Rams, Packers Are All About Quarterbacks

On the calendar, Super Bowl day is still several weeks off, but it may be that the real Super Bowl game will be played today when the Green Bay Packers, with Brett Favre throwing, line up in St. Louis against Ram passer Kurt Warner. In any case, look for the winning team to last through the winter undefeated.

These are the NFL players of the year--Warner one, Favre two--but they’re as different as two successful quarterbacks could be.

Favre is a classic big-play man--like John Elway or Steve Young or Terry Bradshaw--whose excellence or greatness is obvious. Anyone can see and appreciate what Favre does.

In contrast, Warner’s excellence or greatness is disguised, hard to see, unlike any other quarterback’s, yet from this vantage point:

No passer is quicker or more accurate than Warner.

No passer is a better athlete or throws harder than Favre.

And no one, perhaps, has seen such a matchup, factoring in the way both teams run--with Ram Marshall Faulk and Packer Ahman Green--and the way both teams defend.

*

Steelers Better

The only other organizations with a Super Bowl potential this year might be the Pittsburgh Steelers and defending champion Baltimore Ravens, one of which, probably Baltimore, will be eliminated in the game at Pittsburgh today.

After an indifferent run through most of the regular season, the Ravens, with the rebirth of running back Terry Allen, have perked up lately, as they did a year ago, to cloud what seemed to be Pittsburgh’s sunny ride through the AFC.

Plainly, the Ravens have become the mystery team of this tournament. The Steelers, however, are a better blend of running, passing and defense. Not as awesome on defense as the Ravens can be, the Steelers have more offense if passer Kordell Stewart and runner Jerome Bettis are set for the Raven defense.

*

Kordell’s Coach

This is Stewart’s seventh season in Pittsburgh, but his first with his own personal coach, Tom Clements, the former Notre Dame quarterback who, had he spent the last five years at Pittsburgh, might well have had the Steelers in or near the Super Bowl all five years.

The stubbornness of Coach Bill Cowher in delaying the appointment of Clement--or someone like him--is all that has held back Stewart, whose ability, raw at first, has been obvious all along. All he needed is a knowledgeable position coach to work on his confidence and his profession’s fine points, of which there are hundreds.

Self-confidence is about half of quarterbacking; and the most visible change in Stewart this season is the confident way he’s playing.

That improvement comes from Clements, who by training is lawyer, coach and athlete.

*

49ers Run, Run

The first round climaxed last Sunday with the day game, in which Green Bay turned back the San Francisco 49ers in a 25-15 exercise suggesting that San Francisco’s coach, Steve Mariucci, misunderstands the West Coast Offense.

In any event, the 49ers wasted the first quarter and too much of the game running into Gilbert Brown, Green Bay’s 340-pound defensive tackle.

The Packers also wasted the first half running the ball, but a home team can do that and get away with it, particularly on a cold day at Lambeau Field.

It’s the visiting team that pays when it doesn’t attack aggressively with a passer--Jeff Garcia--who is about Favre’s equal except in experience, and with taller and stronger receivers--6-foot-3 Terrell Owens, 6-4 J.J. Stokes, 6-2 Tai Streets and the others. And so the 49er halftime lead was only 7-6.

The San Francisco weakness is pass defense, which wouldn’t have mattered if Mariucci had played for a meaningful lead in the first half but which mattered decisively in the second half when Favre exploited it after Green Bay’s high command awoke.

The play that all but won for the Packers, setting up their 15-7 lead in the third quarter, was an underthrown second-and-11 51-yard bomb, Favre to Corey Bradford, which most NFL right cornerbacks would have intercepted but which San Francisco’s, Jason Webster, misplayed.

The 49ers finally unleashed Garcia in the fourth quarter, when, quickly, his passes achieved a 15-15 tie on a long drive and a two-point conversion. But it was too late. By then, Favre, easily piling up the last 10 points, was in a winning groove. And the 49er pass defense wasn’t.

*

Packers Deep

When it was all over in Green Bay, it was clear that the Packers could be a load in St. Louis today if they remember to start throwing in the first quarter and keep at it.

They have the quarterback for a shootout kind of game as well as the receivers, Antonio Freeman and Bill Schroeder, and they add to that lively depth with No. 3 and No. 4 receivers Bradford and Donald Driver.

Indeed, the Packers have surrounded Favre with more talent than he has had since his Super Bowl season, including tight end Bubba Franks and running back Green, who isn’t the Faulk type but can be nearly as effective as Faulk on the draw plays that are essential to a passing team.

In short, the Packers won’t let the Rams bound away.

Although Favre doesn’t run much anymore, he can still throw with becoming accuracy when falling down in any direction--a trait that sets him apart--and he can be expected to take more chances than Warner likes to risk. The interception Favre threw last Sunday when he should have hung onto the ball was worse than Garcia’s. It just didn’t hurt as much.

One area in which Warner exceeds Favre is connecting with receivers in stride. In most games, this has given the Rams one of their decisive advantages. This time if, for instance, a Warner pass reaches Isaac Bruce or Az-Zahir Hakim in stride, or Torry Holt or Ricky Proehl, the game’s result might hinge on how fast the Green Bay secondary recovers.

*

Miami Inept

The Miami Dolphins were the only home team that lost on wild-card weekend, which probably says more about their inefficient pass offense than their defense. Although the Ravens punctured that defense on two monster drives of 90 and 99 yards to win, 20-3, the Dolphins lost the day because, meantime, they couldn’t throw the ball well enough to keep up.

Almost surely, their pass-offense weaknesses can be attributed largely to lack of pass practice at training camp, through the regular season, and, of course, last week.

The Miami coach, Dave Wannstedt, is one of the many in the NFL who consider that football is a game of running the ball and stopping the run. That means, among other things, that on practice days, that’s what they practice. When in the Baltimore game it became necessary for Miami passer Jay Fiedler to do his thing, he couldn’t. Or, alternatively, his receivers dropped the ball. As golfer Ben Hogan said, there are only three ways to improve: practice, practice, practice.

*

Rice’s Night

On the first day day of wild-card weekend, pro football’s first nighttime playoff game was a surprise success story last Saturday, promising many more mid-January night NFL playoffs until at least the year that a blizzard blows out the players. As the Oakland Raiders won, 38-24, a very strange thing happened to the New York Jets. Every time they threatened to rally during a wild five-touchdown fourth quarter, a 39-year-old man put them down and away.

That was wide receiver Jerry Rice, who carried nine passes for a net 183 yards. At his age, Rice should have been home watching by the fire instead of making the game’s big plays, each of which showed that he still has the quality that has separated him from his peers: explosion.

Never the fastest player on any field, Rice produces burst of speed, on demand, as he did to set up the Raiders’ third touchdown after the Jets had finally scored their first. He was sprinting across the field when quarterback Rich Gannon’s pass caught him at top speed. The net gain was 47 yards.

To score the Raiders’ fourth touchdown after the Jets had scored their second, Rice sprinted into a corner as Gannon’s pass arrived from 21 yards away. That made it 31-17 and just too much for the Jets, who only had one more touchdown in their quiver.

On the game’s decisive plays, it was the New York pass defense that imploded.

Unaccountably, considering Rice’s big night, the Jets, on his last big play, released him unmolested into the corner. Earlier, as the Raiders took a 16-3 halftime lead when wide receiver Tim Brown scored on Gannon’s third-and-goal, three-yard pass, Brown was the only wide receiver out. Unaccountably, the Jets didn’t see him.

On a chilly night in Oakland, their quarterback, Vinny Testaverde, deserved better.

*

Big-Play McNabb

The playoff season began with Saturday’s day game at Philadelphia, where Eagle quarterback Donovan McNabb was the difference as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers fell out of the tournament, 31-9.

Like Steve Young in the old days at San Francisco, McNabb is a running back playing quarterback. Carrying the ball, he attacked the Tampa defense with his usual speed, power and assortment of moves, totaling 57 yards afoot to lead the more famous Tampa runners, Mike Alstott, who finished with 32 yards, and Warrick Dunn, who had 29.

Not the best pocket passer, McNabb has a big strong arm that enables him to throw well on the run, giving the Eagle pass offense the advantage it has had this season over most defenses.

For McNabb, beating Tampa decisively was much harder than it might have seemed, considering the final score. That’s a great defense, and it only buckled when McNabb authored three of the weekend’s best touchdown plays:

* In the second quarter, taking a 10-3 lead, McNabb first faked a pass, then scrambled right, turned, and shot a 16-yard scoring pass through a very small hole to 6-6 tight end Chad Lewis in the end zone.

* Shortly before the half, on third and 13, McNabb disguised his intentions for as long as he could before delivering the ball on a fast-screen play to running back Duce Staley, who, behind well-rehearsed blocking, weaved through the Buccaneers to score from 23 yards out.

* That made it 17-3, and it was all but over when the Eagles scored again in the third quarter on a 61-yard drive that began and was sustained on McNabb’s passes. Then, on second and six at the Tampa 25, he handed the ball to rookie running back Correll Buckhalter, who scurried up the middle to score while half of the Buccaneers were playing pass defense and half were distracted by a fake reverse. There wasn’t a more effective play on offense anywhere in what remained of wild-card weekend.

It takes plays such as that to outmaneuver the Tampa defense, the style of which has been Coach Tony Dungy’s principal contribution to the NFL game. Most teams, the Rams included, have copied Dungy’s tactics and strategy on defense.

His problem remained the same: an inconsequential offense. The Buccaneers are the proof that it’s difficult to win pro championships with defense.

If Bill Parcells succeeds Dungy next season, he will need to do hardly anything, except tinker a bit with the offense, to field a Super Bowl-type team.

Even the Buccaneer offense has ample talent. Dungy is leaving everything in place at Tampa but a pass-offense mind-set.