Packers Expect To Bring a Title to Titletown

A burdensome history against no history at all. It’s what makes today’s NFC title game between the Green Bay Packers and Carolina Panthers so intriguing.

History is the Packers, a team with superstars like Brett Favre and Reggie White trying to live up to the legend of Vince Lombardi and his champions of 30 years ago. Its biggest burden might be its long-ago success.

No history at all is Carolina, a team that didn’t exist two years ago. In their second season, they beat San Francisco twice to win the NFC West, then beat defending champion Dallas last week, humbling the mightiest the NFL has had to offer this decade.

“People keep saying we’re only playing an expansion team,” says Green Bay defensive end Sean Jones.

“They beat San Francisco. They beat Dallas. They had the second best record in the NFC. As far as I’m concerned, they’re a very good football team, however old they are.”

The Packers are the NFC’s best team, 13-3 in the regular season to 12-4 for Carolina.

Picked by many in the preseason to win the Super Bowl, they came to camp with hopes so high that coach Mike Holmgren had to ban those two little words from his team’s vocabulary.

Now, a game away from New Orleans, Holmgren has given up trying to stop such talk.

“Two more games,” says Reggie White, a perennial All-Pro without a Super Bowl ring, “and we can take the rest of our lives off.”

Everything seems to point that way.

Green Bay enters this game with a 17-game winning streak at Lambeau Field, where temperatures are expected to be in single digits if not lower at game time Sunday. Carolina was only 4-4 on the road, and in its two years has played at no colder a place than Washington, where temperatures were in the high 20s and low 30s in the final game last season.

If the Packers win, they’ll go to New Orleans as a solid favorite to win the NFC’s 13th straight Super Bowl. That’s because Denver, the team that seemed its equal in the regular season, was upset by Jacksonville, the other 1995 expansion team, last Saturday.

That’s enough incentive for anyone.

“This one,” says Favre, who won his second consecutive NFL MVP award this season, “is for Reggie and Sean Jones and Eugene Robinson, all those guys who have played so well and so long and never been to a Super Bowl.”

But for White, Jones and Robinson to get there, the Packers will have to beat no ordinary expansion team. Like its AFC counterpart from Jacksonville, Carolina has done what no second-year team has done before by advancing to a conference championship.

The Panthers have six defensive starters over age 31, 12 players who have been to Super Bowls and six who have Super Bowl rings. Just two Packers have been to the title game: wide receiver Don Beebe, who was in four Super Bowls with Buffalo, and backup quarterback Jim McMahon, the starter on the Bears’ 1985 title team.

The Panthers are led by Sam Mills, an all-Pro linebacker who was 0-4 in playoff games until last week.

“Sam? He’s 40 years old and still playing great,” says White, adding three years to the 5-foot-9 Mills’ actual age.

Mills and the defense, one of the NFL’s few remaining 3-4 schemes, led the NFL in sacks this year with 60. Kevin Greene, who played with Pittsburgh in last year’s Super Bowl, had 14 1/2 to lead the league and Lamar Lathon, the other outside linebacker, had 13 1/2.

That allows the Panthers to play a low-risk offense, led by Collins, their first-ever No. 1 draft pick.

“He’s not your average second-year quarterback,” says Collins’ backup, Steve Beuerlein, who won a Super Bowl ring with Dallas in 1993. “He makes great decisions and doesn’t get us in trouble. He knows when to complete passes and when to throw the ball away.”

The rest of the offense is no-names--the kind of rookies and castoffs you’d expect on an expansion team.

One is Anthony Johnson, cut by the Bears, Colts and Jets. He rushed for 1,120 yards this season after replacing the injured Tshimanga Biakabutuka and had 104 last week against Dallas, outgaining Emmitt Smith by 24 yards.

Five more are the offensive linemen. Matt Campbell is a converted tight end signed off the street to fill the critical left tackle position. Norberto Garrido, a third-round draft choice this year, is at right tackle, where he’ll have to block White.

“This isn’t an individual game, it’s a team game and that’s how we always look at it,” says Dom Capers, the runaway winner in coach of the year balloting.

What can stop the Packers? Their history, perhaps.

“The pressure we’re under is immense,” says Jones. “We have to win. Carolina can come in relaxed.”

What can stop the Panthers? The weather, possibly.

“You can’t understand what it’s like until you get out in it,” says Favre, a Mississippian who is 18-0 in games played in temperatures under 35 degrees. “I know I win in it, but I hate it.”

The field torn up in last week’s game is new, Kentucky bluegrass shipped in from Maryland on 23 trucks this week, allowing the Packers to sell off their old field for charity.

The Panthers may be where Green Bay was a year ago when it went to Dallas after upsetting San Francisco on the road--just happy to be in the championship. The Packers lost, 38-27, the Cowboys went on to win the Super Bowl.

“Then, beating San Francisco was our Super Bowl,” Favre said. “Now, when we did it we went back to business and said, ‘Two more games left.”’

So the Packers are a clear favorite--not only in Las Vegas but in their own minds.

“It’s all business this week,” says White. “Brett knows it. I know it. We all know it. This may be the last chance for some of us.”