This Is No Passing Fancy

When the Miami Dolphins won all 17 games they played in 1972, pass offense wasn’t very sophisticated.

The 17-0 Dolphins won some of their biggest games with totals of seven or eight passes.

By contrast, in Jacksonville today, the 12-0 Indianapolis Colts, as led by Peyton Manning, will be striving for 13-0 against the 9-3 Jaguars at the high point of a passing era.

Unlike the 1970s, every NFL team can mount some kind of air attack these days.

With starter Byron Leftwich gone for a month because of a small-bone ankle fracture, replacement David Garrard, a 240-pound quarterback, is 1-0 for Jacksonville after throwing two touchdowns last week to beat Cleveland, 20-14.

Although Manning is clearly favored, the Jaguars, playing at home, will play with incentive enough: the prospect of derailing the league’s only unbeaten team.

Palmer in Wings

It is in next month’s playoffs, though, that the unbeaten Colts will get their most vigorous competition. The AFC’s best teams, Denver, say, or particularly Cincinnati, can just about match Manning throw for throw.

In fact, in a 45-37 shootout last month, Cincinnati’s Carson Palmer met Manning on nearly even terms.

And since then, Palmer has kept improving at a pace that makes it hard to believe that this is only his second season as a starting quarterback in the NFL.

One of the bonuses afforded by big-time sports is watching a richly endowed college student-athlete such as Palmer become a dominant pro.

It could only happen in a passing era.

Passball It Is

The Super Bowl was a new U.S. classic in the 1960s and ‘70s when NFL teams mostly ran the ball.

The great coach of that era, Vince Lombardi of the Green Bay Packers, was often the featured speaker at football clinics where he sometimes lectured on one running play, the Green Bay sweep

Not surprisingly, Lombardi dismissed passing as passball, not football.

Passball, however, is what the good teams are playing these days -- though it isn’t the game Lombardi thought it was.

Running backs have turned out to be as essential as ever.

There’s no way that even Manning or Palmer could pass effectively without a solid running threat.

And to establish a running threat, you have to run some. But pass offense makes the difference.

Among those who remember or who have read up on the early Super Bowl years, the modern game is much livelier.

A perfectly thrown pass by Manning that reaches wide receiver Marvin Harrison far downfield -- after Harrison has outmaneuvered or outfought a defensive back or two -- is more interesting than any off-tackle running play.

And more productive.

Tagliabue Steps In

The NFL commissioner, Paul Tagliabue, has played a large role in football’s transition from a good running-play league into a more attractive pass-offense league.

Not long ago, he stepped in to restrain the more violent of his coaches and players who believed, with some reason, that a quarterback is only one of 11 members of any football team and therefore fair game when assaulted in a pass rush.

NFL rules protecting quarterbacks from unnecessary violence, rules long in the books, weren’t being uniformly enforced as recently as four years ago.

Most officials are former football players (none of them quarterbacks) who hold, along with most NFL defensive players and coaches, that quarterbacks don’t need coddling.

Tagliabue, more farsighted than his game officials, could see that they do.

Otherwise, defensive teams would knock out every good passer in the league. Unless restrained, defensive players never are especially particular whether they do that legally or illegally.

And where would a passing league be without passers?

The problem was serious enough to require a series of directives by Tagliabue to game officials, ordering rules enforcement.

Big Ben Survives

Only occasionally does unrestrained violence appear in a pass rush today, when it usually brings a 15-yard penalty along with a substantial fine that inhibits most veteran players.

Some rookies still have to learn about that.

One such rookie, Cincinnati’s new middle linebacker, Odell Thurman, earned a penalty and fine last week when he dived into Pittsburgh quarterback Ben Roethlisberger’s knees after Big Ben had delivered the ball.

If there’s anything worse than a late hit it’s an illegal late hit.

But Roethlisberger is a survivor. He has survived knee surgery this year and countless wounds, including a new injury to his passing thumb, which looks as if it might be broken.

How does a man with that kind of bad thumb grip a football? How can he throw it straight?

Roethlisberger showed the Bengals how, competing spectacularly with Palmer in what was the most interesting of all the Pittsburgh-Cincinnati games.

Because Palmer’s team ran the ball more effectively, the Bengals won, 38-31, in a changing-of-the-guard game in the AFC North. In a follow-up game last Sunday, quarterbacks Trent Green of Kansas City and Jake Plummer of Denver also romped through a display of superior pass offense on what ended as a 31-27 Kansas City victory.

Younger football fans who have grown up in the present passing era doubtless find it hard to believe that through most of the 20th century, most coaches resisted opening up their game with pass plays.

You’re less likely to lose when you run the ball, they said, but they were wrong about that.

Bengals Tougher

The first thing the Bengals mastered under Coach Marvin Lewis, who joined them in 2003, was the value of pass offense.

The lucky thing was being lousy enough to get Palmer the year he became draft-eligible.

It will never be known if Lewis needed to keep Palmer benched for all of his rookie season, yet he did, and the results since then have been astonishing.

By last September, Lewis and Palmer had built Cincinnati into one of the NFL’s great passing teams -- a trend that Palmer is continuing as he develops the no-huddle system he learned from Manning.

At midseason, however, the Bengals demonstrated in the first Pittsburgh game (which they lost, 27-13) that a great pass offense isn’t enough.

To play the NFL game properly, you also have to play tough football. And by last Sunday, adjusting mentally as well as physically, the Bengals had toughened up enough to beat the Steelers.

This was particularly evident in the play of Cincinnati’s offensive and defensive linemen.

Regularly, the offensive line opened holes for running back Rudi Johnson -- against a Pittsburgh defense that is famous for denying opponents hole-opening blocks.

And just as regularly, the Bengal defense stuffed Steeler running backs Jerome Bettis and Duce Staley and knocked the ball out of the grasp of young Willie Parker.

Wrong Personnel

The Steelers are in danger of falling into irrelevancy in the passing era because Roethlisberger is the only pass-offense star they have

Their opponents are forcing them to play passball without passball personnel.

Pittsburgh’s conservative coach, Bill Cowher, is a longtime believer in running the ball and defending against the run. And over the years, he has assembled the players who can block and tackle as well as any in the league.

He’s one of the few NFL coaches with three first-stringers for one position, running back. His problem is lack of speed at wide receiver.

As you can see in every Pittsburgh game, Big Ben is gifted enough to be the all-pro quarterback, though obviously not this year. His own ballclub is holding him down.

The New Chiefs

The Kansas City Chiefs have become a different team in recent weeks, with Larry Johnson at running back. There’s a temptation to say they’re better than they used to be with Priest Holmes at that position, but that doesn’t seem possible.

What’s likely is that they’re 8-4 and still in the playoff running because their opponents haven’t yet adjusted to Johnson -- assuming that that’s possible.

The Kansas City differences:

* With Holmes in their lineup, the Chiefs were an outside-running team. As a consequence, the middle zones were more often open to passer Green than the usual wide-receiver zones. And that helped make a star of the Chiefs’ inside pass-receiving threat, tight end Tony Gonzalez.

* With Johnson at running back, Kansas City is an up-the-middle power-running team -- and that opens an outside downfield passing threat providing more chances for Kansas City’s wide receivers, notably Eddie Kennison and third receiver Dante Hall. In time, it should also benefit Gonzalez.

The Broncos are still holding onto the lead in this division going into their next three against Baltimore (today), Buffalo and Oakland. But in an uncommonly competitive division, Kansas City and San Diego continue to threaten.