TOP BILLING : Buffalo Has Best Record (10-1) in NFL, but Hasn’t Gained Respect as Best Team

MIAMI — After six straight victories and posting the best record in the NFL (10-1), the Buffalo Bills are still wondering just when the rest of the world will start to take them seriously.

“I come home after the Monday night game,” Buffalo nose tackle Fred Smerlas was saying, “and my wife tells me how the announcers keep saying the other team is making mistakes. Something appears to be wrong with every opponent we play. Don’t you have to be pretty good to go 10-1 in the pros? Pro anything? Everybody we play can’t be that bad. If the Bears or the Redskins were 9-1 coming in here they would have been favored by 10 points. How many games is it going to take? We’re the best team in football, and we’ll probably be underdogs every week the rest of the season.”

Smerlas has been a Buffalo Bill since 1979, which means he’s lost a lot more games than he’s won. He’d like to wade knee deep, at least, in all this rare success. Instead he finds skeptics waiting for the Bills to fall flat on their faces. “You know what will happen if we get to the AFC title game and lose? People will say, ‘See, they were a fluke.’ And if we get to the Super Bowl, they’ll say, ‘Buffalo just lucked out.’ I don’t know what they could say if we win it.”

Should that wind up being the case, the mysterious “they” could simply say that Buffalo had no fewer than five great players on defense, two on offense including the quarterback, and a coach with just the right touch to make it go.

Actually, Smerlas is a funny man, a 285-pound nose tackle who might have made a living at making people laugh if he wasn’t so good at smashing heads. Half of him loves this underdog stuff because it provides an excuse for a team with the best record in the game to keep the chip on its shoulder, even as the Bills charge through their best season since 1964. Plus, it gives Smerlas better postgame material. The Bills, following Monday night’s 31-6 victory here over the Dolphins, are about to laugh themselves right into home-field advantage throughout the AFC playoffs.

Coach Marv Levy predictably prefers not to look that far yet. “I don’t know how good we are,” he said. “We’ve only been at this for part of one year.” But what a year. And what a wonderfully strange mix of players, serious players, crazy players, a lot of very smart players. “A very, very odd team,” Smerlas said.

Let Smerlas take you through the Bills locker room. Being a defensive player on a defense-first team, he points to his cohorts first. The guy who looks like he owns the team is Cornelius Bennett, alias “Biscuit.” Bennett is a 235-pound linebacker who hits like Lawrence Taylor and runs like Carl Lewis. He had 8.5 sacks in eight games as a rookie, including four in the season finale against the Eagles. One time he picked up quarterback Randall Cunningham and said, “You’d better get somebody to block for you, or I’m going to kill you today.” Buffalo gave up two first-round draft choices, a second-round pick and a running back, Greg Bell, previously chosen in the first round. With 15 sacks in 18 NFL games, the Bills think the price was right.

The 285-pounder a couple of lockers over is Bruce Smith, who may be the best defensive end in the game, even though others are more widely known. Of Smith, Smerlas said, “There are good players, very good players, great players, exceptional players and ridiculous players. Bruce is a ridiculous player.”

Not too far away sits Art Still, a 6-foot-7 defensive end acquired after the Kansas City Chiefs gave up on him. Levy had Still when he was head coach there, and didn’t care if the current Chiefs coaches didn’t like Still’s age (he’ll turn 33 on Dec. 5) and relatively laid-back approach to practice. Though he weighs 255 pounds, Still doesn’t eat beef or sugar. He lives amidst plenty of land and wildlife. He and his wife have adopted three of their five children and everybody sleeps in one room, on the floor, a Samoan custom he liked and adopted. The biggest problem is “you have to watch where you step when you go to the bathroom in the middle of the night,” he said.

Smerlas loves the fact that Still plays his brains out and is a touch eccentric. “Art Still came in on a spaceship with a ray gun,” Smerlas said. “He’s a very odd man. Seriously, though, he brings a very relaxed attitude, which is good because I’m ridiculously intense.”

When Levy talks about the “exceedingly good acquisitions” Bills General Manager Bill Polian made before the season, he’s referring to Still and cornerback Leonard Smith, a six-year veteran who came to Buffalo in a pre-season trade with the Cardinals. His presence has allowed second-year cornerback Nate Odomes to progress nicely.

The linebacker corps, led by Bennett, 1987 defensive rookie of the year Shane Conlan and Ray Bentley, is absolutely leak-proof. Bentley and defensive end Mike Hamby (on injured reserve) created a cartoon character, Darby the Dinosaur, for children. Bentley, a third-year pro from Central Michigan, writes a column for a small paper in that state, and plans to write fiction. “I think of myself as a writer who plays football,” he said.

Leon Seals, known in college as “Dr. Sack,” doesn’t have very many of those with the Bills but he does have a doctorate in sociology from Jackson State.

Most of the offensive players are known more for football, especially quarterback Jim Kelly, the man who said he cried the day he had to come to Buffalo, but now is the chamber of commerce’s best friend. Kelly has thrown 11 touchdown passes to 12 interceptions. But nobody’s tougher or better in the clutch this year. And Levy said, “You name all the quarterbacks in the league and Jim Kelly is the one I want. He’s the right guy for this team.”

Everybody expected the defense to be very good, and they haven’t disappointed; Buffalo has allowed just one touchdown the last three games. The weaknesses were supposed to be at running back and wide receiver. But rookie Thurman Thomas from Oklahoma State is the AFC’s ninth leading rusher (despite missing Monday night with a bruised shin) with 588 yards. And Andre Reed, from that noted football power Kutztown State, has 53 receptions for 748 yards, trailing only Cincinnati’s Eddie Brown and Miami’s Mark Clayton in receiving yards.

Most of the main characters are under 30, and many are under 25. How can the Bills win with such a young team? “Having young, good players, that’s the difference,” Levy said.

Asked what would happen if this team played in Los Angeles or New York, Smerlas responded, “Put all these guys somewhere like that you’d have a big payroll. We’d have starred in a movie. At least a video.”

That’s something Levy wants no part of yet. It’s his job to keep perspective. “I realize they’re aware of the big picture,” Levy said. “I just don’t want them to look at it too often.”

Levy, who started law school at Harvard before transferring into its graduate-studies program, is a professorial type who is very popular among players wherever he is. Smerlas refers to the Bills locker room as, “Uncle Marv’s Neighborhood.”

He is in charge of a young, sometimes fiery team. The Bills ran off the field here at Joe Robbie Stadium Monday night, many of them screaming at the top of their lungs. Having finished 2-14 in 1984 and 1985, followed by 4-12 in 1986 and 7-8 last year, the Bills aren’t exactly accustomed to what is happening to them. The team hasn’t made the playoffs since the 1981 season, one of the reasons so many skeptics have yet to be converted. Another is that the Bills were beaten soundly by the Bears earlier in the season.

“There have been so many losing seasons, it’s logical that it would take a while (for across-the-board acceptance),” said Frank Reich, the backup quarterback and Maryland alumnus.

The defense is the best in the AFC and the offense is No. 4. And there’s not a lot, if anything, the Bills don’t have in the way of personnel. “Nobody really talks about what used to be,” Reich said. “Smerlas and (tackle Joe) Devlin and (guard) Tim Vogler have been through the bad times. But there are so many new people here. Nobody has to say, ‘Let’s not forget what it was like to go 2-14.’ It’s not important. We know how to win now and we expect to.”