Giants vs 49ers: Can Alex Smith Become Another Joe Montana or Steve Young?

Great players always come up big in the biggest games. It may sound like a movie angle from "The Replacements" or "Invincible," but it couldn't be farther from any screenplay or award-winning role.

The NFL playoffs are built for the sport's grandest stage and two of the biggest stars during this time of year from playoffs past, Joe Montana and Steve Young, have delivered when the game mattered most.

Now, a man with a common name, Smith, is being asked to be anything but common and deliver a championship back to the Bay area.

Smith will forever be linked to Aaron Rodgers and the 2005 NFL Draft that saw Smith taken first overall and Rodgers plummet to 24th in the pecking order. The numbers for both players' careers aren't even close, and Rodgers is the one holding a ring and a Lombardi Trophy.

This season, Smith hopes to be doing the same thing.

For all the success this team has enjoyed this season—playing for a rookie coach in Jim Harbaugh, having a Top-5 defense in the NFL along with the best run defense in the league and sporting a running game led by one of the more versatile backs in the game in Frank Gore—there is something that still does not evoke championship material.

Is it line play? Is it youth and inexperience? Or, is it the man behind center who has played his best ball of his career but fans keep waiting for him to stumble and they hope that slowed gait does not happen this afternoon at Candlestick Park?

Smith provided heroics in last week's 36-32 win over the New Orleans Saints with his legs and his arms, but he isn't a Montana who had Jerry Rice to throw to or Steve Young who was one of the best improvisational passers of all time or even a guy named Elvis (Grbac) who had the name and the look to become a short-lived cult hero.

No, this is the common man Smith. One who has relied on everyone around him to get the job done, and while it may have taken six years to get to this point and plenty of doubters to claim he wasn't the right person for the job (heck, they have a talented rookie on the bench waiting his turn, like Rodgers waiting on Favre), Smith has proved everyone wrong this year.

So far.

Smith needs to do nothing more than what he is doing right now. He needs to find his receivers. He needs to be mobile in the pocket. He needs to remain calm when names like Tuck, Pierre-Paul and Umenyiora come after him.

And most of all, he need not remember the names of the past during the game. If he wins, he will become the name of this team's future.