When Rams Don’t Hand It to Eric, It Gets Out of Hand
In seven games over the last three seasons, Eric Dickerson has carried the football fewer than 15 times. The Rams have lost six of those games.
The exception was the first game against Atlanta at Anaheim this season when Dickerson’s hamstring tightened after only seven carries and he sat down at halftime with the Rams leading, 10-3, on their way to a 17-6 victory.
The most recent example of the rule was Sunday’s rematch at Atlanta when Dickerson carried only 11 times for 41 yards in that 30-14 defeat.
Ram opponents like their chances a lot better when they can keep the football out of Dickerson’s hands.
In the past they accomplished this only by jumping out to such substantial leads that the Rams had to play catch-up and abandon their ground game, thus neutralizing the star.
The difference this year is that he is being stuffed even when the Rams are ahead . His 3.7-yard rushing average is nearly a yard and a half off his average of the first two years.
“We continue to be ineffective on offense,” Coach John Robinson said Monday, stating the obvious. “We’re perplexed by it. The first thing we have to do is get back and play hard and get more continuity.”
It’s clear that even if the Rams manage to stumble into the playoffs, they won’t last long without ammunition. It may be they’ve been going at it all wrong.
“That’s certainly something we’re trying to question ourselves on,” Robinson said. “We feel like we’re not doing anything different than when we were successful.”
Whatever the reason--the line isn’t blocking, Dickerson isn’t running as hard or defenses are stacked for him--the Rams aren’t getting much production out of one of the game’s greatest talents.
How to make Dickerson more productive? If handing him the ball doesn’t work, why not try throwing it to him?
Dickerson caught 51 passes for 404 yards as a rookie in 1983. Add that to his league-leading 1,808 yards rushing and his total offense was 2,212--almost as much as when he set the National Football League’s single-season rushing record of 2,105 in ’84 but caught only 21 passes for 139 yards and a total of 2,244.
Although he has rushed for 685 yards in the nine games since ending his holdout, he has caught only 14 passes for 102 yards. He has caught only two touchdown passes in his career, both in the same game against San Francisco in 1983 when the Rams lost, 45-35.
He hasn’t caught any kind of pass in two weeks and only one the week before that.
Robinson said: “Part of the thing is that we’re getting so caught up in the eight-man (defensive) front, which is forcing him into a blitz pickup thing. We’re trying to keep people in on (pass) protection.”
But wouldn’t Dickerson be more valuable as a pass receiver than a blocker?
“We’ve got to go one way or the other,” Robinson said. “We’ve got to expand. You’ve gotta protect or come out and flood, and up to this point we haven’t done that.”
They did it in ’83. Whenever Vince Ferragamo got in trouble, he dumped the ball off to Dickerson. Jeff Kemp didn’t do that last year, and Dieter Brock hasn’t done it much this year.
Dickerson was seldom asked to catch the ball at Southern Methodist, but he averaged 7.9 yards as a receiver in his rookie year with the Rams, so the potential would seem to be there.
He might not be the all-purpose back that Roger Craig is to the 49ers, leading the NFL with 64 receptions. But he could be a two-way threat like Marcus Allen, James Wilder, Lionel James and Walter Payton.
“I think he’s willing to do what we ask him,” Robinson said.
Robinson also conceded Monday that with a four-game lead reduced to two, “We’ve let a tremendous advantage slip away.
“Atlanta did to us what we’ve done to other teams: came out and played very aggressively and capitalized on our mistakes. There’s no question it was an ugly day.”
It was the first time the Rams were really flat this season.
“We just didn’t seem to have the energy that we have had,” Robinson said. “You could kind of feel it. And we played a club that played good football and is a physical team, and the 10-point advantage we spotted ‘em right off the bat gave ‘em enough life to stave us off the rest of the game.
“We’ve got to make sure that we benefit from it and don’t get bogged down in some sort of self-analysis that creates such a negative atmosphere that we can’t get focused. We’re eight and three, and two games ahead. Everything we do has to start from there.
“Look, we’re in a slump. It’s something everybody except the Bears have gone through. Hardly any team hasn’t escaped this sort of thing. One of the reasons we’re sitting ahead is we had escaped it. We worried about it and we tried our best to avoid it.
“We still have control of our future. We just have to get off our rears and get going.”
Ram Notes Injuries to cornerback Gary Green (arm) and center Doug Smith (hip) don’t seem to be serious enough to keep them out of Sunday’s game against the Green Bay Packers (5-6) at Anaheim. . . . The Rams haven’t lost three in a row in three years under Coach John Robinson, but they have lost their last three to the Packers, all at Milwaukee, the last three years. The Packers, however, haven’t won on the Rams’ home field in eight tries since 1966. . . . Are the 49ers chasing the Rams? Ronnie Lott said after Sunday’s win over Kansas City had closed the gap another notch: “I don’t think we should be thinking about the race with the Rams. We’re in a race with ourselves.”