Inside The Nfl

He Won't Let It Buffalo Him

Last summer, when quarterback Jim Kelly of the Bills bumped into his Bronco counterpart, John Elway, Kelly said, "Now I know how you feel." This summer, when the two met again, Kelly said, "Now I'm starting to catch you."

What a curse the Super Bowl has been for some of the AFC's best quarterbacks. Elway is winless in three Super Bowl appearances, and now here comes Kelly, who's 0-2 in the Big One and has a good shot at a third straight trip to the title game. Last January, Kelly got mugged by the Redskin pass rush and threw three interceptions in the first 31 minutes to help put Buffalo in a 24-0 hole.

Nevertheless, Kelly's lousy showing in Minneapolis doesn't haunt him. He's too confident and too resilient to be spooked by one of his worst days as a pro. But that hasn't always been the case. Kelly needs to have team and individual success, or he slips into a funk and begins to lose his commanding edge.

It last happened in 1989. Kelly played poorly in three consecutive losses late in the year, and the Bills almost blew the AFC East title. His agent/brother, Dan, convened a meeting of the six Kelly brothers at Jim's Orchard Park, N.Y., house to cheer up the slumping quarterback. And that's the last pep talk Jim has needed. In the past two seasons combined, he completed 63.8% of his passes and threw for 57 touchdowns, with 26 interceptions.

Even with Buffalo planning to use the running game a bit more this year (big back Carwell Gardner will be joining Thurman Thomas in two-back sets), Kelly could have a big year—as long as he avoids memories of those two Super Bowl defeats. "Nobody knows, except maybe John, what it's like to lose two Super Bowls in a row," says Kelly, forgetting for a minute that one NFC quarterback, Fran Tarkenton of the Vikings, lost three Super Bowls, including two straight in the mid-'70s. "You can't feel it in baseball, or basketball, or hockey, where there's a best-of-seven championship. In the NFL it's one game, winner take all, to be the king of kings. You have an off day, and it's all over. The low is pretty low.

"But all during the off-season, I'd see people and they'd say, 'You guys'll get your chance again.' And what encourages me is I know they're right. How many teams in the NFL right now can say they definitely have a chance to be in the Super Bowl this year? Eight, maybe 10. But everybody knows we're one of them."

Don't Touch That Dial

The Olympic TripleCast was a pay-per-view disaster, but that hasn't scared off the NFL. The league has plans to experiment with pay-per-view in 1994, probably in two test markets—one NFL and one non-NFL city. All the games not scheduled to be shown on free channels in those two cities will be made available to cable subscribers on a pay-per-view basis at a cost of $12 to $15 a game.

Art Modell, the owner of the Browns and the chairman of the NFL's television committee, foresees no radical change in how the league televises its games on free TV for the balance of the decade. That's a wise move, because certain members of Congress have said they will jump all over the league if it starts making fans pay for any of the games they now see on free TV.