AIKMAN, MOON DESERVE TO GET THEIR HALL PASSES.

Byline: KEVIN MODESTI

Our old L.A. friends Troy Aikman and Warren Moon, a pair of Hall of Fame-quality quarterbacks, are taking a lot of late hits these days.

Rick Reilly told a radio interviewer that Aikman should not go into the Hall of Fame, that he rode more-talented teammates to those three Super Bowl victories.

Crunch.

Peter King made Aikman his first choice for the Hall of Fame but left Moon out of his top eight, leaning toward guys with a Super Bowl glow.

Whack.

Reilly and King are just a couple of verbal pass-rushers from Sports Illustrated, but they said what too many people are saying.

Aikman, who's from UCLA, and Moon, who started out at Hamilton High and West Los Angeles College, are among the first-time candidates on the 15-man ballot for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Aikman is expected to be voted in, with Reggie White being the other lock. Moon is expected to be rejected, at least this year.

As they await the Hall of Fame announcement Saturday in Detroit, Moon and Aikman are being defined by what they didn't do more than by what they did, and in different ways both seem to be victims of the teams they played for.

Moon is one of the most able passers of the NFL's modern era, ranking fourth on the all-time list in completions, fourth in yards and fifth in touchdowns, having led the league in one or more of those categories in 1990, 1991 and 1995. Only Dan Marino, John Elway and Brett Favre finished ahead of him on all three lists.

Since this is the Pro Football Hall of Fame, not the NFL Hall of Fame, it should be noted that Moon was even more prolific in the Canadian Football League - where he led the Edmonton Eskimos to five Grey Cup championships.

But Moon never played in a Super Bowl, an omission overcome at Hall of Fame selection time by only Dan Fouts among quarterbacks of the Super Bowl era.

And a quarterback who never led his team to a Super Bowl is like a gunslinger who never dueled at High Noon.

But Moon faced some disadvantages. Not drafted out of Washington, where he was a running quarterback - and maybe a little too black for the taste of the NFL scouts of the day - Moon had to prove himself in the CFL and didn't make his pro debut in the states until the year he turned 28. At which point he became the quarterback of the Houston Oilers, 2-14 the season before.

Moon couldn't quite get the Oilers to the Super Bowl in the 10 seasons before he moved on to Minnesota and Seattle. Three times they lost a second-round AFC playoff game - each to a team with a better regular-season record. Then they lost that 1992 opening-round playoff game to Buffalo in the biggest collapse ever - hardly the quarterback's fault, since he led the Oilers to the 35-3 lead and drove them to the field goal that forced overtime.

His playoff statistics compare very favorably to his regular-season numbers. So let's be honest, Moon didn't fail to get to the Super Bowl, the Oilers failed to get to the Super Bowl.

Aikman is one of the great Super Bowl quarterbacks ever, starting for the world champion Dallas Cowboys of 1992, 1993 and 1995. Terry Bradshaw, Joe Montana and Tom Brady are the only other players to have quarterbacked three or more Super Bowl winners.

But Aikman was an unspectacular passer who ranks 12th in completions, 22nd in yards and a puny 48th in touchdowns. Five more touchdown passes and he would have caught Chris Chandler.

And a quarterback who didn't pile up the yardage is like a gunslinger without a gun.

But Aikman faced his own disadvantage. Unlike Moon, it's not that his team was bad, it's that the Cowboys quickly became too good. Aikman didn't have great passing stats because he didn't have to - usually the Cowboys were ahead and trying to run the clock in the second half.

So which would you rather be - Aikman, who'll go into history as the dullest quarterback ever to win three Super Bowls, or Moon, who'll go down as the flashiest quarterback never to win the big one?

I guess Aikman, since his Hall of Fame election seems assured, while Moon will have to sweat it out.

Each of Sunday's Super Bowl quarterbacks, the Pittsburgh Steelers' Ben Roethlisberger and the Seattle Seahawks' Matt Hasselbeck, knows how much a victory would raise his stature in the sport, though Hasselbeck declined to talk about it this week in Detroit.

``That sounds like a question that a bunch of sports reporters sitting around a desk should discuss,'' Hasselbeck said.

They will on Saturday, when a committee of 39 veteran members of the media do the Hall of Fame voting.

There are two quarterbacks on this year's ballot and, based on what they did and not what they didn't, both deserve to complete the journey from Los Angeles to Canton, Ohio.

CAPTION(S):

2 photos, box

Photo:

(1 -- color) MOON

(2 -- color) AIKMAN

Box:

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