Dickerson Works Overtime For 207 Yards : His 42-Yard Scoring Run Allows Rams to Edge Buccaneers, 26-20
A boring game had painfully slipped into overtime at Anaheim Stadium Sunday, the Rams having made the Tampa Bay Buccaneers look like somebody’s future playoff opponent.
The Buccaneers, thrilled with a rare chance to win, were confident they had heard the last from the Rams’ bullet train, Eric Dickerson, who hadn’t gained more than 100 yards on their defense since way back in the first quarter.
To them, Dickerson was a bad memory. He was history. The Buccaneers had made this little adjustment on defense at halftime and had turned Dickerson into your basic plow-horse fullback.
In fact, the Buccaneers were probably thinking of other things as Dickerson raced 42 yards for the touchdown that gave the Rams a 26-20 overtime win.
The truth is, the Buccaneers were probably looking for the Rams to pass on the play, a shocking notion in itself. It was shocking because the Rams had only thought to pass only three times to their wide receivers in regulation time.
It seemed almost absurd that they would stoop so low as to tease a defense with the pass to set up a game-winning run.
But nothing else was working, not even Dickerson, so the Rams had no other recourse.
After Tampa Bay had tied the game on a 37-yard field goal by Donald Igwebuike as time expired in regulation, the Rams elected to receive when the Buccaneers lost the coin flip.
They took the ball at their own 27 and shocked 50,585 in attendance by passing the football. Quarterback Steve Dils, whose role previously had been to get the ball safely into Dickerson’s hands, dropped back and threw to Bobby Duckworth for an 18-yard completion.
Tampa Bay’s defense stood stunned, Duckworth having caught only 1 pass for 5 yards in the previous 60 minutes.
Two plays later, it was Dils passing for 16 yards to Ron Brown, who would equal his total yardage output in regulation on one play.
Would the Rams pass three times in the same drive? As the Buccaneers mulled over the possibility, Dickerson shot through the line of scrimmage and went racing toward the end zone.
And the Rams slipped into the tunnel with their fourth win in five games, pausing only briefly to apologize for the way they handled it.
“We’re certainly not a smooth football team,” Ram Coach John Robinson said. “We’re struggling, there’s no question.”
The Rams, these days, can turn seemingly easy assignments into adventures. How else do you explain it?
On their first two possessions, the Rams cut through the Tampa Bay defense.
“At times, I didn’t know which hole to run in,” Dickerson said.
Dickerson, who finished with 207 yards in 30 carries, had 105 of those on his team’s first two possessions.
Dickerson carried 7 times for 53 yards on the Rams’ first drive, leading to a one-yard touchdown run by Barry Redden.
It was 14-0 before you could say Ivory Sully, who, later in the first quarter, would take a stiff-arm on the chin as Dickerson raced by the Tampa safety on a 40-yard run for a touchdown with 4:24 left in the quarter.
It seemed almost too easy for the Rams, so they set out to change the course of the game.
Near the end of the quarter, Dickerson took a pass from Dils and ran 22 yards before being walloped by cornerback Ricky Easmon. Dickerson fumbled the ball to Craig Swoope at the Ram 38, and the Buccaneer offense decided to do something about it.
Led by the scrambling of Steve Young, the equally erratic and exciting Tampa Bay quarterback, the Buccaneers drove for the touchdown, the score coming on a four-yard run with Young making a hook-slide into the left corner of the end zone.
The Rams came back with a 34-yard field goal by Mike Lansford in the second quarter to make it 17-7, but weren’t about to go into the half with that kind of lead.
So, with 2:16 left, Dils tried to pass and was blind-sided by linebacker Keith Browner and fumbled. Browner recovered the ball at the Ram 11.
The Buccaneers turned that into a 26-yard field by Igwebuike.
“We dominated the first half,” Robinson said. “But we came away with a seven-point lead.”
In the meantime, the Buccaneer defense had thrown a choke-hold around Dickerson, who seemed on his way to a record-day.
After his 105-yard first quarter, Tampa Bay held him to just three yards in the second quarter, 41 in the third and 19 in the fourth.
Tampa Bay Coach Leeman Bennett said his team did nothing differently to stop Dickerson except to improve its tackling.
But the Rams saw it differently.
“In the second half, they blitzed a back-side safety,” Dickerson said. “And by the time I turned up field, he was there. A good football team will make adjustments. And they made adjustments.”
Without Dickerson, the Rams offense was sunk.
Dils, starting in place of the injured Steve Bartkowski, threw more passes laterally than down field. And the passes he did throw toward the opposing secondary, well, his receivers had problems catching.
Dils finished with 11 completions in 22 pass attempts for 118 yards and no touchdowns.
It was a great chance for Tampa Bay to crawl back into a game, and the Buccaneers did just that.
Nathan Wonsley shot through the middle of the Ram linebacking corps and raced 59 yards for the game-tying touchdown with 5:44 left in the third quarter.
The Buccaneers had hit the Rams where they were hurting most. Inside linebacker Carl Ekern missed the game with a groin pull. The Rams last week lost Steve Busick for the year with a knee injury. So the Rams were left with Mark Jerue and Jim Laughlin.
“There’s some real different numbers out there on the field,” Robinson said, alluding to his team’s injuries.
The game remained tied and relatively listless until early in the fourth quarter when the Rams mounted a 21-yard drive that led to a 41-yard Lansford field goal with 9:41 left.
The Rams figured that would be enough to put the game away, but were wrong.
Up until then, Tampa Bay had played this game not to lose, but there was nothing left to lose when the Buccaneers found the ball at their own one-yard line with 4:34 left.
So Bennett, who had kept Young in chains for nearly four quarters, finally let his quarterback loose.
Young had passed for only 16 yards until the final drive, but completed 5 of 9 passes for 60 yards on this one, getting his team close enough for Igwebuike’s field goal as time expired.
Unfortunately, though, Tampa Bay couldn’t do much when they lost the coin flip.
“It’s too bad we didn’t get our hands on the ball in overtime,” said Young, who finished with 37 yards rushing and 83 passing. “It’s not fair to work that hard and not have a chance to win a game.”
Some would say that it’s not fair for a team to have a Dickerson to fall back on. But the Rams seem to lean on him every week.
When the game was there for the taking, the Rams went to a familiar friend. The touchdown play was 46-gap in which Dickerson veers off tackle and picks his own hole.
It used to be the team’s favorite play, but these days the Rams bring it out for special occasions only.
“We use to run that play after play after play,’ Dickerson said. “But opposing teams had defended it. We don’t use it much anymore.”
Once was enough for the Buccaneers.
DICKERSON’S TOP RUSHING GAMES
Year Opp Car Yds TD 1986 Tampa Bay 30 207 2 1985 Dallas 34 248 2 1984 Houston 27 215 2 1984 St Louis 21 298 0 1983 Detroit 30 199 3
