Two Rookies Will Take a Star Turn

The Pittsburgh Steelers will be in Cincinnati today in a matchup of famous rookie quarterbacks.

Cincinnati’s Carson Palmer is the Heisman Trophy winner from USC. He is 4-5 in his first year as an NFL starter.

Pittsburgh’s Ben Roethlisberger is the pride of the Miami (Ohio) RedHawks. He is 7-0 in his first year as an NFL starter.

Palmer, who sat out all last season, was off to a slow start this fall in what was technically his rookie campaign. But as the Bengals picked up steam, so did Palmer, who is 3-1 in his last four games.

Roethlisberger came to national fame in a conventional NFL offense.

Instead of attacking with passes, the 8-1 Steelers attack with runs by Jerome Bettis, who gets the ball on most first-down handoffs and often on second down.

When those plays fail to gain 10 or more yards, Roethlisberger is called on to throw on third down.

Third-Down Problems

A pass defense is rated as pretty bad if it can’t break up third-down passes.

On third and four or more, quarterbacks are either blitzed or their best receivers are double-covered.

It is a mark of Roethlisberger’s poise and talent that he is so often effective on third-down passes or scrambles. Many of his big winning plays this year have been made in the all-or-nothing crises of third down.

Palmer has also been asked to learn the trade while mopping up on third down for the inefficiencies of others this season. He has been less successful than Roethlisberger.

That’s partly because Pittsburgh’s coaches have built a much better all-around team than Marvin Lewis could have been expected to develop in his first year and a half with the long-awful Bengals.

No pro quarterback can do it on his own. In Pittsburgh, Roethlisberger is working with the most experienced coach in pro football, Bill Cowher. In Cincinnati, Palmer, who might be the better passer, has coaches who are still in transition from nothingness to wherever Lewis can haul them.

It’s no cinch that Palmer will ever eclipse Roethlisberger as an NFL performer. What identifies Roethlisberger as a definite comer is his steadiness as a third-down quarterback. In a passer, few assets are more valuable.

Pass Offense Kills

The St. Louis Rams are doing the unthinkable. With their attack-passing system, they’re killing off the West Coast offense.

A West Coast team runs the ball too often to outscore a pro club that is committed to pass offense, as the St. Louis passing team and the Seattle Seahawks’ run-pass team have shown twice this fall.

On Oct. 10, a late flurry of Ram passes won a 33-27 game that Seattle, with a careful regard for West Coast principles, had led into the final six minutes, 27-10.

Five weeks later, an early flurry of Ram passes scored 17 quick points and put the Seahawks so far out of last Sunday’s 23-12 game that they couldn’t catch up running the ball.

But as a West Coast team, run it they did. Shaun Alexander took 22 handoffs for 176 yards, often running at will through the Ram defense -- which, later, was honored by some fans as the winner of the game for holding Seattle to four field goals.

A more accurate assessment is that the Seahawks ran so often that there wasn’t time for the pass plays they needed. When the game was on the line, the Rams attacked with passes. The Seahawks blew it by handing off to Alexander.

Western Heritage

Teams playing the West Coast offense have remade football, bringing back the pass plays that most coaches had ignored for a quarter-century after Vince Lombardi started winning Super Bowls in the early 1960s.

The Lombardi running-game era lasted long enough for one of his rivals to win a Super Bowl with a total of seven passes.

Then coaches, noting Bill Walsh’s Super Bowl successes in San Francisco with Joe Montana’s short, ball-control passing in the 1980s, began to copy the 49ers. And soon, most of the Super Bowls were being won by teams with good passers.

Still, those teams also made it a point to run well too, running about half the time. That changed in the 2000 Super Bowl, when the Rams began to throw most of the time.

Passing teams haven’t remade the NFL. But the league was watching closely last Sunday when, for the second time this season, the best of the West Coast teams, Seattle -- running half the time -- couldn’t outscore a passing opponent.

Rams Have the Horses

Ram Coach Mike Martz is less than a rabid advocate of attack passing. Recently, the Rams have come out running as often as they have come out passing.

There’s just no telling what Martz will decide to do today in Buffalo, where, if he reverts to his rather ordinary running game, the Bills might make it close. The Rams, who could be 9-0 if they had attacked every opponent with Martz’s cleverly designed pass plays, are 5-4 because they haven’t.

It was just Seattle’s tough luck that Martz chose last Sunday to strike with passes by quarterback Marc Bulger.

Except for two runs, the Rams threw the ball every time they had it in the first quarter until they had a 14-0 lead.

And they kept throwing into the second quarter, when, on third and 18, Bulger’s pass reached second-year wide receiver Shaun McDonald in the end zone. Surrounded by three Seahawks as he fired, Bulger hit McDonald squarely in the midst of three other converging Seahawks.

On an official’s call that could have gone either way, McDonald lost the touchdown when the ball was juggled well after he was down. So the Rams’ lead was 17-0 instead of 21-0 with nearly three quarters remaining, and neither team scored another touchdown.

That is because Martz began running Marshall Faulk again. And Seattle kept unsuccessfully playing catch-up with Alexander’s runs.

Dummy Scrimmage

The Philadelphia Eagles easily won the Monday night feature at Dallas in a game illustrating that parity isn’t universal in the NFL. Rather, the extent of talent disparity has been presented with almost mathematical clarity in Philadelphia’s first two games this month.

Less than a week before the Eagles unloaded on the Cowboys, they went all out to make three points -- one lousy field goal -- against Pittsburgh’s defense. They were blown away that day by the Steelers, 27-3.

The Pittsburgh-Philadelphia picture that lingers is of Donovan McNabb taking one quick step back from center, as he always does, before disappearing from sight, surrounded by Steelers.

The most descriptive Dallas-Philadelphia picture, by contrast, shows McNabb circling in his own backfield, unhindered by the Cowboys, before throwing a bomb far downfield.

The Dallas-Philadelphia game was more like a Philadelphia dummy scrimmage in July than a big game in November. How could the Dallas talent level be so far below Philadelphia’s?