These Times, They Are A-Changin’ In The Nfl Off-Season Turbulence Has Altered The Face Of League
A lot of strange things have happened to the NFL since the Dallas Cowboys beat the Pittsburgh Steelers to win their third Super Bowl in four years.
The Cleveland Browns are the Baltimore Ravens. The Houston Oilers are en route to Tennessee, showcasing young stars like Steve McNair and Eddie George before 40,000 empty seats in the Astrodome during a lame duck season.
Between Sept. 1 and Oct. 13, Michael Irvin will be picking up roadside trash and serving meals in AIDS hospices, not catching footballs.
Brett Favre, the NFL’s MVP, is two months out of drug rehab.
For the first time in 27 years, Don Shula no longer coaches the Miami Dolphins. Jimmy Johnson does.
Oh yes, and the Cowboys won’t become the first team ever to win four Super Bowls in five years and six overall. Take it to the bank. Take it to Vegas. Take it to the Oneida Casino near Green Bay International Airport.
For the Vince Lombardi trophy could very well go back to Green Bay, to the team that Lombardi coached to wins in the first two Super Bowls, the Packers. If not, look to the Buffalo Bills, who could make their fifth appearance in seven seasons in the NFL title game.
And maybe win it this time, say 27-24?
But that’s in the future. Here’s the now:
Jurisprudence
“We all have short memories,” says commissioner Paul Tagliabue. “We’ve had stars in trouble before - remember Lawrence Taylor (suspended for four games in 1988 for violating the NFL drug policy)? The overwhelming majority of more than 1,500 players stay out of trouble.”
That’s the kind of thing commissioners are paid seven-figure salaries to say. It’s also true.
But it doesn’t lessen the impact when one of the biggest stars on the highest-profile team in football - if not all of sports - is arrested in a hotel room with a quantity of cocaine and two women who describe themselves as “self-employed models.” That’s what happened to Irvin March 4 in Irving, Texas, not far from the Cowboys’ training complex.
The upshot: a plea bargain to cocaine possession; a sentence of 800 hours of community service (hence the trash pickup and waiter duty); and a five-game suspension by the NFL, which will keep the game’s second-best wide receiver off the field until Oct. 13.
Irvin’s woes emphasize the problems of the Cowboys, who have paid so much to their major stars (Irvin, Deion Sanders, Troy Aikman, and now $48 million to Emmitt Smith) that they have little room under the salary cap for role players. Smith enters the season with a sprained left knee, the same injury that’s sidelined left tackle Mark Tuinei, and Sanders’ switch to offense leaves the secondary thin.
Free agency (Franchise Division)
On Aug. 31, festivities at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor will celebrate the return of the NFL 12 years after Robert Irsay sneaked the Colts off to Indianapolis. The next day, the Ravens will open their season against, appropriately, the Oakland Raiders, who moved to Los Angeles in 1982 and back to Oakland last year.
This, of course, symbolizes the NFL, where three franchises have relocated in the past two seasons and the Oilers have official sanction to go within the next two years.
The Ravens were brought in from Cleveland by Art Modell in an agreement that rewrote history. Cleveland will get a new team by 1999, with the Browns’ uniforms and history. The Baltimore franchise is officially categorized as a new one, and it adopted the name from the poem by Edgar Allan Poe, a one-time Baltimore resident.
So both Baltimore and Cleveland have separate sections in the NFL guide, and the Ravens’ record holders include John Unitas, Raymond Berry and Lenny Moore, among other ex-Colts, rather than the likes of Otto Graham and Jim Brown.
The Oilers, meanwhile, are still playing in the Houston Astrodome, but their fans are in Nashville, where a new stadium, complete with the mandatory luxury boxes, will be built. Next year, there will probably be a detour to Memphis, where one of the game’s best young coaches, Jeff Fisher, will bring in an improving young team.
Seattle is on hold while computer millionaire Paul Allen decides whether to continue his commitment past a year. The hangup is the usual one: money and a site for a new stadium with millions of dollars’ worth of luxury boxes.
Detroit is about to build a new downtown stadium and the Lions are planning to play there. Minneapolis and Philadelphia want new facilities and Cincinnati has taxpayer approval to build a new home.
“It’s ironic, but a stadium built 20 years ago is considered old,” Tagliabue says. “We’re trying to stabilize the situation, but I’m not about to say it’s stabilized yet.”
Back to the field
Talk about strange.
Here was Don Shula in the press box at Giants Stadium for a JetsGiants exhibition, plugging the satellite TV package that allows fans to get all of a week’s games at the same time. After 33 seasons and 347 wins as a head coach, 26 of the seasons and 274 of the wins of them in Miami, he is now a “consultant” to the Dolphins.
One name Shula does not utter often is “Johnson,” who between trips to the Fox Television studio last year sat on his boat in Biscayne Bay listening to South Florida fans clamor for him to replace Shula.
“When you get down to it,” says Johnson, who coached the Cowboys to Super Bowl wins in 1992 and 1993, “I don’t think I would have gone anywhere but here.”
His team probably isn’t going anywhere. Not this year.
Although Johnson says his “window of opportunity” in Miami is three years - the length of Dan Marino’s contract - he’s spending the first year a bit like he did in Dallas, where he finished 1-15.
He won’t be 1-15 this year, but veterans go, rookies come (five could start) and he made a major point of telling his team that freeagent rookie linebacker Larry Izzo, a dynamite special teams guy, was the second player beyond Marino to clinch a spot on the 1996 Dolphins.
But Johnson’s old team has its problems, too.
The free-agent attrition continued in the off-season and into training camp, thanks largely to the salary cap. A total of 22 free agents have left - Super Bowl MVP Larry Brown is the most prominent this year - since an incredibly deep Dallas team beat Buffalo 52-17 after the 1992 season for the first title in its run.
“We have stars but most teams have a lot more depth,” says coach Barry Switzer.
San Francisco, which has been battling the Cowboys through the ‘90s, has some of the same problems - cornerback for starters, along with a rebuilt offensive line. Steve Young and Jerry Rice are still there and picking up running back Terry Kirby from Miami should help.
But Green Bay looks like the most solid team in the NFC, as long as John Michels, the rookie left tackle, keeps Favre healthy.
Pittsburgh was written off early in preseason when the AFC champions lost Neil O’Donnell to the Jets for $25 million over five years.
But the Steelers have a way of replacing lost players. Jim Miller, a third-year man, is now the quarterback, with Kordell Stewart in his “Slash” mode as quarterback/running back/wide receiver.
Kansas City is solid again. But the specter of last season’s 10-7 playoff loss to Indianapolis after a 13-3 regular season remains.
So look to Buffalo and Marv Levy, its 71-year-old coach, whose refreshing outlook does nothing but enhance the game. “Is this a must- win?” he said in reply to a question during his fourth Super Bowl. “World War II was a must-win.”
Levy is as good a reason as any to pick the Bills to finally win the Super Bowl.
After 12 straight NFC wins, what could be stranger than that?