THE DIRTY BIRDS

So Super Bowl XXXV will be played without the great pass offenses that have enlivened every recent Super Bowl in the eight consecutive games won by quarterbacks Troy Aikman, Steve Young, Brett Favre, John Elway and Kurt Warner.

As everyone knows, Sunday’s game in Tampa figures as a dull, low-scoring defensive fight.

But the cause isn’t a change of heart in the NFL.

The 31 coaching staffs aren’t conspiring en masse to substitute mindless defense for the spectacular pass-first football of recent years.

What’s going on is that the NFL’s game officials are rendering pass offense obsolete.

Most have plainly chosen to enforce the rules that help pass defense instead of passing.

It isn’t a league decision.

There is no league-wide all-encompassing conspiracy.

But it’s happening.

If you saw the Baltimore Ravens’ last two games, you know how the league’s scofflaw teams lasted longest in the playoffs.

They played dirty football.

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LAWLESS HITS: The Ravens marched through the playoffs making illegal plays that were never called by the officials.

With lawless hits, their defensive players injured and disposed of the only two quarterbacks who could have kept them out of the Super Bowl, Oakland’s Rich Gannon and Tennessee’s Steve McNair.

As the Ravens won in Oakland Sunday, 16-3, their fattest, fastest defensive tackle, Tony Siragusa, who weighs 345 pounds, attacked the 210-pound Gannon after the ball had been thrown and deliberately drove him into the ground.

Earlier as the Ravens won in Tennessee, 24-10, Baltimore linebacker Ray Lewis similarly drove McNair into the ground after a similar late hit.

NFL rules forbid that kind of assault, but Lewis and Siragusa, who both play outside the rules, won anyway when the two wounded quarterbacks were all but useless after the attacks.

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THE TALKING SET: If there isn’t a conspiracy among the officials to help people like Lewis, they’ve doubtless been influenced by the reality that few of them--and few radio and TV announcers--are former quarterbacks.

Most members of TV’s talking set are old linemen and linebackers who tell us, repeatedly, “Let the boys play.”

The only commentator who has raised his voice--slightly--against quarterback violence is the one former Super Bowl quarterback, Phil Simms.

Most announcers--the John Maddens and the others--have not only been egging on the lawbreakers, they also tell us they’re looking forward to a brutal defensive Super Bowl.

Let it be noted that they’re not speaking for most spectators.

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NO MORE MONTANAS: It’s clear now that most NFL referees are either unwilling or unable to enforce the regulations that protect passers against defensive players who hit them illegally.

Thus to save the game from the league’s criminal element, the rules will have to be changed again--and this time there’s only one thing to sensibly do.

All defensive contact with a passer--after the ball is in the air--should be forbidden and enforced immediately with penalties and fines.

This should be the law:

* Hit the quarterback as hard as you can when the ball is in his hands.

* Back off if it isn’t.

* Protect quarterbacks as sanely as kickers are sheltered now--with five-yard penalties for brushbacks and more for worse.

Otherwise, pro football will degenerate into what it was in Oakland last Sunday.

Not even Joe Montana would be remembered for his excellence if he’d had to face that kind of defense.

And anything Siragusa did, anyone can do.

As you’ve heard, this is a copycat league.

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XFL SEASON: Sports fans looking forward to XFL football this spring saw the previews this month when Gannon and McNair were hit.

The XFL people, promising all-out warfare, call the NFL a pantywaist league and theirs a man’s league.

But if they fail to protect their passers and kickers, they won’t even have a football league.

They’ll be stuck with outdoor wrestling.

Or to put it another way, the NFL people are already playing XFL football, having surrendered their game to the most uncivilized among them.

This fits nicely into a nation that has been bemused by computer violence, by, for example, no-rules-no-referee extreme football, so-called.

Anything goes today.

If you can fool the IRS, good.

If the Securities Exchange Commission fines you, don’t pay.

If you can muscle your way into the presidency, do.

As recently as last year--when the NFL was still a passing league--few fans would have expected Siragusa and Lewis to step forward as poster boys for the greatest country on earth.

But there they are.

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DILFER AGAIN: The Ravens are favored at Tampa next Sunday in part because their quarterback, Trent Dilfer, is a better clutch performer than most opponents.

His critics are still thinking of Dilfer as they saw him in his Tampa Bay days, when he failed because he lacked the kind of informed modern leadership he gets now from Baltimore Coach Brian Billick--who, incidentally, isn’t responsible for the behavior of Siragusa and Lewis though he profits by it.

In the second quarter at Oakland, when Siragusa took out the other quarterback to take away all chance for the Raiders, Dilfer was ahead of Gannon in first downs, 4 to 1; in big plays, 1 to 0, and in points, 7 to 0.

In the last two weeks of presumably the best in American football, Dilfer has been the author of the two big plays--the two winning passes that gained 56 yards at Nashville and 96 at Oakland.

It’s true that the catcher, Shannon Sharpe, gained most of the 96 when the opposing cornerback, Marquez Pope, decided not to run with a speeding 230-pound tight end and when the safety, Anthony Dorsett, elected to run the other way.

But it was Dilfer who read the multitude of Oakland blitzers on third and 18, who stood in gamely as they came at him, and who delivered the winning pass with perfect timing and accuracy as Sharpe sprinted into an opening that was about the size of a doorpost.

As some of us have said for 10 weeks as the Ravens won all 10 games, Dilfer rates more from his critical fans than they’re willing to give him.

The irony is that in the era of the 10-second attention span, the Dilfer doubters somehow remember the old Dilfer more distinctly than the new one.

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PASS, PASS, PASS: The question of the day was posed everywhere in the stadium and in TV-land Sunday while the New York Giants were running up the score on the Minnesota Vikings, a score that at the end reached an unbelievable 41-0.

How could that happen?

Or, more completely, when every other offense has been crippled by late hits, how did the Giants do it?

I have a two-part answer that may fit:

* The Minnesota defense has been that weak all season but not regularly exploited because most opponents have been intimidated by the Vikings’ explosive offensive players, particularly on Minneapolis’ domed field.

* The Giants, belatedly joining football’s pass-first party, changed philosophy and came out passing Sunday, when they kept passing until they had leads of 14-0 in the first quarter, 34-0 at the half, and 41-0 in the third quarter.

To break on top as the game began, the Giants threw the ball on four of their first five plays and scored two quick touchdowns.

Stretching out to 34-0, the Giants, in 20 attempts, threw passes on 16 first-down plays but ran only four times on first down, when, repeatedly, the Vikings lined up in running-play defenses to stop the thunder and lightning they expected from Giant running backs Ron Dayne and the formidable Tiki Barber.

Putting it in two words, the Giants won with play selection.

They won exactly the way the Rams won the Super Bowl last year and started 6-0 this year before Warner broke a passing-hand finger.

The Giant passer, Kerry Collins, is very good but not that good.

Giant receivers Amani Toomer and Ike Hilliard are good but not that good.

The Giants routed Minnesota with play selection.

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COLLINS COMEBACK: As for New York quarterback Collins, he’s been as big a surprise to his critics this year as Dilfer remains to the fans who still criticize the Baltimore quarterback.

But Collins’ problem is different.

He was an early victim of the lawless violence of four years ago that finally became an NFL obsession this season.

During the exhibition months of 1997, Collins was one of the league’s great young quarterbacks, a veteran of a phenomenal pro season the year before, when, as an NFL sophomore, he led the expansion Carolina Panthers into the NFC championship game.

But six months later in that Denver exhibition, he was illegally attacked by Bronco linebacker Bill Romanowski, who broke Collins’ jaw in two places.

I saw that hit and expressed doubt that he’d play again after a jaw-shattering experience that would traumatize most normal people if not most professional athletes.

Collins somehow returned nonetheless--and not only that, he came back for the first regular-season game of 1997.

But he was never the same, either at Carolina or New Orleans, where he was banished only a year later--just two years after driving an NFL expansion team to a conference title game.

Although Collins has had other problems in the months since he ran into Romanowski (or vice versa), I have always believed that the remembrance of that head-splitting late hit was still influential in his troubled life right up until he ran into Giant Coach Jim Fassell.

By bringing Collins along carefully this season, pretending that his thunder-and-lightning offense was good enough, Fassel has built himself a quarterback.

It will be hard--impossible?--for Fassell and Collins to outscore Baltimore’s three-platoon wonders in the 35th Super Bowl, but at the very least they’re likely to keep the Giants ahead in the feeble NFC East into the foreseeable future.

If not longer.

Fassel and Collins are both pretty good.

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VIKING OFFENSE? Here’s one thing the Vikings have proved this season, both on the road and in Minnesota: They don’t really have a pass offense.

Their receivers, Randy Moss and Cris Carter, are the NFL’s two best; their running back, Robert Smith, is one of the best, and their young quarterback, Daunte Culpepper, has wondrous size and ability--but the Vikings don’t really have a pass offense.

They simply line up those gifted receivers left and right and throw the ball somewhere or, too often on first down, run Smith.

All that is because their leader, Dennis Green, possesses only three of the four talents an NFL coach needs to win the championship.

Green owns, in abundance, the most important three things: He is a solid human being, he is an unmatched talent scout, and he knows how to run a big organization.

But he’s a little weak in the Xs and O’s department, and that’s hurt him.

His old first lieutenant, Billick, has gone away to coach Baltimore, and Green may not fulfill his destiny until he finds another Billick, if there is one.