Playoffs Find Bumps in Rules

Paul Tagliabue, the commissioner, is going to be the NFL’s most important Super Bowl player this year -- for at least the next several days -- for a unique reason: His best coaches seem to be taking advantage of his best officiating crews, turning pro football, formerly a beautiful game, into a common brawl.

And if that isn’t what Tagliabue wants, he’ll have to do something about it.

The problem isn’t the tough, widely publicized hitting that has marked the playoffs. Solid hits, when legal, are about half of what football is about.

The whole problem, which scorched both of last Sunday’s games, is that pass offense -- the artistic half of NFL offense -- is being ruptured illegally by defensive backs who hold, punch, grab, shove, bump and otherwise interfere with receivers in violation of the rules.

During the regular season, these scofflaws were usually caught and punished.

In the playoffs, though, the officiating crews have “let the boys play,” as many coaches have noted.

But misconduct isn’t football. When allowed, it drastically changes the game from a thing of great interest and beauty into a street fight.

The precise problem is that both of this year’s Super Bowl coaches -- Bill Belichick of New England and John Fox of Carolina -- are veteran NFL defensive coaches who have learned that what’s forbidden in the fall is forgiven in the playoffs, or at least winked at. Thus, last Sunday, Belichick and Fox both capitalized on their knowledge not of football but of the officials.

It’s hard to believe that Tagliabue wants two differing games, a regular-season game and a playoff game.

Little Hits Hurt

On various occasions last week, fast-moving, hard-minded defensive backs -- all of them well-paid by Carolina and New England -- lowered shoulders and deliberately ran into receivers at the instant of the catch, knocking them flat and jarring the ball away. But that’s football. It’s legal.

Head-to-head hits violate the rules, but shoulder hits are part of the game when the ball is in an opponent’s hands. So are chest hits.

Accordingly, a good NFL receiver is used to such blows. They look murderous, but he’s withstood them since junior high school.

What’s hard for him to overcome is a series of little tugs and holds and punches by his peers in the 2004 defensive backfields.

Although all the little blows look harmless enough as the receiver scoots down the field, the reality is that they severely disrupt his plans and timing in violation of the rules.

Modern pass offense -- the thing that has made NFL football the artistic and entertaining game it is, a game without precedent or equal -- is based largely on timing. When the call is even a short pass, a good passer will often let go of the ball just as or even before the receiver makes his final cut.

If his receiver can’t go into that cut because a defensive back is harassing him illegally, there goes modern pass offense.

Every illegal move that a defensive back makes -- as he races down the field side by side with a potential receiver -- should therefore be noticed and punished by the officials, who are empowered by the rules to penalize the offending player and who, during the regular season, usually do.

Tossup Bowl?

The rule changes of the 1970s that made NFL bump-and-run defense illegal -- except in the first five yards beyond the line of scrimmage -- paved the way for the modern pass offense. Previously, pro football had been a running-play league.

A couple of the early Super Bowls were won by teams throwing a total of 11 passes or fewer in 60 minutes.

It was in those days that the adjective “dull” was so often applied to the Super Bowl.

Here are three ifs:

* First, if passing is illegally thwarted in the Feb. 1 matchup, the effect on the Super Bowl could be the same as it was in the days when passing was legally discouraged.

* Second, if the officials continue to “let the boys play,” the game will figure as a tossup. (Who knows whether Carolina or New England can more expertly play illegal football?)

* Third, if modern passing is allowed, New England, the better team with the better quarterback, Tom Brady, will win Super Bowl XXXVIII with the most original and creative pass offense of 2004.

Let’s hope nobody in pro football holds that it’s right and proper for pass-offense people to keep designing and playing legal, artistic football while pass-defense people play illegal, scummy football.

Although New England beat the Indianapolis Colts last Sunday, 24-14, Colt passer Peyton Manning could well have thrown four touchdowns instead of four interceptions had Marvin Harrison and his other receivers been able to extricate themselves from the clutches of Patriot defensive players.

Aesthetic Disaster

The Philadelphia-Carolina game, won by the Panthers, 14-3, was an aesthetic disaster. Or does someone in the audience think they won it with brilliant offense?

In truth, the Carolina offense was an embarrassment to the NFL, to the game of football, and to all three Carolinas, North, South and East.

Of the Panthers’ two touchdowns, the first and winning points were scored on a 24-yard desperation throw by Jake Delhomme, whose-up-for-grabs pass was identical to Brett Favre’s disastrous rainbow throw the week before.

The only difference was the result: Favre’s pass was intercepted on the pivotal play of that game, the play that took Green Bay out of the playoffs.

The Delhomme pass came down in the end zone on the pivotal play of the NFC championship game, nesting in the hands of a thoroughly surprised Carolina receiver as two Eagle defensive backs went to sleep, upright, on either side of him, close enough to smell him, or touch him if that thought had occurred to either of them.

The second and last Carolina touchdown was scored on a powerful three-foot run by DeShaun Foster -- as four Eagles tried to ride him instead of tackle him -- after a 20-yard pass-interference penalty against Philadelphia had advanced the Panthers to the one-yard line, which, in this game, they couldn’t reach any other way.

Interestingly, after Panther defensive backs had repeatedly been getting by with illegal contact, it was the Eagles who were finally nabbed for the same crime.

Except it wasn’t, quite, the same crime.

This time it was routine pass interference, which the officials didn’t allow in either game last week.

What they did allow in both games -- or at least what happened -- was repetitious illegal contact by defensive backs running along with receivers while attempting to disrupt their timing and, if possible, their paths to the ball.

It was the kind of defense that will set the game back 25 years unless Tagliabue steps in.

Piling On McNabb

The Eagles are a one-man team. Except for quarterback Donovan McNabb, they don’t have much of anything -- few exceptional running backs, fewer receivers (except for Freddie Mitchell) and not enough blockers to contend with a determined defense.

That they reached the NFC title game again is a commentary on how far the NFC has fallen behind the AFC.

What the Eagles do have is a superb running-passing quarterback in McNabb, the most effective ballcarrier on their team and the great runner-passer of the playoffs.

The NFC tournament this winter was a question of whether McNabb could single-handedly get the Eagles into the Super Bowl, an accomplishment which, had he remained uninjured, could have and probably would have been his, given the lack of quality offense from Carolina.

But McNabb was injured. And if you saw him lying on his back on the cold ground in the second quarter as Panther linebacker Greg Favors rushed in to pile on him, you saw the whole game -- from beginning to end -- and the end of the Eagles as a Super Bowl contender this season.

The NFL announced, after communicating with the officials, that McNabb hadn’t been ruled down by contact, implying that no umpire had blown a whistle and that the Philadelphia quarterback must have been tripped by one of his teammates.

In other words, no official had seen the Panthers’ Mike Rucker knock him down. In the fog of football combat, it sometimes happens that nobody sees what occurs but 10 million football fans.

So McNabb was fair game -- provided a defensive player put an arm on him, or a hand, or at least a finger to officially end the quarterback’s involvement in the play.

The rules are explicit. Particularly if a prone quarterback is motionless, it is unnecessary as well as decidedly unfair and manifestly improper for a 240-pound linebacker to pile on him as if McNabb were trying to squeeze out the last half inch on an attempted touchdown sneak.

Although not called, it was a penalty play -- not that in the end it mattered. For the entire action of this game was compressed into the instant it took Favors to dive on McNabb.

Before Favors leaped, it was a 7-3 contest ripe for the plucking by either team. After the big leap, which put McNabb on the sideline for much of the rest of the night, the game was no contest.

Everything that happened thereafter was superfluous, even Carolina’s tugs and holds on Eagle receivers. They weren’t going anywhere without McNabb.

Belichick Had It

As the snow came tumbling down in New England last Sunday, the Indianapolis express, which has been described as the NFL’s greatest this winter by the many with an appreciative eye for Manning’s passes and Edgerrin James’ runs, was derailed in New England for two principal reasons.

First, but perhaps not foremost, Manning’s receivers were illegally manhandled on most pass plays.

Second, and maybe foremost, New England Coach Belichick knew the Indianapolis plays about as well as Manning knew them.

After the Colts smashed Denver and then Kansas City, Belichick could predict what they would do against the Patriots because Manning himself had told him about it in a public statement. The Colts, Manning reported, “aren’t doing anything different” these days, “we’re just executing better.”

Thereupon, Belichick and his aides, diligent film students, clearly taught themselves the Colts’ probabilities in every formation.

If, for example, Manning almost always went to Harrison on a crossing pattern from, say, a certain kind of one-back formation, they made a note and later so informed their pass-defense players.

Belichick’s research couldn’t have paid off if the Colts had changed the look of their offense substantially after outscoring Denver and Kansas City. A new-look offense for every new opponent is integral to the West Coast offense, as developed by the coach who in the 1980s built San Francisco’s five-time Super Bowl champions, Bill Walsh.

But in Indianapolis, apparently, to hear Manning tell it, the goal is simply “executing better.”

In any case, New England’s defensive backs -- heady veterans all -- clearly knew in great detail where to move when they saw the Colts line up. Or at the least, they had it figured five seconds after the play began.

Thus on one play, after Harrison had taken four steps, Patriot defensive back Ty Law was seen pointing to a corner of the field as if to tell his teammates, and as if to remind himself, that that’s where the ball was headed.

Before Harrison could get there, Law, barely reaching the ball in time, intercepted when Manning unloaded a touch late.

On a devastating day for the Colt offense, Law caught as many Manning passes as Harrison did, three apiece.

A Patriot safety, Rodney Harrison, had made the first interception, racing through the end zone in accord with Belichick’s planning to pick off one that would have been a touchdown pass if Manning had thrown it a moment earlier.

It’s hard enough for Manning (or any quarterback) to remember his own offense. The truly remarkable achievement of this game was the way New England’s defensive players could keep it in mind in the intense heat of combat even after they had been exhaustively briefed by Belichick and his defensive coordinator, Romeo Crennel, whose first responsibility is the defensive line.

The Patriots’ first interception was the play that told the Colts this wasn’t to be their day. A long, Manning-directed countermarch, which had them within reach of tying the Patriots, was abruptly ended by a deflating end-zone interception.

Soon it was not 7-7 but 10-0 New England on a day that quickly resembled other bad days in Manning’s career. Although he often plays brilliantly when out in front -- as he was in the Colts’ most recent two appearances against Denver and Kansas City -- he sometimes makes mistakes playing catchup.

Bottom line, the Panthers should perhaps be pardoned if, after the rosy feeling of winning an NFC title wears off, they begin to wonder what Belichick has in store for them.