Gentlemen, heads up. Elite cornerback and DB roll call, 2001:

	No NFL team can match the savvy combination of Jerry Rice and Tim Brown.

Madison. McAlister. Sparks. Rolle. Springs. Ronde Barber. Ty Law. Donnie Abraham. OK. Listen up. I'd take this briefing serious if I were you. This could be life or death for you or your wingmen. This briefing might save you. Then again, it might not. We want you to at least know what hit you. So, like I said, listen up:

Brown Rice will kill you.

Understood? Forget all that noise about the Rams being the Greatest Show on Turf. It's just pure disinformation campaign -- all those Chunky Soup commercials, all those Monday Night Football digressions whizzing over our heads, all that making Mike Martz out to be Bill Walsh ... flush all that.

The public is not privy to what deep-cover Special Ops Intel gives us: The Rams' passing game is not our big problem. The Raiders' passing game is. We know the Rams receivers are susceptible to The Punishment Factor. What we don't know is what will kill us. And what we don't know is how to stop Tim Brown and Jerry Rice. Come to think of it, we have never known how to stop them. But now, we've obtained the key to their SysOps package.

Open your red files, gentlemen.

These are aerial still photos of Isaac Bruce, Torry Holt, Az Hakim and Ricky Proehl in flight. Good, but no better than Moss and Carter in Minnesota, or Moulds and Price in Buffalo, maybe even Miami. ...

	Rice has reached the end zone nearly 200 times in his Hall of Fame career.

"AWWWWWWWW ..."

OK, scratch that, just checking to see if you're awake back there. Miami can't attack through the air and hope to win, not once we get to playoff altitude. Gadsden can't run, McKnight can't catch and Chambers, well, Chambers is good. Not enough combat missions; if he don't get blown up in the meantime by some mean strong safeties, then one day he might grow up to be a mere shadow of Tim Brown or Jerry Rice.

Since the Raiders got rid of bust tight end Rickey Dudley in favor of second-year receiver Jerry Porter, and dropped Rison in favor of the sleeker if older Rice, it is the Raiders passing game that has become the most difficult for DBs to stop in the NFL.

Why? Turn to Page 2, gentlemen. All the whys are on Page 2.

First of all, wake me up when the Rams receivers collectively get to 100 career touchdowns. The Raiders' air assault team has close to 300 career touchdowns, nearly 100 for Brown, nearly 200 for Rice. And their young, unknown top gun hot shot, that young Porter boy, might have more pure horsepower than either one of them. Take all three and it's scary. Unguardable. Scary unguardable. Why is that? Because their QB, Rich Gannon has seen the flaw, gentlemen. And the flaw is in us.

The flaw is in our own minds, DBs.

	Brown has been beating double-teams all his life ... so what do you think he'll do to single coverage?

Brown and Rice are the most dangerous pair of receivers in NFL football in 2001 ... because we believe it. We trust our eyes too much. See, men, your eyes are like little aerial cameras. They tell us what has already happened. And what has already happened is utter devastation to DBs everywhere. We know that. So we can't trust our eyes here, because the passing game is about what's going to happen.

Yes, I know, Mr. Troy Vincent, Mr. Bobby Taylor, it's going to be hard to put our eyes and our pasts behind us. We know that. We hear ourselves thinking: "Three hunnerd career TDs? From two dudes? You kidding me?" That's what we think. We hear Rice coldly breaking down our tendencies: "Aeneas Williams -- he is susceptible to the dig ... Ray Buchanan -- he'll bite on the slant-shake ..." If we give off fear, they'll smell it.

The Raiders always have been good at smelling fear. We saw Rice amass ungodly numbers as a 49er. Jerry Rice scores five touchdowns in one game against Martin Mayhew of Tampa Bay, sends him into retirement and law school; Rice scores five touchdowns in one game against Charlie Dimry and the Atlanta Falcons, while Deion Sanders, our Patron Saint, observes on the other side of the field. Joe Montana hits Rice on the last play of the game from deep to beat E.T. -- no not that E.T., but a corner named Eric Thomas -- and the Cincinnati Bengals. Or does the same to the Giants' whole secondary. Jerry Rice, blowing up. Steve Young hits Rice for three TDs in a Super Bowl blowout against San Diego and Stanley Richard. Rice catches three TDs from Montana in a Super Bowl blowout against Denver and Mark Haynes. That weren't even the Super Bowl where Rice was MVP.

We know all that. We know it too well, gentlemen.

As DBs, we mustn't trust our eyes. We must wipe out our memory of better DBs than us being turned, blown away, put into death spirals, crashing and burning. We must put it out of our minds, mentally prepare for a new kind of war. If we don't ... Brown Rice will kill us. We'll be like the Taliban Air Force. We'll never get off the ground.

	Don't expect Rich Gannon to crack under a little bit of pressure -- you'll have to actually hit the guy.

I know, men -- hard to forget 193 touchdowns scored by one guy who is not named Jim Brown. 193 TDs? Are you kidding me? Rice is a legend, the Michael Jordan of receivers. So when he runs a drag across the field, sits down in a soft spot in Cover 3, runs a dig, a post-corner option, when Gannon pump fakes to him, we can't help but be influenced. But we must help it, if we want to get back home tonight. If we bite ... Brown Rice kills us. If we turn our hips toward Rice, we're dead. If we carioca, we croak. If we cross one leg over the other, headed Rice's way, we're cooked.

Not by Rice. By Tim Brown.

Look at this videotape of the New Your Giants rookie cornerbacks being shot down in the rain last week, gentleman. See that? When your safeties turn in Rice's direction after Gannon's pump-fake, here comes Tim Brown, pure Stealth, accelerating under radar, 210 pounds of pure thrust, zoom, right up the pipe, slicing through the unprotected zone. Quick six. Tim Brown in the open field ... one DB can't stop him. Put your egos in your watch pockets, gentlemen, and know this:

One man cannot stop him.

Usually fancy-pants fly-boy wide receivers can be massaged, softened up, bells rung up, stretched out. You can make the weaker ones fold up like cardboard. But when you get one whose character is strong ... then it's back to, can you cover him? Tim Brown is one of those.

Brown and Rice did this thing they do just last week against the Giants, and we hold out small hope for the Arizona Cardinals this weekend, or the Chiefs, the Titans, and whoever else after that.

Brown and Rice make it look too easy -- like stealing. So somebody's got to fight them. How? We were sort of hoping that you could tell us, men. You're the ones up there flying. You're the ones who know what your bodies and the equipment can stand. Anybody?

Bring 'em on? Very amusing, Mr. ... Smoot, is it? You talk a good game. Hope you and your wingman Mr. Bailey are up for it. Rook.

	If you lay back in a Cover 2, then Charlie Garner and the Raiders running backs will kill you.

Now, if we start to double Brown, or be influenced by Brown's precise routes and Gannon's pump-fakes in his direction, then Rice will kill us. And if we say, "Screw it, we'll just stay deeper than the deepest in Cover 2, get way back there and keep them all in front of us," like the Bears did against the Vikings and Cris Carter and Randy Moss last week night on ESPN Sunday Night Football ... well, that won't really work either, will it?

It worked against the Vikings, because they have no running game to punish safeties and corners for playing deep. The Raiders have a running game. Charlie Garner for quicks, Ty Wheatley and Zack Crockett for strongs. Even if we stop all that, there's still Porter, the next prototype, ready to be unveiled in the playoffs, dropping the bomb big-time. Dead? I wouldn't say we're dead, men. Not necessarily. But I would say to be sure to fill out your next-of-kin forms.

Getting to QBs is not normally our job. That is for the anti-aircraft artillery. We just want to know the pressure is on, and that ball is going to come out of there no later than 3.5 seconds after the snap. Any longer, doesn't matter what we do. We're toast.

But maybe that's our only way now. We can get to QB Gannon, maybe, but we'll have to actually get to him, blitz him off the slot, the corner. We can't get to him mentally. Mentally, he's pretty much Rock City. Can't look across the line and call him, "be-atch," and tell him, "I'm coming for your puffy little cheeks," and hope he'll crack up. That might work against QB Kordell. Not QB Gannon. Maybe we can stop Brown Rice from killing us by going back door like that.

	Rice and Brown face the best cornerback in the NFL every week in practice.

Any volunteers? Oh. Yeah. You. Woody. Very funny. Woody, you don't count. You're a Raider. Only guy who can handle Brown or Rice one-on-one does it every day in practice, when he practices. That would be you, Charles Woodson. We could use you, turf toe, limp, no ability to plant and all. On one foot, you're the best in the business. One reason Brown Rice will kill us is because they got ready by working against you for a whole August.

After that, against the rest of you ... it's like stealing for them.

Tim Brown won the Heisman Trophy. The Denver Broncos once offered him the keys to the Federal Depository in Denver, if he'd sign with them free agent and come play with John Elway for the last few years of the Supreme Air Commander's career. Brown said no.

Tim Brown likes catching passes for the Raiders. He's not like, say, Eddie Kennison. He doesn't hear the noise. He's more like Jerry Rice. It's like having two Michael Jordans, and only one of them is 39 years old. Brown has been catching passes and being pretty much unstoppable for 10 years, all with the likes of Andre Rison and James Jett on the other side of the field. In other words, Tim Brown's been beating double-teams his whole life. And now, because you DBs heads and bodies are being turned by Jerry Rice, you're leaving yourselves one-on-one with Tim Brown. Pity.

Must work together on this. Vary your techniques and strategies. Mix it up. Box and punch. Blitz and lay back. Listen, I can stand up here and talk to you until I'm blue in the face, but really, it's six of one and a half-dozen of the other. Brown Rice.

That's two touchdowns, and the Super Bowl hasn't even started yet.

Well, your cocky tails have been warned. Don't worry. If you don't come back from this mission, I'll write your folks. Consider yourselves briefed.

Now get out of my sight.

Ralph Wiley spent nine years at Sports Illustrated and wrote 28 cover stories on celebrity athletes. He is the author of several books, including "Best Seat in the House," with Spike Lee, "Born to Play: The Eric Davis Story," and "Serenity, A Boxing Memoir."