NFL PLAYOFFS : The Other Guys AFC’s Championship Game Quarterbacks Have Egos (and Offenses) Firmly on the Ground

PITTSBURGH — One side of the country has the real Super Bowl. The other has the Substandard Bowl, an event being treated as if it were the Bud Bowl with live characters.

One side has the glamour, the other the grit.

One side has Steve Young and Troy Aikman, the other side, those two other guys.

And that’s one of the big reasons Sunday’s AFC championship game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the San Diego Chargers at Three Rivers Stadium is being treated by many as a warm-up act for the NFC championship game that follows at Candlestick Park between the San Francisco 49ers and the Dallas Cowboys. The Steelers and Chargers don’t have big-name quarterbacks.

Most assume, with good reason, that the 49ers and Cowboys are the class of the league, that the NFC will dominate Super Bowl XXIX as it has in Super Bowls for a decade.

The Steeler-Charger game could better stand on its own if it had star quality in the men at the controls. After all, the Miami Dolphin-Kansas City Chief game in the first round of the playoffs was hardly a dream matchup. But the presence of quarterbacks Dan Marino and Joe Montana elevated the game in status.

Sunday’s game in Pittsburgh has no such advantage. The thought of Neil O’Donnell at quarterback for the Steelers and Stan Humphries for the Chargers elicits a lot of yawns.

Unfair? Frustrating? Demeaning?

The two quarterbacks shrug their shoulders and cock their arms. They have been through this all their careers.

“I’d probably say that NBC and everybody are upset,” Humphries said, “because Marino and Aikman and all those guys aren’t playing, and me and Neil are playing. I think me and Neil are probably two quiet kind of guys who just go out and do our job.”

The sentiments from O’Donnell are identical.

“I don’t need to see my name in the papers,” he said. “I just try to go out and do my job playing as a professional quarterback. I said from Day 1 here that I don’t need the exposure. People who know the game know what type of quarterback I am. In this business, you can be a hero one week and a zero the next.”

Both men appear content to play on teams with enough weapons that the quarterbacks have a reasonable chance to succeed without having to carry a team on their throwing arms.

The Steelers and Chargers are similar in many ways. Both have big-play defenses and big, bruising running games.

Quarterbacks with big egos need not apply.

It’s not as if Humphries and O’Donnell haven’t done their share to put their teams into Sunday’s game.

Just the opposite.

The Chargers might not have gotten this far if Humphries hadn’t pulled himself off the Coliseum grass in the fourth quarter of an early season game against the Raiders after suffering a knee injury. A team doctor told Humphries he was through for the afternoon.

Wrong.

Humphries shook off the pain and led San Diego to victory in the closing seconds.

The Chargers might not have gotten this far if Humphries hadn’t come back from a dislocated left elbow to equal his career high in completion percentage (58.3%) and set a personal best with 17 touchdown passes while throwing for 3,209 yards, the second time in the last three seasons he has gone over 3,000 yards.

And the Chargers certainly wouldn’t have gotten this far if Humphries hadn’t rallied his team from a 21-6 halftime deficit in last week’s second-round playoff game against the Dolphins, throwing the game-winning, eight-yard touchdown pass to Mark Seay with 35 seconds remaining.

That’s a long way from Humphries’ days in Washington, when he couldn’t get then-Coach Joe Gibbs to seriously consider him for the starting job.

The knock on Humphries, a 6-foot-2, 223-pounder, was that he had a tendency to slip out of shape. But after Bobby Beathard jumped from the job of general manager of the Redskins to the same post with the Chargers, he jumped at the chance to get Humphries, working out a trade with his old club.

“The key to Stan is believing that he belongs and that he’s the man,” said Bob Lane, his quarterback coach at Northeast Louisiana. “Once he’s convinced, I’m telling you, hold onto your hat.”

Lane made that statement during the 1992 season, Humphries’ first in San Diego. It’s a statement that has held up.

If numbers are the criteria, O’Donnell can also put up his share. In three seasons, O’Donnell already had set six team records on a club that once had another pretty good quarterback in Terry Bradshaw. Although he’s on a team that favors a ball-control offense, O’Donnell managed to pass for 3,208 yards in 1993.

And even this season, despite sitting out two games because of injury and operating in an offense that led the NFL in rushing, O’Donnell was the seventh-ranked passer in the AFC, passed for 2,443 yards and 13 touchdowns with only nine interceptions.

“He feels really comfortable in our offense,” said Ron Erhardt, Pittsburgh’s offensive coordinator. “He sees our philosophy. He knows it doesn’t have to be pass, pass, pass. We have a running game.

“He’s a good student and he’s got a good arm. But not a big ego. He doesn’t need the stats. Winning gives you a different outlook.”

Yet Erhardt realizes many people around town are disappointed because O’Donnell is not another Bradshaw.

“I feel sorry for him,” Erhardt said. “Nobody wants to be criticized.”

The biggest knock on Humphries and O’Donnell before this season was that neither had produced much when the spotlight was the brightest, going a combined 1-3 in the postseason.

That has all changed. And it could change even more for Sunday’s winner.

Who knows? If the AFC should somehow pull an upset in the real Super Bowl on Jan. 29, the cries of disappointment could be markedly different a year from now.

Young? Aikman? Where’s O’Donnell? Or, where’s Humphries?