PHILADELPHIA — 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.
