Mission accomplished

Sporting News, The, Jan 23, 1995 by Michael Knisley

It takes Cowboys guard Nate Newton a moment, just a moment, to do the math in the catacombs of Candlestick Park late Sunday afternoon. How much better, he is asked, is the 49ers' defense this season, the one designed specifically to stop Newton's Cowboys?

"Well, let's see," he muses. "How many did we score on them this time last year? Thirty-eight? I guess that makes them about 10 points better right now, doesn't it? That's how you judge a defense, isn't it? By the points they give up. They did their job. They're a good team, a solid team."

Chances are, the 49ers didn't have 451 yards of Dallas offense in mind when they tore down their 1993 defense to build the anti-Cowboys approach. Chances are, San Francisco didn't have 29 Dallas first downs in mind, either, when it hired Ken Norton Jr., Rickey Jackson, Richard Dent, Gary Plummer and Deion Sanders.

But yards and points, as Newton says, aren't the final standard. Those 10 fewer points scored by the Cowboys Sunday in the 49ers' 38-28 victory in the NFC championship game ... that's the reason for all the personnel juggling in the Bay Area over the past 12 months. San Francisco didn't exactly stop the Cowboys, but the defense made the critical difference, nonetheless. It turned last year's 38-21 loss to Dallas in the NFC title game into this year's ticket to the Super Bowl.

Rarely is an NFL team as upfront about its personnel intentions as the 49ers have been this season. Consecutive championship-game losses to the Cowboys left open wounds on the psyche of this proud franchise, and San Francisco's management made no mystery of its willingness to take specific aim at the way Dallas kept beating it.

Because Emmitt Smith kept running wild, because Michael Irvin and Alvin Harper kept catching big-play passes, because Troy Aikman kept putting points on the board -- because the Cowboys kept winning the games that really counted -- 49ers President Carmen Policy set about his 1994 offseason looking for help to stop that bleeding. Plummer and Norton, the linebackers, came to seal off Smith between the tackles. Jackson, the pass-rushing linebacker, and Dent, the defensive end, came to pressure Aikman. Sanders came to harass Irvin and Harper.

And San Francisco didn't try to sugarcoat it. Everything else was secondary to the goal of a victory last Sunday. Against the Cowboys.

"To me, it's never been a secret," says 49ers center Bart Oates, one of Policy's few offensive imports this season. "It's not as if this team, the administration and the organization, has tried to hide their intentions. We're building this team to beat Dallas. Dallas is the marquee team. Two Super Bowls. Our mission is not just to beat them in the regular season. It's to beat them in the championship game."

On Sunday, Norton, hired away from the Cowboys after their second consecutive Super Bowl victory last year, accounted for seven tackles and three assists. Plummer, a former Charger who will see his old team in the Super Bowl January 29, added four solo tackles and an assist. Jackson, whose contributions surprisingly have been more significant against the run than the pass, knocked down three passes and had a pair of tackles. And Sanders, the most flamboyant of the 49ers' free agents, defensed five of Aikman's 53 passes and intercepted one of them.

Dent, still hobbled by a nagging knee injury, was on San Francisco's inactive list against Dallas.

Clearly, Policy knew what he was doing, even if the 49ers don't take one of the league's dominant defenses into the Super Bowl. (Had Dallas not found itself in a 21-0 hole 7 1/2 minutes into the game -- the Cowboys turned the ball over three times before they ran their seventh play from scrimmage -- all those first downs and yards might have amounted to more than a loss.) The improvement -- from 15th in the league in yardage allowed last season to eighth this season -- was enough to clear the hurdle on which San Francisco tripped the past two seasons.

"It's been a gratifying year," Policy says. "Eddie DeBartolo (team owner) and I have a good thing going. Anything we needed, anything we wanted, as long as it made sense, we got it. As far as I'm concerned, these coaches and players deserve a championship. We couldn't have scripted it any better. Prior to the game, we said there's nothing else we should have done. It's up to the players."

It's been a gratifying year for San Francisco's offense, too, which scored more points (505) during the regular season than all but three teams in NFL-AFL history -- the 1983 Redskins (541), the 1984 Dolphins (513) and the 1961 Oilers (also 513).

But as good as the offense is, the difference between the 1994 49ers and last season's model is the defense.

"Not to take anything away from our defenses the last couple of years, but I really felt like last year, going into this (NFC championship) game, we really had to score every time we had the ball," 49ers tight end Brent Jones says. "Not that we don't have that feeling this year. There's still that sense of urgency we have. But last year going into this game, we had a few guys hurt and I think there was just that anxiety in the offensive huddle that if we had to punt, Dallas was going to march down and score. And we were never going to be able to catch up and get back in the game.