Yes, You Can Win for Losing

Dallas, Baltimore, New Orleans and the New York Giants lost their 2004 NFL season openers by an average margin of 15.8 points Sunday, thus establishing themselves as leading contenders to win the Super Bowl.

Following the lead of the last three Super Bowl champions, the Cowboys, Ravens, Saints and Giants began their new seasons 0-1, throwing fear into a league that knows the dirty little secret about season openers, which hold all the significance of one extra exhibition game. The only difference is more people pay attention to them.

* Season opener 2003: New England is hammered by Buffalo, 31-0, launching the Patriots into the stratosphere. New England closes the season 15-0, including a victory over Carolina in the Super Bowl. Buffalo finishes 6-10 and out of the playoffs.

* Season opener 2002: Tampa Bay loses to New Orleans in overtime, setting the stage for the Buccaneers’ 27-point Super Bowl victory over Oakland. New Orleans finishes 9-7 and out of the playoffs.

* Season opener 2001: New England loses to Cincinnati, which takes some doing, 23-17. Just to show it wasn’t a fluke, New England also loses its next game, to the New York Jets. Building on the early momentum, the Patriots keep rolling into the Super Bowl, beating St. Louis in that one. Cincinnati finishes 6-10 and, of course, out of the playoffs.

New England won its 2004 opener, causing Patriot fans great consternation as they watched division rivals Miami lose on Saturday and Buffalo lose on Sunday, their mood brightened only by the Jets’ 31-24 triumph over Cincinnati.

The old saw about a game in September being worth as much as a game in December is a bald-faced lie. Last season, three teams qualified for the playoffs with records of 10-6. So, theoretically, a team could lose all its games in September, and three more in October, and still reach the Super Bowl tournament.

So things are looking good for the Cowboys, who started 40-year-old Vinny Testaverde at quarterback and got 25 yards rushing from Eddie George, who is 30 going on 40, in a 35-17 loss at Minnesota.

Same with the Giants, who were so curious about these Kurt Warner’s-lost-it theories, not to mention those Tom Coughlin’s-lost-it theories, that they gave Warner a jersey and a helmet and turned him loose on the Philadelphia Eagles, who were winless in their previous three openers.

Late in the fourth quarter, Warner was on the bench watching Eli Manning finish off a 31-17 Giant loss, counting down the seconds as Warner’s recent 0-8 record as a starter moved to 0-9.

In New Orleans, the Saints were in late-season form as they lost, 21-7, to a Seattle team that supposedly couldn’t win on the road. (Yes, the Saints were 1-3 last December.) This can only mean good things for New Orleans, which won a playoff game in 2000 -- for the first, and last, time -- after opening at home with a loss to Detroit.

Baltimore, the last team to win the Super Bowl after stumbling to victory in its opener, decided to get back to fundamentals in a 20-3 loss to Cleveland. How else to explain the Ravens’ 17-point loss to a sixth-year expansion team that held Baltimore running back Jamal Lewis to 500 yards in two meetings in 2003?

This was a confusing game on several fronts.

Lewis, who rushed for an NFL-record 295 yards last September against Cleveland and 205 in a December rematch, netted 57 yards in 20 carries Sunday. Or, if you like, he fell 193 yards short of his per-game average against the Browns in 2003.

The Ravens, restricted by sporadic passing last season, believe they found the missing piece of the Super Bowl puzzle with their recent signing of Deion Sanders, a cornerback who wears his age on his shirt, 37, and hadn’t played a down in the NFL since the Ravens’ Super Bowl season of 2000.

After sitting out the last three ultimate games, the Ravens and Sanders decided to change their cumulative karma with an unholy union that left a couple of one-time winning programs -- Brian Billick’s and CBS’ “The NFL Today” -- a lot quieter on this first Sunday.

And how did Sanders fare after three years on the sidelines?

He finished the game without a tackle. No tackles, no change at all, everything seems status quo.

Last season, Cleveland went 0-2 against Baltimore, giving up a total of 68 points while scoring only 13. Desperate to reverse that trend, the Browns opted for a strange strategic ploy. This franchise, founded in 1999, brought back members of a team that won the NFL title in 1964, claiming that title as its own and using it for inspiration against the Ravens.

Actually, the Ravens won that 1964 championship, back when they were still known as the Cleveland Browns. That all changed in the mid-1990s, when the old Cleveland Browns became the new Baltimore Ravens. The new Browns, the ones born in 1999, need all the help they can get, so they honored such long-ago stars as Jim Brown and Paul Warfield before the game and touched their taped fingers to a 40-year-old trophy won by the franchise they were about to play against.

Yet, those old players proved inspirational, on an inspiring day for old players.

Curtis Martin, 31, rushed for 196 yards in the Jets’ victory over the Bengals.

Marshall Faulk, 31, rushed for 128 yards for St. Louis and Emmitt Smith, 35, netted 87 yards for Arizona in the Rams’ 17-10 triumph over the Cardinals.

And in what has to be the fantasy league stat line of all time, Jerome Bettis, 32, rushed five times for one yard and three touchdowns in Pittsburgh’s 24-21 victory over Oakland.

Breaking it down, that comes out to three touchdowns while averaging 7.2 inches a carry.

That’s a veteran performance. Bettis has been around long enough to know that the game they play in the NFL is a game of inches.

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OPENING SUNDAY

* Atlanta 21, San Francisco 19

* Cleveland 20, Baltimore 3

* Denver 34, Kansas City 24

* Detroit 20, Chicago 16

* Jacksonville 13, Buffalo 10

* Minnesota 35, Dallas 17

* N.Y. Jets 31, Cincinnati 24

* Philadelphia 31, N.Y. Giants 17

* Pittsburgh 24, Oakland 21

* St. Louis 17, Arizona 10

* San Diego 27, Houston 20

* Seattle 21, New Orleans 7

* Washington 16, Tampa Bay 10

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Hard Running

After running through the Cleveland Brown defense for 500 yards in two games last season, Baltimore Raven running back Jamal Lewis was shut down in Sunday’s opener. A comparison:

*--* Date Attempts Yards Average Long TD Sept. 14, 2003 30 295 9.8 82 2 Dec. 21, 2003 22 205 9.3 72 2 Sept. 12, 2004 20 57 2.9 9 0

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