Mission aborted. I came here looking for reasons why the Buffalo Bills will win Super Bowl XXVIII on Sunday, and I have failed.
I like the Dallas Cowboys 28-20.
How soon we forget. Only three Roman numerals ago at Tampa, the Bills were installed as solid 6 1/2-point favorites to beat the New York Giants. When the Bills seized a 10-3 lead in the second quarter, nobody blinked. The Bills then went ahead 12-3 on a safety that could have been a touchdown. New York quarterback Jeff Hostetler, upon being tackled in his own end zone, somehow had presence of mind not to be stripped of the ball.
The rest, as they say, is hysterical. The Bills lost that game 20-19 when Scott Norwood’s field-goal attempt traveled wide right. Since then, the Bills have been garlic bread. They keep showing up to leave a bad taste in your mouth. They’re just good enough to qualify for a fourth straight Super Bowl; they’re just bad enough to enter the Georgia Dome Sunday having lost the last three. Every year, they crash America’s biggest party. They get thrown out of the building, go home, think about it and decide to try again.
“Maybe next year, we’ll try the World Series,” says their coach, Marv Levy, looking more like Dr. Jack Kevorkian every day. Ah, but Levy is joking, and that’s important. In a strange way, the Bills seem immune to pressure. It’s as though they’ve run out of shoulders to bear the weight of the world. Whether that means softer hands on Sunday is unknown. They led 7-0 last year and were driving for another touchdown when Jim Kelly threw an interception, one of nine Buffalo turnovers. The Bills really will have to go some to self-destruct so thoroughly again.
If Kelly, tamer and wiser, has a clear head, there’s reason to believe counterpart Troy Aikman might not. He suffered a concussion on the second play of the second half in last week’s NFC championship victory over San Francisco. He recalls little about that game and is still having memory lapses about other things. He forgot his phone number. He called his mother after Sunday’s game to tell her not to worry. He then called her two hours later to tell her not to worry because he didn’t remember the first call. His mother then started to worry.
“I’ll be fine,” Aikman says. Not so fast. He’s scheduled to see another doctor on Monday. In any other line of work, Aikman would be disallowed from reporting to the office on Sunday. In the supposedly brutal world of boxing, Aikman would be prohibited from participating in anything more strenuous than shaving and showering for 30 days. In some states, for 45 days. But Aikman told the Cowboys’ medical staff he wants to play. That’s what Roger Staubach used to do, until he retired prematurely because of too many blackouts. What if Aikman absorbs another blow to the head early in Sunday’s game?
Aikman or no Aikman, though, the Cowboys are still NFC. Many years ago, it was explained to me why the NFC is so dominant in Super Bowls. But this series has been so lopsided for so long, I forget the reason. Don Pierson, the Tribune’s outstanding pro football expert, says it all began with Lawrence Taylor in New York and to a lesser extent, Fred Dean in San Francisco. They reinvented the pass rush and forced other NFC teams to become tougher or perish. In the AFC, you can get by on finesse, at least until the Super Bowl.
The Bills are good, and the Bills are together. But only the Cowboys can beat the Cowboys on Sunday. They had their flat moments during the regular season-including one at the Georgia Dome, where they lost to the dreadful Falcons. But the Cowboys, starting with coach Jimmy Johnson, are definitely prime time. They love to strut their stuff. Stage fright for the Cowboys is when the curtain goes down; it’s when they don’t receive enough attention. I can’t imagine they won’t be ready to be praised as wonderful again on Sunday.
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But beware of the Buffalo Bills next year. They’re too good to know what’s bad for them.