Winning on Road Is Huge Task

The San Francisco 49ers will have lost all eight of their 2003 road games if they fail at Philadelphia today. Their tumble, however, is merely an exaggerated example of what’s happening in pro football.

Few teams can win on the road.

Among the losers last Sunday were the high-riding Baltimore Ravens -- at Oakland, of all places.

The Ravens are 0-4 in their last four games on the road and 2-5 since an opening-day defeat at Pittsburgh, a team that has since then hardly won anywhere.

Another loser, Cleveland, will be home to Baltimore today.

Although 14 pro clubs have winning records, only eight have winning road records.

What’s going on here? All this:

* Traveling athletes are always at a disadvantage. There’s something about home cooking and a familiar environment, along with familiar weather, that makes a difference.

* Game officials would not be human if they were not influenced by hometown crowds.

* NFL club owners let rowdy hometown fans raise hell when opponents are on offense, disrupting their plans and tactics. That’s unsportsmanlike conduct -- which isn’t allowed on the field of play -- but that doesn’t seem to bother the game’s uncivilized spectators and owners.

* Above all, perhaps, the NFL’s road-game handicap proves that parity is gaining ground swiftly. When the league’s objective is to equalize competition, it’s the home team that most clearly benefits.

Just playing at home is worth three points in the Las Vegas books. And when two pro clubs seem about evenly matched -- as most do -- it’s no simple feat for any one of them to overhaul a team that has a 3-0 lead before the game even begins

Offensive Show

The Philadelphia Eagles (11-3), the NFC’s top team in the playoffs this winter, joined with an AFC also-ran, the Miami Dolphins (8-6), to produce a seven-touchdown offensive show, based on pass offense, that pleased football fans Monday night.

Before the Eagles broke a 24-24 tie to win it by seven points in the fourth quarter, 34-27, passers Donovan McNabb and Freddie Mitchell of Philadelphia, and Jay Fiedler of Miami threw for 507 yards, setting up the touchdowns that were scored mostly on short fake-pass draw plays.

That’s the right way, precisely, to play the game if you like to move a football.

And if you like to win, or like trying to win.

And if you don’t mind delighting large crowds of sports fans.

If either team had set out to win by running the ball Monday -- as most football coaches and network announcers constantly advise -- they would have been hopelessly outclassed.

On one running down, wide receiver Mitchell threw a 25-yard scoring pass to running back Brian Westbrook.

On another running down, McNabb’s longest strike arced 50 yards.

That’s football at its finest.

Edge to Patriots

If it’s New England Patriots vs. Kansas City Chiefs next month in the AFC playoffs, New England will have the edge in three of the four most important competitive aspects.

With quarterback Tom Brady, the Patriots have a better pass offense than Kansas City can muster with quarterback Trent Green, as good as Green is.

And they are also better on pass defense and on running-play defense.

They yield to Kansas City only in running-play offense; and even though the Chiefs run with extraordinary passion when Priest Holmes has the ball, that part of the game is less influential than running-play defense or pass offense and pass defense.

Rival coaches Bill Belichick of New England and Dick Vermeil of Kansas City are probably equally competitive. Both have recently taken pro clubs to the Super Bowl, and won there.

Vermeil, moreover, the third-year Kansas City coach who always wins in his third year anywhere, will be the sentimental favorite.

But in a Foxboro freeze, defensive superiority will mean more than anything Vermeil or Holmes can bring to the party. And Belichick is a lifelong defensive expert.

The Lewis Offense

The Cincinnati Bengals, who are in St. Louis for today’s game, have brought along some surprisingly successful football players who have been winning every which way for new Coach Marvin Lewis after finding it all but impossible to win any way in the last 12 years.

Plainly, as his friends have been saying since his defensive team won Super Bowl XXXV for Baltimore, Lewis is one of the NFL’s top coaches.

From this distance, it isn’t easy to see exactly what he did to turn a perennially sad-sack non-contender into the co-leader of the AFC North with his old Baltimore mentor, Brian Billick.

But since a typically slow start for a rookie coach, Lewis has come on fast.

The Bengals lost four of their first five, then won seven of their last nine, upsetting Kansas City and Seattle (when the Seahawks were hot) and dividing with division nemesis Baltimore.

As a defensive expert, Lewis, in the last two months, has usually had enough defense. But when naught but offense would do in close games, his offensive team has scored 34 points to beat Baltimore and then 41 to beat San Francisco by three points in last Sunday’s shootout.

Moreover, Lewis has done all this minus pouting tailback Corey Dillon, a great one who in recent years was about all the Bengals had. Now, suddenly, they have a passer, Jon Kitna. Nobody until recently thought Kitna could win in this league, nobody but Kitna. And Lewis.

A Time to Run

The St. Louis Rams (11-3), who at the moment rank alongside Philadelphia at the top of the NFC, will take on an AFC leader today, Cincinnati (8-6), after going all out last Sunday to hold off division rival Seattle (8-6).

To beat the Seahawks, 27-22, the Rams passed one test of a good team: When scored upon, they promptly answered back.

They answered three times in four chances:

* After a long Seattle touchdown drive shortened their advantage to 14-9 in the second quarter, the Rams replied with a 40-yard bomb into the end zone, Marc Bulger to Terry Holt, restoring their 12-point lead.

* After a Seattle field goal had changed the score to 21-12 with 18 seconds left in the half, time ran out on the Rams before they could reply.

* After a long Seattle field-goal drive in the third quarter, the Rams, assertively passing often on first down, drove to the answering field goal as the fourth quarter began.

* After Seattle moved to the touchdown that closed the score to two points, 24-22, the Rams answered with a time-consuming field-goal drive that kept Seattle’s offensive players off the field as the clock ran on, saving the day for St. Louis.

Using time-tested West Coast offense precepts, the Rams, though no West Coast team philosophically, took control with their pass offense in the first half -- going deep three times after failing to throw a long pass in their struggle with Cleveland a week ago. Then in the second half they ran the ball to hold the lead.

The Extraordinary Bears

The Chicago Bears (6-8), who will be home to slumping Washington (5-9) today, caught Minnesota last Sunday in a road game in the chilly Windy City and flattened the Vikings, 13-10, with Chicago’s newest quarterback, first-round draft pick Rex Grossman.

If it seems incongruous that a team from Minnesota, one of the union’s coldest states, should freeze up on the road, one explanation is that the Vikings play in nothing but comfort at Minneapolis. Indoors.

Grossman’s reputation going in that cold afternoon was that he’s a Jay Fiedler type, a good enough quarterback and competitor but an erratic passer. And he lived up to all of that in his first start after succeeding Chris Chandler, who had succeeded Kordell Stewart, who had himself been playing again lately.

After misfiring on four of his first five passes, Grossman completed only 13 (of 30) but led the Bears on their game-winning 75-yard drive.

As often happens in football, even on a cold day, his teammates caught fire from a new quarterback and made the necessary blocks and defensive stops.

It is less likely that Grossman is the Bears’ permanent answer. To win pro games consistently, a passer has to consistently throw the ball straight.

This time, though, Grossman made a historic contribution, knocking the Vikings down into a first-place tie with Green Bay in the NFC North. The Packers’ final game, against Denver in a Wisconsin night game Dec. 28, could be even more historic -- for Green Bay or Denver. Or both.

On Firing a Coach

The Indianapolis Colts will get the home-team advantage again against Denver today after defeating Atlanta last Sunday with great ease at Indianapolis, 38-7.

It might not have been so easy if the Falcons hadn’t chosen a strange time, three days before the game, to fire veteran Coach Dan Reeves, a move that clearly disrupted his players.

Actually, the Falcons’ new chief executive, Arthur Blank, now completing his second season as a club owner, told Reeves he was through as of his last game later this month. But the owner might have known that the coach, a veteran bulldog competitor, wouldn’t hang around as a lame duck.

Firing a coach during the season is always a mistake. It tells the world that the owner hasn’t learned his job. For as every other NFL executive knows, Reeves is the same conservative leader he was months ago when Blank decided to keep him on. It’s the owner who’s changed, not the coach.

What’s more, a week earlier, in what turned out to be his last NFL start, Reeves had finally got back his injured quarterback, Michael Vick, who had just pasted division leader Carolina, 20-14.

If Reeves had had Vick all year, would the Falcons now be a 3-11 disappointment to owner Blank? Not likely. It’s more likely that Blank, the compiler of Home Depot millions, has a long way to go to be a winning owner.

More on Denver

What the Broncos (9-5) showed the football world last Sunday was how to win without playing your best game.

They let Cleveland (4-10) hang around until overtime, when the Browns had to make a tough decision, namely, if you win the coin toss on a windy day in Denver, do you elect to take the wind or the ball? The Browns opted for possession of the ball and never had it again after that one three-and-out series.