NFL’s Parity Provides Fantastic Final Four

The NFL’s four best teams have made the final four this year, which is a little different. Usually, at least one survivor doesn’t really belong.

Breaking another precedent, each of the four clearly has a Super Bowl shot.

Still, I’d say the Oakland Raiders will hold off the Tennessee Titans today, when the Tampa Bay Buccaneers upset the Philadelphia Eagles.

These are four very different kinds of teams. The Raiders, for instance, with Rich Gannon throwing, are a great passing team, the league’s best.

Tennessee and Tampa Bay are defensive teams with divergent approaches to offense.

The Titans feature a mobile big-play quarterback, Steve McNair.

The Buccaneers, No. 1 defensively in the NFL, have an outrageously different quarterback, Brad Johnson, who is at once the most accurate and most immobile of the passers.

The Eagles, led by scrambler Donovan McNabb, are the best balanced team in the league. As led by Andy Reid, they’re also among the best coached. So they’re favored, but not a lock, to win the Super Bowl a week from today.

Raiders Go Deep

The Raiders are also nicely balanced. They won last Sunday’s Jet game, 30-10, with their best defensive lineup in many years, and with a dangerous ballcarrier, Charlie Garner, to complement Gannon.

Even so, they broke a 10-10 tie only in the last five minutes of the third quarter.

Time was running out on the short-passing Raiders -- whose extensive assortment of short ones had been controlled all day by Coach Herm Edwards’ Jet defense -- when two things happened:

* Quarterback Chad Pennington, the young Jet phenom, turned suddenly erratic.

* And at just that time, Raider Coach Bill Callahan decided suddenly to throw downfield.

The change occurred so fast that nobody was ready for it, least of all the Jets.

This was a game that had figured to turn on a play by the Raider secondary, and, finally, it did. Pennington was unhinged by an interception that was made with the presence of a wide receiver by Raider cornerback Tory James, who, at 6 feet 2 and 190 pounds, could be playing wide receiver.

Next, the youngest, biggest and fastest Raider receiver, Jerry Porter, 6-2, 220, challenged Edwards’ two-deep defense -- twice. And less than a minute into the fourth quarter, soon after Gannon had hit Porter far out there both times, it was no longer 10-10, it was 24-10 and all over.

Best Game Yet

Oakland’s opponent today will be a Tennessee team that last weekend survived one of the great games in NFL playoff history to eliminate the Pittsburgh Steelers, 34-31. Called the dullest pair in the playoffs, the Titans and Steelers altered that perception in one big hour of football.

Both clubs came out passing and that made their matchup the most entertaining of the weekend, proving two things:

Players on passing teams aren’t wimps.

The traditionalist running coaches who over the years have thought that, and said that, have been dead wrong. Confounding conservatives, the Titan-Steeler passing duel developed into the hardest-hitting football game of the long winter.

Coaches who are as defense-oriented and as run-minded as Tennessee’s Jeff Fisher can pass when they realize they must pass to win. It was, of course, as hard for Fisher to bring himself to that realization as, earlier in the season, it had been for Pittsburgh’s defense-oriented, run-minded Coach Bill Cowher. Thus the future of football: hard-hitting passing games.

The difference in this game was Tennessee’s running quarterback, McNair, who has the talent to upset Oakland.

A Parity Problem

After the Tennessee game, Pittsburgh’s Cowher complained that an official’s call had beaten him in overtime. That echoed the complaints of New York Giant fans and their media a week earlier, that the officials beat them in the last minute at San Francisco.

But in neither case was officiating to blame. The explanation both times was, simply, NFL parity.

Of the league’s 32 teams, 25 or 26, possibly more, are so evenly matched that most games can be won at the wire, as many are. Thus any 11th-hour penalty call is bound to get somebody’s attention.

It’s true that in a close game, any such a last-moment call will seem decisive to a loser.

But in reality, the NFL is the best officiated league in sports, considering the speed with which the games are played and with which the officials must act.

The reality also is that every Sunday, every NFL team gets 60 minutes to act. The things it does and doesn’t do in all that time are more instrumental in winning and losing than any official’s call.

New York’s Homers

The NFL’s long, long effort to equalize the personnel in every franchise -- summed up in the word “parity” -- has brought results that please most fans, who want the home team competitive. But whiners marred it this winter in New York and Pittsburgh:

Giant fans beefed that pass interference wasn’t called on the key play in San Francisco, but the fact is that pass interference is an inhumanly difficult call. Interference is either present or close to it on nearly every pass play. Naturally, the officials will miss a few.

Cowher beefed that a game shouldn’t be decided at the end on a penalty as slight as running into a kicker. But that’s a valid and necessary penalty. Naturally, all rules should be enforced at all times. To say they shouldn’t is as naive as it is self-serving.

For the NFL, the worst complication in all this was the loud whining that went on for a week in the New York media. The exasperating truth is that in the largest and presumably most sophisticated city on the continent, New Yorkers are homers at heart.

Bucs Attack

The 49ers were finally knocked out of the tournament last week -- a week late, New Yorkers would say -- by a Tampa Bay team that played attack football for a change. That strategy routed the Californians, 31-6.

Normally, Tampa Coach Jon Gruden wants to run, but against a 49er secondary devastated by injuries, he designed a pass attack that won easily.

Which leads to an obvious question: Will Gruden attack the Eagles that way in Philadelphia today?

If he does, the Buccaneers can upset the team that has so often humbled them there.

If he doesn’t -- if he hopes to rely on his wonderful defense and a ball-control ground offense -- winning will come harder, if ever.

Gruden is a student of his game who, having decided to pitch the ball through the 49er secondary last week, planned a better attack than some passing teams mount.

When Gruden’s team was at the top of the red zone, he usually sent in pass plays to Johnson. And that proved decisive.

As a scrambler, Tampa quarterback Johnson is the NFL’s slowest, but he knows his limitations, and he’s compensating now. First, he has toughened himself physically with an exercise program. Second, Johnson has made himself into a quicker passer. He still couldn’t carry a pro team; but with mostly pass calls from Gruden, he’s a genuine Super Bowl threat.

Eagles Versatile

Tampa’s opponent at the Vet today is an Eagle team led by a famous quarterback who could earn only one touchdown last week against an infamous defense.

And in a 20-6 win over the Atlanta Falcons, McNabb, Philadelphia’s veteran passer-runner, could earn that one touchdown only after his defense had won the game with a touchdown on an interception.

McNabb was coming back from a long injury absence, true, but he’ll have to be much better than that to befuddle the Buccaneer defense, which last year’s coach, Tony Dungy, built into football’s finest.

Obviously, Dungy would still be at Tampa with an offensive design like that of his successor, Gruden. Dungy doesn’t seem to know enough about offense. But his defense is the reason that Gruden is in Philadelphia.

Dungy’s losing record on Northern trips in other years with the Buccaneers shouldn’t be held against Gruden now.

And in any case, the real Tampa problem this week isn’t any of that, it’s Philadelphia’s all-around team.

Reid has put together an Eagle team that can execute a little of this and that because it is better balanced than any NFL opponent.

And that’s McNabb’s edge. To begin with, McNabb can beat Tampa with either his arm or feet.

Moreover, McNabb’s runners can run the ball, his receivers can hold the ball and move it, his blockers can block, his defense has few weaknesses, and his special teams are special. That’s why Philadelphia is the prevailing Super Bowl favorite.