercely into the ground is not only bad manners--it’s not only a flagrant cheap shot--it’s a violation of NFL rules, just as, at Nashville, linebacker Lewis’ big hit was a violation.

Today’s Raven-Raider game is therefore a matchup of lawbreakers.

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FAILURE REWARDED: In pro football, the line is fine between roughness or toughness and brutality or savagery--between civilization and barbarism--but it’s there.

And for the following reasons, it’s time for the NFL to take a stronger stand against defensive savagery:

* When a defensive player angrily smashes into a quarterback after the ball is gone, he’s expressing his frustration that he didn’t arrive in time to prevent the throw.

* When an NFL referee refuses to penalize a pass rusher for a late hit, the league is rewarding the pass rusher for failure.

In such a case, a defensive player, bent on a sack, didn’t get there in time.

He failed--and now we applaud him?

Is that what the NFL wants?

Is that the American way?

Do we pin medals on obvious failures?

The lifeblood of the NFL--the magnet for the big crowds and the big ratings--is the gifted quarterback who, standing in gamely against a vicious rush, summons the courage to wait until a teammate opens up in the defensive maze and then throws him the ball with incredible accuracy.

What is gained for the NFL when these artists--when the NFL’s greatest passers--are attacked like animals and lawlessly injured or intimidated?

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PUNCHLESS OFFENSES: The rebirth of NFL defensive superiority this season--as based in large part on defensive brutality--has brought to an end, temporarily at least, pro football’s greatest era: The recent years of extraordinary pass offense.

The quarterbacks personifying that era were Troy Aikman, John Elway, Joe Montana, Steve Young, Brett Favre, and, last year, Kurt Warner--who have, just among themselves, won more than a third of all the Super Bowls.

By comparison, NFL offenses, to win today, don’t even have to score touchdowns.

Last week when the offensively insignificant Giants soundly whipped the Philadelphia Eagles, 20-10, they became the latest to advance in the playoffs on touchdown plays scored only by defensive and special-team personnel.

If there’s a sudden, serious offensive crisis in pro football at the moment, it’s unlikely to end until Aikman, Young and Montana are adequately replaced and until their battered replacements are allowed to survive and flourish.

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TOO CONSERVATIVE: The playoffs are proceeding without the NFL’s two best teams, the Titans and St. Louis Rams, who played the most interesting of all the Super Bowl games just a year ago when, in the final instant, Tennessee famously came up a yard short, 23-16.

In part, both teams are out of the playoffs now because their quarterbacks, Warner and McNair, were at inopportune times hurt.

Still, there were two better reasons for Tennessee’s exit last Sunday at Nashville, where, first, Titan Coach Jeff Fisher’s extreme conservatism led to the upset by Baltimore.

McNair showed what the Titan offense is capable of on the first series of the game, when his passes and scrambling runs drove Tennessee ahead, 7-0.

Thereafter on too many critical plays, Fisher, as usual, instead of authorizing McNair passes, insisted on running Eddie George--hoping, apparently, to make a statement against the Baltimore defense, which prides itself on restricting any running back in the league to fewer than 100 yards.

George finished with 91, meaning that Fisher lost that battle as well as the war.

But the other and primary reason he lost was the ineptness of his kicker, Al Del Greco, who missed three field-goal attempts, one a low-trajectory duck that was blocked and returned for the winning touchdown.

On offense as well as defense at Tennessee, Fisher has been showcasing the finest talent in football today, the top two-platoon blend; but at the crisis points of their game against Baltimore, the greatest of the Titans all sat down while their kicker, Del Greco, who began his athletic career as a high school soccer star, kicked them out of the playoffs.

McNair, George, Fisher and every other Tennesseean did all they had to do to win a big football game before it was time for a teammate, a soccer player in a football uniform, to beat them.

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WRONG HIRES: How would you like to be a great football player on a great team that lost a Super Bowl shot because it hired the wrong soccer player?

In other years, pro football became America’s No. 1 sport with rule-changing, which is needed again now to reduce the new animal-like power of the defensive teams and to eliminate the anomalous game-deciding power of the soccer players.

Do the Lakers bring in a soccer player to take free throws for Shaquille O’Neal?

Sounds good, can’t happen.

Do the Dodgers bring in a soccer player to pitch the ninth?

Sounds better, no chance.

Football is the only big-time sport whose championship games are won and lost by imports from another sport.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

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ROAD WINNERS: Football also differs from baseball and basketball in that it’s an all-weather game.

On a winter day, however, the NFL can’t do much about that short of scheduling its most important playoff games at domed sites--which is another good idea that won’t materialize.

And so there is a chance that the winning clubs at New York and Oakland today--the two groups advancing to the Super Bowl--will be not the best teams that day but the best all-weather teams.

On, for instance, a fast track, Minnesota would drub the Giants with the most impressive offensive talent remaining in the title race: wide receivers Randy Moss and Cris Carter, running back Robert Smith and quarterback Daunte Culpepper.

New York’s offensive talent is, by comparison, laughable except for running back Tiki Barber, who has a broken arm, and whose replacement, first-round draft choice Ron Dayne, has trouble getting out of his own way.

On a slow field or in a big wind, New York’s beautifully coached defensive players, who are praying for a blizzard, could make things even.

Last week, Baltimore’s defensive players went to the same prayer meetings.

But at Oakland today, the game will match West Coast offense teams, and, in all-around ability, the Ravens seem a touch stronger than the Raiders.

Even though Gannon is more quarterback than Baltimore’s Trent Dilfer, this has been a season in which Dilfer has proved his many critics prematurely wrong.

It was Dilfer who had the day’s big offensive strike last Sunday, a high-velocity pass that hit Raven tight end Shannon Sharpe in stride on the 56-yard play that set up the tying touchdown that Baltimore had to have to get back in the game in the second quarter.

For years, his many critics had evaluated Dilfer on teams that didn’t have Raven Coach Brian Billick in charge--and good coaching is at least half of good quarterbacking.

Put it all together and I won’t be surprised if, for the first time in NFL playoff history, the visiting teams--Minnesota at New York and Baltimore at Oakland--win the conference title games to reach the Super Bowl.

That wouldn’t be the best-team Super Bowl but it would do.