Having grown up in the Chicago area, coach Mike Shanahan has a keen sense of pro football history. In guiding his Denver Broncos toward an undefeated season, he has concentrated on one week at a time. At the moment, he is trying to beat the Bears.
While everybody else is looking ahead to the Broncos-Dolphins showdown Dec. 21 in Miami, Shanahan has reminded his team it can make history Sunday against the New York Giants.
A Broncos victory would be their 19th in a row, including playoffs.
“We’d be the first team in the history of professional football to be able to do that,” Shanahan said.
The 1933-34 Bears and the 1941-42 Bears had strings of 18 in a row. So did the 1972-73 Dolphins and the 1989-90 San Francisco 49ers. But nobody has reached 19. While everybody else is thinking prematurely about a 19-0 record for one season, Shanahan is showing his team a more immediate goal.
He will leave out the part about the 1933-34 Bears losing their bid for 19 in a row against the Giants in New York.
All for Elway: Giants coach Jim Fassel helped coach Denver quarterback John Elway at Stanford and for his first two years in Denver.
Now that Elway has won an NFL-record 147 games, thrown for 50,806 yards, led 47 game-winning fourth-quarter drives and won a Super Bowl, Fassel is ready to say it: “I’ve always shied away from comparing guys in their time. The game today is different than it was 30 years ago. But when you put all the things together, I would say John Elway is the greatest quarterback of all time.”
Ernie would agree: Giants General Manager Ernie Accorsi drafted Elway when he was general manager of the 1983 Baltimore Colts. Owner Bob Irsay told him not to do it because Elway didn’t want to play there, but Accorsi did it anyway.
“Morally I couldn’t sell the franchise out,” Accorsi said. “I just had too much respect for the Baltimore Colts. I know it sounds corny, but I wouldn’t do it. I figured if it was good enough for Johnny Unitas, it was good enough for John.”
Three days later, Accorsi was watching an NBA game on television when a bulletin flashed that Irsay had traded Elway to Denver for guard Chris Hinton, backup quarterback Mark Hermann, a future No. 1 pick and two preseason games with the Broncos that included $250,000 guarantees.
The next year, Irsay moved the team to Indianapolis. Accorsi went on to the Cleveland Browns and watched Elway beat the Browns in AFC title games in the 1986, 1987 and 1989 seasons.
“I really think he’s the greatest quarterback since Unitas,” Accorsi said. “To me, nobody could ever be better than Unitas. But John is amazing. You watch him now and I don’t know if he’s lost a fraction of a second off his fastball. The nice thing is that John has been a credit to the game as well as a great player. I rooted for him in the Super Bowl. I think everybody loves John Elway.”
Superstitious: Jets coach Bill Parcells had dentist appointments on three consecutive Tuesday mornings earlier this season, each preceding a victory. On the fourth straight Tuesday, Parcells visited the dentist’s chair again “even though I didn’t need anything done.” He had his teeth cleaned and the Jets went on to win their fourth straight. Back to the dentist he went the following Tuesday.
“Just sat there,” Parcells said. “Same chair, same time. But then the Colts beat us, so I didn’t have to go anymore.”
Parcells claims he made a deal with Sports Illustrated to keep him off the cover last week before the Jets play the Dolphins in Miami.
“Yeah, I requested purposely not to be on that cover,” Parcells said. “I said I really didn’t want to do the article if it was going to be on the cover. As recently as last week, I took a photo for them with a guarantee that it would not be on the cover. But they elected to do that anyway, so you can imagine how I feel about it.”
Joe Assad, the magazine’s senior publicist, said SI never enters into agreements about its covers. Regarding the legend of the Sports Illustrated cover jinx, Assad added: “We don’t put stock in it. Michael Jordan has been on the cover 46 times and has been relatively unaffected.”
Why not Beebe? With the Packers hurting for receivers, Don Beebe wonders why his phone hasn’t rung.
“If they called me right now, I would consider it because there’s only a month and a half left and they are in dire need,” Beebe said.
Injured much of last year, his ninth in the league, Beebe said he is in shape because he’s running the House of Speed, a training program for athletes that is conducting a speed camp at Neuqua Valley High School in Naperville from Dec. 28-30 (877-82SPEED).
“People have called and asked, `This doesn’t have anything to do with drug paraphernalia, does it?’ ” Beebe said.
Replays on replay: The variety of views on instant replay keeps it on the shelf, where it will remain at least until league meetings next March. Forget this year’s playoffs.
Cardinals owner Bill Bidwill, who always has voted against it: “The game should be left on the field. Nobody’s perfect. Players, coaches, officials, they all make mistakes. But players don’t get a second chance if they drop a pass. Coaches don’t get a second chance to change a call on third-and-short unless there’s a penalty. Play the game the way other sports do.”
Bidwill’s coach, Vince Tobin, disagrees: “I had experience with it when I was coaching in the USFL. I liked the opportunity to have a challenge.”
Tampa Bay General Manager Rich McKay, a co-chair of the competition committee and an opponent: “I don’t agree with the concept, but I don’t want to be the one who says let’s just get stuck in the mud here and end up with a block of seven votes that defeats replay. I think we have to spend more time trying to craft a system that can get passed. If that means we have to vote for it, we very well may.”
McKay believes limiting the scope to only out-of-bounds and end-zone plays might help. But Pittsburgh owner Dan Rooney wants to expand its scope to include judgment calls, such as pass interference.
Parcells doesn’t approve of the coaches’ right to challenge: “I think that’s irrelevant to getting the calls right.”
Then why did he vote in favor of the challenge system last March?
“Because I was crazy,” Parcells said.
Miami coach Jimmy Johnson said: “We would be in favor of replay in any form, any way, any fashion. If it involves timeouts, if it involves challenges, if it involves the president of the club going on the field and throwing a flag.”
He said he would be in favor of adding replay “for the playoffs, for this game, for the week after next, for the Super Bowl.”
Lowercase, please: At an autograph show, a woman who somehow had come up with Doug Flutie’s original NFL scouting report presented it to him. The first two words: “Extremely small.”
“That was the very first line–`extremely small,’ ” Flutie said. “And then it went into all the superlatives after that. I’m thinking, if you have all these superlatives, then why is being too small an issue?”
Flutie never has lost a regular-season home game as a starter in either the NFL (10-0) or USFL (7-0). His overall regular-season record as an NFL starter is 15-7 (.682).
Triple threat: Seattle’s Ricky Watters is closing in on his fourth straight 1,000-yard rushing season. He needs 21 yards against San Diego to keep that streak alive, which would also make him the first back in league history to gain 1,000 or more yards in a season for three different teams. Watters had 1,013 yards as a rookie in 1992 for San Francisco and three straight 1,000-plus seasons for Philadelphia from 1995 to 1997.
The dynasty: The San Francisco 49ers refuse to go away. They have won at least 10 games in 17 of the last 18 seasons. The one exception was strike-shortened 1982. More than coincidentally, they have had just two primary starting quarterbacks in that span, Joe Montana and Steve Young.
