THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 26, 1997 TAG: 9701260215
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: BY JIM DUCIBELLA, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 104 lines
I don't think it's as big a mystery as many football fans, and Oliver Stone, make it out to be. There are concrete reasons why the NFC has a 12-game winning streak in TV's annual unveiling of its most creative commercials, a.k.a. the Super Bowl.
Patriots coach Bill Parcells doesn't think there's any mystery to it, either. The Big Tuna's opinion has added significance this week since he happens to be at the controls of an AFC team given almost no chance to end the streak.
``When I was coaching in the NFC, we had a lot of good teams over there,'' Parcells said recently. ``I think the teams that came out of the NFC at the time and made it to the Super Bowl were battle-hardened. They had to beat the Bears and the Redskins and the 49ers.''
What's depressing about that statement if you're a Patriots' fan is who they beat to get to New Orleans. There was a Pittsburgh team shaky all season at quarterback and whose main threat, running back Jerome Bettis, was ailing.
And there was Jacksonville, a second-year expansion team. The Jags wouldn't even have made the postseason tournament if Atlanta's Morten Andersen, one of the game's most accurate kickers ever, had not missed a chip-shot field goal.
Not to mention that Jacksonville was playing its third playoff game in a row on the road, one of them a fluke victory over Denver.
And that's part of the problem for the AFC. Too many fluke teams. Sorry, New England, the Patriots were a fluke in Super Bowl XX. Tony Eason and Craig James? The Chicago Bears, who had assembled one of the great defenses ever and one of the greatest running backs in Walter Payton, took pity in winning only 46-10.
Throw in San Diego in Super Bowl XXIX, the team that forgot to cover Jerry Rice on the third play of the game. Another fluke.
Then there are the NFC coaches during the streak: Bill Walsh, Parcells, Joe Gibbs, Jimmy Johnson and George Seifert. Walsh and Gibbs have already made the Hall of Fame. Johnson and Parcells are locks. Seifert's a good bet.
Consider the AFC coaches during the same period: Don Shula, Ray Berry, Dan Reeves, Sam Wyche, Marv Levy, Bobby Ross and Bill Cowher. Seriously, now, isn't Shula really the only one who belongs in the same sentence with those guys? OK, maybe Levy.
Each NFC coach was an innovator. Walsh built an offensive machine around Joe Montana and a strong, quick line that didn't maul you as much as whisk you out of the way. The 49ers defense never got the credit it deserved, perhaps because Walsh and Seifert continued adding such amazing weapons to the offense like Rice, Steve Young and Rickey Watters.
Parcells wasn't as interested in scoring points as he was keeping you from scoring. He knew he had solid quarterbacks in Phil Simms and Jeff Hostetler, but the real talent was on the other side of the ball. Lawrence Taylor, Pepper Johnson, Carl Banks, George Martin and Jim Burt could beat you any way you challenged them to, whether with strength or quickness.
In six seasons covering Gibbs, I never once heard him discuss having to find a way to win the Super Bowl. That wasn't his concern. He would talk for hours, if you let him, on his perceived importance of finding a way to negate Taylor and the Giants defense. In doing so, he created a formula for success no one in the league had the antidote for.
Gibbs found mammouth offensive linemen who were also remarkably quick for their size. He had lost John Riggins by the time Doug Williams became his quarterback, so he supplemented the offense by assembling the greatest corps of receivers in team history in Art Monk, Gary Clark and Ricky Sanders. And he had an unheralded back who, had he stayed healthy, could have been one of the league's most versatile players ever in Kelvin Bryant.
The formula still worked when Mark Rypien replaced Williams at quarterback, just as it continued to work for San Francisco when Rice replaced Dwight Clark and Brent Jones replaced Earl Cooper and Rickey Watters replaced Roger Craig.
Johnson's Cowboys built on what the Redskins started by finding an even bigger offensive line and an even better quarterback in Troy Aikman.
While NFC teams were scrapping to outdo each other, what was the greatest innovation in the AFC?
Wyche's no-huddle offense, that's what.
Laugh all you want at Wyche, but he was a Walsh disciple who wasn't afraid to be a little creative. I think it's significant that the closest Super Bowl other than the Giants' infamous 20-19 Wide-Right Bowl was San Francisco's 20-16 victory over Wyche's Bengals in XXIII.
That one took Montana's genius and one of the clutch drives in Super Bowl history to make the NFC a winner, which brings up another point.
It has been the AFC's misfortune that several of the greatest players of the modern era - Montana, Rice, Taylor, Payton - all have labored for NFC teams the last dozen years.
Then there are those who aren't the best of their generation, but Hall-of-Famers nonetheless - Dallas' Emmitt Smith, Aikman, Deion Sanders and Irvin; San Francisco's Craig, Young and Ronnie Lott; Washington's Russ Grimm and Joe Jacoby and Monk; New York's Simms; Chicago's Richard Dent and Mike Singletary.
Who can the AFC put up against them? John Elway and Dan Marino, for sure; Thurman Thomas and Rod Woodson, maybe.
In Super Bowl XXX, Dallas over Pittsburgh, Aikman aimed his passes at Irvin. Only hard-core Steelers fans remember who Neil O'Donnell was throwing to on either of his two crucial second-half interceptions. Household names, they ain't.
Frankly, that's what makes today's game a little more intriguing. The Patriots have so many young players, so many unknowns, whose career paths have yet to be forged. Is Drew Bledsoe the next Montana? Or is he Stan Humphries East? Is Terry Glenn an Irvin, or Ricky Nattiel? Is Curtis Martin more Emmitt Smith or Craig James?
At this moment, hours before kickoff, such questions make for interesting conversation. However, by this time tomorrow, odds are that talk will return to why the AFC has 13 straight of these not-so-Super Bowl losses.