The Eagles-Giants and Cowboys-49ers games honor the NFC as it used to be

These NFL divisional-round matchups are a throwback to a time when parity didn't rule the NFL. When a few teams dominated the league. When the Eagles were fun but kept coming up short.

Keith Byars, here with Vai Sikahema, played on many very good Eagles teams. But they could never get to the top of a top-heavy NFC.Read moreTannen Maury / Associated Press

by Mike Sielski | Columnist

Published Jan. 20, 2023, 10:44 a.m. ET

The alignment of this year’s NFC playoffs was enough to send a tingle of memory through Keith Byars, to get him thinking back to opportunities missed and a moment that neither he nor any Eagles fan can forget. Four teams still standing in the divisional round: Eagles-Giants on Saturday, Cowboys-49ers on Sunday, three from the NFC East, one a traditional power from out west. And for Byars, this bracket has the feel of the mid-1980s and early 1990s, when having Pat Summerall and John Madden call your game on CBS was a Sunday staple and a sign of your team’s status, when one conference dominated the other, and one division stood above the rest.

“It was just football at its best,” Byars said in a phone interview Thursday night. “It was grown-man football. It was football in its purest form. In those times, the NFC East was so good. It was the 49ers and the NFC East.”

From 1986 through 1992, through the seven years that Byars spent with the Eagles as a stumpy, reliable running back/tight end who was better at catching passes out of the backfield than he was at carrying the ball between the tackles, the NFL featured none of the parity that is one of its hallmarks today. The NFC won 13 consecutive Super Bowls, from 1984-96, and four teams — San Francisco, Dallas, Washington, and the Giants — won 11 of them. There were haves. There were have-nots. And man, was it fun.

“The Eagles would have been in there,” Byars said, “if we’d have kept the same chemistry.”

Those lamentations are familiar to anyone who lived through and followed pro football then. The Eagles won at least 10 games every regular season from 1988-92, made the postseason four times, and won just one playoff game, and Byars can run through the might-have-beens as well as anyone can.

If only the NFL had delayed or rescheduled “The Fog Bowl” at Soldier Field against the Bears in the ‘88 playoffs.

“We missed our time in ‘88,” he said. “That would have been our Super Bowl season.”

If only Randall Cunningham hadn’t taken that hit to his knee from the Packers’ Bryce Paup in the 1991 season opener. If only then-owner Norman Braman hadn’t fired Buddy Ryan, who, Byars said, had kept notes on a West Philadelphia-born kid who had become a force at Central State University, an NAIA school in southwest Ohio.

“He was going to draft Erik Williams,” Byars said. “That was common knowledge with us.”

Instead, Harry Gamble, Rich Kotite, and the Eagles traded two first-round picks to move up to take Antone Davis. Williams, after the Cowboys took him in the third round of that same 1991 draft, became a three-time All-Pro at right tackle, a fixture on three Dallas championship teams.

“Imagine him anchoring our offensive line,” Byars said.

Instead, the Eagles and their fans had to settle for that single playoff victory, over the Saints in the Superdome, for Ryan’s braggadocio and his 46 defense, and for the games and plays that testified to those teams’ edginess and toughness.

“We always had the respect of our peers,” Byars said.

He himself was responsible for maybe the most memorable of those plays: his crushing block on his best friend, Giants linebacker Pepper Johnson, on Nov. 25, 1990, at Veterans Stadium — a 31-13 Eagles victory and New York’s first loss that season after a 10-0 start.

Byars and Johnson had been teammates at Ohio State and remain close as brothers to this day. Whenever they had to face each other in the NFL, they couldn’t bear to talk during the week before the game. But they’d meet at the 50-yard line, just before kickoff, to hug it out and wish each other luck.

“After I made that block, I said, ‘Pepper, I’m going to have to talk about this for the next 44, 50 years’,” Byars said. “When we’re together, he says, ‘Aw, yeah, Keith, they bring it up for us.’ I have to remind people: That wasn’t Pepper. That was a New York Giant. At the last minute, I held back about three to five percent. If it was Lawrence Taylor, I would have tried to give it a little more.”

The residue of that hit, of that era of the Eagles and the NFL, clings to every complaint that Jonathan Gannon’s defensive schemes are too passive, every Seth Joyner rant that the Eagles should be blitzing more, every Bronx cheer at Lincoln Financial Field whenever the Eagles hand the ball to a running back for the first time in 10 plays. Those conditions will be back in place Saturday night, as close as the league gets anymore to those good ol’ days that Byars and so many people around here still treasure.

So here we go: Eagles-Giants one night, Cowboys-Niners the next, and forget standing and cheering. Forget chugging a beer. Forget filming a video of yourself for Instagram. If you’re a football fan this weekend, the best way to celebrate your team’s trip to the NFC championship game is with an episode of 60 Minutes and a rerun of Murder, She Wrote.