He May Look Like Santa, but He Wins Like Vince

NEW ORLEANS —  I got a great idea for the NFL. You know that semifinal and final scheme they have for arriving at a contender for the Super Bowl? Well, change it. Pit the various NFC winners against the various AFC winners right from the start. That way we can get a Super Bowl between the real best teams in the game.

This way, we’re getting obvious mismatches. We could end up with, say the Dallas Cowboys or the San Francisco 49ers playing the Green Bay Packers in the Super Bowl instead of teams unequal to the task.

Too many of the games are merely complicated executions, as predetermined as a firing squad.

This is not to say the New England Patriots didn’t put up a spirited game against Green Bay in Sunday’s Super Bowl. They did. That’s just the point. They play their best and still come up empty and it looks like a father-son game. For whatever reason, the playing field isn’t level. This was the 13th consecutive NFC victory in this showdown. That isn’t a contest, that’s a landslide. It promises to continue. The AFC goes to the woodshed every year.

It wasn’t a game, it was a track meet. They should have timed it, not scored it. It wasn’t trench warfare, it was more like the Battle of Jutland. They pounded each other at long range like battleships.

Desmond Howard won it, it says here. I’m not so sure.

It just might have been won by a guy who couldn’t return a kickoff in under a week, was under no consideration at all to win a Heisman and is trying to follow in the long-lasting footsteps of a legend.

Mike Holmgren was the “other” coach in this Super Bowl. He might have had superior talent to Bill Parcells, but Parcells had the charisma, the air time, the media.

It’s just that Holmgren doesn’t look like a football coach. And he certainly bears no resemblance to the man whose team and legacy he has inherited.

Vince Lombardi all but invented the Green Bay Packers. They were the glamour team of the ‘60s, a precision outfit, all-powerful, unstoppable. They were a reflection of their coach--and Vince Lombardi was a man of unwavering conviction who brooked no challenge to his authority. He was a man of great probity, he went to daily Mass, but he was a rock in his commitment to victory. A tough, fearless man, you know all you need to know about Lombardi when you know that the football line he played on in college was known as “The Seven Blocks of Granite.”

Holmgren looks more like a block of Jello. Where Lombardi wore a gap-toothed smile that could turn into a snarl in an instant, Holmgren looks more like a department store Santa Claus. I don’t think he could snarl if he practiced.

He doesn’t have the prognathous jaw or the pugnacious stare of the career football coach. You might guess him for the guy who came to fix the air-conditioning. He doesn’t look devious enough to be a football coach. You’d trust him to watch your baby while you went in to make a phone call.

His team is not the disciplined corps of performers Lombardi had. Neither are they the Dallas Cowboys, but Lombardi’s team crushed you like an invading army with superior firepower. They ran the ball down your throat in a power sweep of ballcarrier behind blockers which Lombardi termed “Run to Daylight. “

Holmgren’s team runs to darkness. There is no Paul Hornung, Donny Anderson, Elijah Pitts and Jim Grabowski. Holmgren’s runners are more like penalty-killers in hockey. They use up the time when you get a lead, kill the clock a yard at a time. They don’t make big runs, they just take a long time to go down.

Where Lombardi stressed ball control. Holmgren’s teams don’t get the ball that much. But they don’t need it that much. What running game? His ballcarriers carried the ball 36 times Sunday for an unimpressive 115 yards. Lombardi would have fired them.

Holmgren blends in with his team. He is not the authority figure Lombardi was. He sometimes still seems to have the assistant coach mentality in which he toiled much of his career. He seemed to be a career assistant coach. He started out as a high school coach (Sacred Heart, San Francisco). Even there, he was only 4-24.

Even as a collegian, Holmgren admits he was overlooked. After he enrolled at USC on the understanding from the coach, John McKay, that he would stress the passing attack (Holmgren was a quarterback), the coaches reneged and recruited O.J. Simpson and the attack became Student Body Right and Holmgren was left, so to speak, holding the ball. He matriculated, so to say, under Bill Walsh of the 49ers and Lavell Edwards of Brigham Young.

His team is not the Lombardi Packers but the quick-striking, lightning-war type.

Are we entering a “Holmgren Era” in Green Bay? he was asked in the postgame news conference. Before he could answer he was told he had an important phone call. It was the President.

Holmgren blushed suitably as he accepted the congratulations of the chief executive, then returned to his news conference.

“It’s a different time and a different game today [than Lombardi’s time]. It’s harder to keep players in a time of free agency, which they didn’t have then. I think we believe in the same things. We try to get players of high principles and character and commitment.”

It’s possible that in the case of Bill Parcells his team was overmatched--and so was he.

Holmgren’s team is exciting and, maybe, in time, he too will be exciting.

As a disciple of Bill Walsh, he scripted the first 15 plays for Super Bowl XXXI, but his quarterback Brett Favre overruled him on the second play and audiblized a long post pass.

Lombardi might have been apoplectic. But Holmgren was understanding. Particularly since it went for a touchdown.

He may not get a street in Green Bay named after him or the Super Bowl Trophy. But he won the Lombardi Trophy and in time may win his reputation. He does what Lombardi did--win.