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Columnist Dean Juipe: Conflicting Trends Mark NFL Season

Through the first two months of the National Football League season, the central theme was offense.

In particular, the defending Super Bowl champion St. Louis Rams were scoring touchdowns at a record pace. They opened the season with 41, 37, 41, 41, 57 and 45 points and averaged 39 through their first 10 games.

The rest of the league began to play and plan accordingly, believing the only way to win was to "out-score" the opposition; i.e., sacrifice defense to win by something like 34-31.

But then the Rams got banged up, and, almost unbelievably, the dominant trend of the first half of the season gave way to a diametrically opposed one in the second. As if this were two distinctly different seasons in one, defensive teams began to inch upward.

This very unusual season culminated Sunday when the best defensive team in the league -- and some are saying the best defensive team of all time -- won the Super Bowl with a superb, if marginally flawed, performance. Baltimore's 34-7 victory over the New York Giants in Tampa lent some credence to an adage that has been applied in any number of sports: The team with the better defense (or pitching, if you're talking about baseball) wins when the chips are down.

The total may have gone "over" in Las Vegas but only because the Giants deflated as the game wore on -- and because quarterback Kerry Collins turned in a truly wretched performance. Not that the Ravens' Trent Dilfer was much better, but Collins and his four interceptions played right into Baltimore's hands.

(Dilfer, despite the TV announcers' view that he deserved MVP consideration, was erratic and did little to help the Ravens win. Had a couple of his first-half passes been picked off, instead of wildly flying out of bounds or into the ground, Dilfer and Collins could have exchanged places.)

By the time the game reached the stretch run, the only suspense was whether New York's self-destructive ways would turn the final score into one that historians would call embarrassing. Forgotten was that through the majority of the contest it was the tight and taut defensive struggle many had envisioned.

The Ravens' defense repetitively stymied the Giants and a team that went the entire month of October without an offensive touchdown is now the reigning Super Bowl champion. (Much to the relief of well-paid oddsmaker Danny Sheridan, who had New York at a frivolous 10,000 to 1 to win the Super Bowl when the season opened.)

Baltimore completes the season with 11 straight wins and impressive playoff victories over Denver, Tennessee, Oakland and a Giants team that had scored 41 points in its previous game. The only thing the Ravens didn't do in the finale that they had in their three earlier playoff games was knock their opponent's starting quarterback out of the game, although KO'ing Collins wouldn't have served any constructive purpose.

An old movie that had been on earlier in the day, "Night Of The Living Dead" came to mind as the Giants reprised the zombies' role as Super Bowl 35 unfolded.

They looked real and had some fight in them, yet when it came right down to it they were overmatched and listless.

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