An Un-Weis Decision

When onetime NFL coaches Pete Carroll of USC and Charlie Weis of Notre Dame were cranking up last week for the football game of the year -- college or pro -- Weis apparently told several newspaper reporters: “I own Pete Carroll.”

But does he? Notre Dame could have won if Weis’ offensive strategy had been different.

Before USC won dramatically, 34-31, he blew it by repeatedly asking his running backs to play ball-control football in what was, ultimately, a losing effort to keep the Trojan offense off the field.

In pro football, as Weis himself often proved, what happened to Notre Dame usually happens to running teams relying on ball-control tactics against good passing teams.

For, clearly, it’s all but impossible to successfully play ball control for 60 minutes against a quarterback like Matt Leinart when his pass offense is as sharp as USC’s.

Weis’ flaw was in underrating his own pass offense. He has one of the finest quarterbacks in college football, Brady Quinn, who played well enough against the Trojans to earn the Heisman Trophy if the Fighting Irish had won.

Quinn, obviously under orders to proceed cautiously, opened up just once. After Reggie Bush’s third masterful touchdown run had, with only 5:09 left, put USC ahead, 28-24, Quinn was authorized to come out passing.

And, shortly, his aggressive response overwhelmed the USC defense with a series of passes as spectacular as they were accurate. On a breathtakingly efficient 85-yard drive, Quinn in three minutes regained the lead for Notre Dame, 31-28.

As an NFL offensive coordinator at New England, Weis normally played that kind of aggressive football with quarterback Tom Brady to win three of the last four Super Bowls.

But for reasons that remain unclear, Weis chose to face Leinart the way he played Peyton Manning last year when he beat the Indianapolis Colts by keeping Manning off the field.

Weis’ strategic approach in his first USC-Notre Dame game showed that he’d badly misread the USC quarterback. As of last year, Weis knew that Manning could be rattled. Too late, he knows now that Leinart can’t.

Leinart Like Starr

Leinart beat Weis with two plays at the end of a grueling game during which Weis’ team beat him up but couldn’t break him.

The first of these decisive plays was the 61-yard deep sideline pass -- thrown on fourth and nine -- that moved the Trojans into position for the tying field goal if Carroll had had any interest in that.

A long pass down the sideline was precisely the right call on that fourth-down play against that team at that moment, and a defining thing about Leinart is that he had the courage and aggressiveness to call it at the line of scrimmage, in the noise and pressure created by a Notre Dame crowd trying to rattle him.

The call illustrated, once more, that Leinart has an unusual football mind that works in suffocating pressure even when he’s exhausted. For in all that late-game confusion, he had to change a coach’s call.

And of course Leinart’s big pass illustrated that he has the arm to do what he should do and wants to do.

The more celebrated of Leinart’s two winning plays was the touchdown-scoring quarterback sneak. It was reminiscent of Bart Starr’s game-deciding sneak in the so-called Ice Bowl game on Dec. 31, 1967, when, like Carroll, Green Bay Coach Vince Lombardi played not to tie but to win.

To score, Leinart got an illegal but essential -- and seldom called -- assist from Reggie Bush, who stormed up from his tailback position and shoved him across the goal line.

So Leinart and Bush -- who was unstoppable on touchdown runs of 36, 45 and nine yards -- belong as the 2005 co-Heisman winners, if there’s any way to do that. And if there were any way to lift USC’s offensive team bodily into the NFL this year, it would improve at least half the clubs in pro ball.

None of them ever produced a game like that.

Steelers Need Big Ben

The Pittsburgh Steelers will go into their AFC North matchup at Cincinnati today in second place -- by 1 1/2 games -- to the division-leading Bengals, whose quarterback, Carson Palmer, has done everything he had to do to beat five of the six middle-of-the-pack opponents he has encountered so far.

He couldn’t bridge the Jacksonville defense two weeks ago. Nor, in Week 6, could Pittsburgh -- with backup Tommy Maddox at quarterback.

When Ben Roethlisberger is out of the Pittsburgh lineup, as he was that day, the Steelers are just another parity team this year in the oh-so-even NFL.

The Jaguars not only carried the Steelers into overtime but beat them when an intercepted Maddox pass was returned for the winning touchdown, 23-17.

Playing hurt, Maddox threw some sound passes but also made some schoolboy plays. There were times in other years when Maddox seemed to be the answer for the Steelers. Not now. It’s even less likely that third-stringer Charlie Batch is a savior.

When Roethlisberger returns, perhaps as soon as today, he will be asked to carry the Steelers into the Super Bowl. That is putting considerable pressure on a second-year pro

Still, when he’s on the field, his team does seem to be the NFL’s best.

The Bengal-Steeler game could be a giant stride for him and his teammates -- or for Palmer and the Bengals -- toward where they all want to go. In other years, the Bengals were duck soup for a team as good as Pittsburgh. Now they’re a test.

The Leftwich Problem

The Jaguars under Coach Jack Del Rio, a former USC linebacker, have developed a title-contending defense that looked as aggressive and powerful against Pittsburgh as it had against Palmer. In short, it looked like any other finely tuned NFL defense.

But Del Rio has a problem at quarterback.

Although his passer, Byron Leftwich, has modern quarterback size (6 feet 5, 245 pounds) and accuracy, it takes him too long to throw the ball.

He starts a typical Jaguar pass play with a big, old-fashioned, time-consuming stride and proceeds with a big, old-fashioned, time-consuming roundhouse passing motion that will cripple his team until it’s fixed.

Someone has to teach Leftwich the modern, compact, Joe Namath passing motion that Brady, among others, uses to such good purpose today and that made a two-time Super Bowl champion of John Elway.

Old pro quarterback Ken Anderson, who is on Del Rio’s staff, should help Leftwich here.

Meanwhile, the Jaguars are winning with their defense, which can get them to second place in their division but not their conference.

Cowboys Repair Bledsoe

The Dallas Cowboys held off the New York Giants in overtime by a less-than-awesome 16-13 score last week in the NFC East headliner because they’re making a new man of quarterback Drew Bledsoe.

To the dismay of Buffalo, where Bledsoe was ineffective last year, he has Dallas in first place.

Before the game, Dallas Coach Bill Parcells had shown Bledsoe how to solve his passing problem, an inability to get the ball off against a hard, up-the-middle rush.

Just throw it on first down, Parcells urged, and for a while that worked pretty well, Bledsoe completing eight of nine passes on the 83-yard drive that left the Cowboys ahead of the Giants at halftime, 7-6.

Then the Giants started blitzing Bledsoe on first down. So, he began completing some on second and even third down.

For the day, he completed 26 of 37 for 312 yards, meaning, perhaps, that under Parcells’ careful handling he’s thriving.

The Giant passer, Eli Manning, couldn’t keep up, in part because, when the game was there to be won by either side, his side showed a preference for running the ball.

In sum, this was a day that showed the downside of parity football. When the players are all of about even ability, the game can be either ragged or crowd-pleasing. This one was ragged.

Is Gibbs Changing?

The Washington Redskins, locked in a three-way second-place tie, half a game behind Dallas in the NFC East, may have played their best game last week since the second coming of Joe Gibbs.

Though they lost it in the last two minutes -- when the Chiefs pleased a Kansas City crowd with a familiar weapon, a Trent Green touchdown pass to Priest Holmes -- the Redskins’ quarterback, Mark Brunell, outplayed Green most of the way.

Brunell led the league in passing that day with 331 yards and three touchdown throws.

Conventional wisdom that the AFC is stronger than the NFC -- particularly in pass offense -- was tested when the visitors won the statistics first to last. This suggested that Gibbs, after a successful 20th-century tour as a running-play advocate, may be moving his team, and himself, into a new century.

The Injury Equalizer

The New England Patriots, 3-3 with a team that was the best in the land when its defense was hale and hearty, have found a new way to play .500 football: Just lose all your defensive talent to injury.

That has taken the Patriots out of the NFL and into the NPL -- the National Parity League.

After the Patriots fell behind at Denver, 28-3, Brady weathered the loss of his first two running backs, Corey Dillon and Kevin Faulk, to mount one of the NFL’s finest near-comebacks.

A dropped pass by the team that rarely drops passes -- the dropper this time was wide receiver David Givens, who drops even fewer than the club average -- kept Brady from getting into position to win it at the end.

Otherwise, the league’s best passer made the Patriots’ famous but depleted offense look about as good as ever in the second half.