Rams Are the Best at Underwhelming Their Opponents
If I were the rest of the teams in the league, I wouldn’t schedule or play the Rams. I would scrap every game with them on the books forthwith.
This is not a team, it’s a plague. An infection that won’t go away. Football’s version of hepatitis. Poison ivy. You play ‘em and you start to itch.
This team doesn’t win ugly, it wins horribly. If Dallas is America’s team, the Rams are Halloween’s team. These are not games, they’re snuff movies.
Some years ago, Joe Brown, then lightweight champion of the world, after a tough 15-round fight with a wily but clumsy left-handed fighter named Kenny Lane, announced that all left-handers should be drowned at birth, that they were a crude perversion of the sweet science of boxing and made a parody of the game. There was no way to fight them.
The Rams are the southpaws of football. There’s no way to play them.
There’s an adage: Never eat at a restaurant called Mom’s, never play cards with a guy named Slick, or golf with a guy named Three Iron or One Putt. To that you can add: Never play football with a team coached by John Robinson.
They don’t play you, they host you. They’re like China. They don’t beat you, they just let you get swallowed up.
They remind you of a card player who sits there with lousy hands all night long and confused play but always seems to be spreading his cards innocently and saying, “Are these any good?”
They’re like a guy you never see from tee to green but all of a sudden he shows up sinking these incredibly long putts on hole after hole to close out the guy who is playing the game the way the Scots intended. These guys never hit a fairway or a green but go around scraping the ball to the hole where they can say sweetly to their furious, frustrated opponents: “Are we playing how or how many? “
There should be a law against them.
It’s like playing a scene with a dog or a baby. The actor perfects his craft, studies his lines, gets his part down perfectly--and then an animal or child steals the movie. That’s the Rams for you. They just blunder in and walk away with the flick.
They’re the Hitless Wonders of pro football. There used to be a baseball team with that nickname in Chicago. They were World Series champions with a team batting average of .228. They won a Series in which they got one hit in one game, two in another and four hits in each of two games they won.
The Rams would understand perfectly.
Once there was a Rose Bowl game in which an opportunistic Michigan State team came out to play a ball-control UCLA team. An emcee showed Michigan State the ball at a pregame banquet. “I’m showing you what it looks like ‘cause you ain’t gonna see it much in the game,” he said.
“We ain’t gonna need it much,” said Coach Duffy Daugherty of Michigan State.
The Rams don’t need the ball much, either. Which is a good thing.
The Rams win small. They have scored two whole touchdowns from the line of scrimmage so far this year, three altogether.
That third touchdown was a piece of work. The San Francisco 49ers were driving for a touchdown when they decided to take a sure field goal from the 27-yard line.
But Ray Wersching’s kick was blocked by cornerback Jerry Gray. It bounced to linebacker Mike Wilcher. Tackled, Wilcher desperately lobbed the ball to the other cornerback, Leroy Irvin, who ran 65 yards for the clinching touchdown.
Earlier, Irvin scooped up a fumble near midfield and ran to the 49er seven, from where the Rams were able to score easily, three points, that is.
The victory over St. Louis ended with the Cardinals on about the 11-inch line but too confused to get the ball in play before the clock ran out. The Rams do that to you, too.
The Rams are really cartoon characters. Tom and Jerry in cleats. They should end every game nibbling on a carrot and leering, “Ehhh, what’s up, Doc?” at opponents. They make the “Perils of Pauline” look like “Gidget.”
Hollywood should draw a character named Randy Ram. The bad guys are always dropping safes on him or running him off a cliff--only the safe misses him, bounces up and hits the villain so hard there’s a hole in the roof matching his body. Or, Randy Ram falls off a cliff onto a tree while the guy in the black hat goes sailing by him with his eyes sticking out on springs and his hair looking like electrodes.
You’ve heard of the Bad News Bears? Meet the Good News Rams. It’s like those old Saturday afternoon serials. You know that no matter how many cliffs they hang off, or how many trains seem about to roll over them, they’ll make their getaway and turn the tables on their pursuers.
The moral? Never play football against a coach who reminds you of your favorite uncle--or who looks like you think Santa Claus might have.
There’s the old Runyon story about the father’s advice to his kid: “Son, some day you’re going to run into a guy who will offer to bet you he can pull the ace of spades and a glass of cider out of your left ear. Don’t bet, because sure as shooting, you’re going to wind up broke with an ear full of cider.”
That’s what you’ll get from the Rams--an ear full of cider. And time run out.