Playoff Hint: Think Offense

Evading the clutches of the parity gods, 11 of the 12 best football teams in America reached the NFL playoffs.

The exception was super-erratic New Orleans, a winner over Dallas last week in one of the five major upsets that brought the league’s any-team-can-beat-any-other-team parity phase down to the last hours of the regular season.

Of the eight division champions and four wild-card teams that advanced, none stands out as a likely Super Bowl champion. My top two candidates, Denver and New England, are like the others: excellent football machines with some problems.

Denver’s problem is that, as a wild card, it can play no more at home this season.

New England, built to play tough in New England, could have trouble on the Super Bowl’s domed field.

Kansas City, one of the three best, could have a lot of pre-Super Bowl trouble in New England’s winter wonderland. Indianapolis doesn’t get the results it should with the talent it has. Philadelphia doesn’t get the playoff results it hopes for. The Rams may not recover from last week’s upset. Can either Green Bay or Seattle go 4-0 in its next four? Can anybody win?

Seahawks vs. Packers

Today, the Seahawks will be back in Green Bay, where they lost three months ago, 35-13. What they accomplish this time will depend in part on what they learned last time, playing before the fervently partisan Packer crowd on a nice fall afternoon.

It’s no longer autumn in Green Bay, but the Seahawks already know that. Their coaches also know Green Bay. The Seahawk leader, Mike Holmgren, during his seven-year tour as head coach of the Packers, took their 1996 team to the championship in Super Bowl XXXI. (They haven’t won it since.)

So it won’t be the intangibles that trouble the Seahawks in this game. The question is simply whether they’re good enough.

You can be sure of several aspects of Seattle football:

* This is, first of all, a solid team. Reasonably well off in all departments, Seattle has more than held its own with the good teams. The Seahawks knocked the 49ers out of the playoffs, remember, beating them twice.

* Seattle’s quarterback, Matt Hasselbeck, a fifth-year pro who began life as a Packer backup, throws a good pass. Though not widely known, he is an NFL passer.

* Of all those playing the West Coast offense, Holmgren and Hasselbeck play it best.

The more experienced Packers are, of course, the weekend’s heaviest favorite. For the ultimate questions answer themselves:

* Whom would you rather have at quarterback, Hasselbeck or Green Bay’s Brett Favre?

* Whom would you rather have at running back, Shaun Alexander of Seattle or Green Bay’s awesome Ahman Green?

Even so, this is a game that figures to be tight, tighter than advertised.

Colts vs. Broncos

Today, the Indianapolis Colts will be home to a Denver team that smashed them there two weeks ago, 31-17. The truth about the Colts is that in their employ, they have the players on offense who could have made that game a 38-35 shootout if they’d known how to use them.

And it’s not too late. The Colts can make tonight’s game a shootout, if they somehow learn how a modern offense attacks.

Every Indianapolis game against good pro clubs should be high-scoring because of the kinds of players on their roster.

Although the Indianapolis defense under Coach Tony Dungy is first-rate, his front office hasn’t found him the talent to play it. Conversely, the Colts’ offense is third-rate, even though their players are among the NFL’s finest. For Dungy, it’s a cruel twist.

With quarterback Peyton Manning, running back Edgerrin James, wide receivers Marvin Harrison, Reggie Wayne and Brandon Stokley and kicker Mike Vanderjagt, the Colts should be scoring 35 or 40 points every week.

Instead, they needed some luck last week to pull out a 20-17 victory over the NFL’s young expansion team, the 5-11 Houston Texans.

It was that close because the Colts played their usual game in the first three quarters when, disgracing themselves, they fell behind, 17-3. Their “usual game” meant pounding the eight-man Houston line with James, instead of bypassing Houston’s aggressive defensive players with Manning’s passes.

The reason Vanderjagt gets so many field-goal chances is that whenever the Colts find themselves in scoring position, they run James on first down, picking up one or two yards.

Then, against coaches who typically change from run defenses to nickel or dime pass defenses on second and long as well as third down, they ask Manning to throw what are often desperation passes because he doesn’t want to lose field-goal position.

Then they bring in their kicker.

That’s the way teams did it 40 years ago. This is another century.

Patriots Throw It

The New England Patriots, clear favorites to represent the AFC in the Super Bowl, showed the world how the 21st-century game should be played when, en route to a 31-0 triumph over Buffalo on the final weekend of the regular season, they reeled in 28 first-half points

The Patriots did this with passes. It wasn’t so much that quarterback Tom Brady, possibly the best in the NFL, threw four touchdown passes to stake out a 28-0 lead in the first 28 minutes. Rather it was the way Coach Bill Belichick sent him out, throwing the ball on nearly every play in the first 21 minutes to open a 21-0 lead.

Belichick, formerly among the most conservative of NFL coaches, learned the 21st-century offense by playing the Rams in the years when they were a passing team.

As a consequence, the Patriots have become as much fun to watch as they are difficult to beat.

It isn’t easy to catch up with a pro club that gets off the bus firing strikes until it’s nicely ahead, after which Belichick’s skills on defense keep things that way.

Buffalo’s coach, the recently fired Gregg Williams, explaining what happened to the Bills, said, “They spread us out.”

The Patriots did it with a no-huddle, no-running-back, no running, no-stopping-a-good-passing-team attack.

For example, on first and goal for the Patriots at the Buffalo seven-yard line -- where most coaches like to try a running play first -- Belichick spread the Bills and Brady fired away.

Later on first and goal at the one, where, with few if any exceptions, other teams run at least once, Brady fired again and got a quick touchdown

It was a textbook lesson in how to win, 2003-04 style, and you didn’t have to watch too closely to get it.

Resting the Broncos

The Denver coaches, thinking about the Colts today instead of the Packers last week, rested quarterback Jake Plummer, running back Clinton Portis and four other offensive starters for the duration of the Green Bay game, meaning they threw the game away, 31-3.

There are pros and cons to such strategy.

The pro side is that it helps balance the books with the best of the division winners, those who can rest their key people this week because the NFL playoff system has given them wild-card week byes. As a further Bronco benefit, players who don’t play can’t get hurt.

All this is logical thinking for a wild-card coach, and Denver’s Mike Shanahan, who has been there before, and who has won the Super Bowl as a wild-card leader, is nothing if not logical.

The minus side of a game-long rest period, which is frowned upon in such circumstances by the more emotionally demanding coaches, is that good players can get into bad habits playing next to non-starters.

Failing all day leads to frustrations that are emotionally hard on veterans who aren’t used to failing. Or as the late George Allen used to say, “Losing just gets you used to losing.”

What’s more, Shanahan, as a player in the entertainment business, didn’t do much that day to entertain the thousands who, patiently listening to the long, long commercials, tuned in for what was widely billed as the game of the week. Neither the NFL’s leaders nor TV’s will thank him for that.

In this instance, however, Shanahan was probably right. He has two injured aces who will be needed as entertainers as long as they and the Broncos last in what is now a tough four-game season. Both Plummer and Portis plainly needed some injury time off. Shanahan wasn’t just resting tired players.

And even though the Broncos tore up the Colts last time with their 5-foot-7 rookie halfback, Quentin Griffin, among other reserves, they’ll probably need Portis too to win this time and to keep winning, if it comes to that.

And though some of Shanahan’s veterans did miss a game, they have practiced every day alongside the other veterans.