‘Sick’ Rams Face ‘East Coast’ Giants

After last week’s overtime loss to the Minnesota Vikings, the Rams’ locker room had the look of tragedy: heads buried in hands, clothes strewn, eyes watering and, most of all, a numbing silence.

Football players, resilient as they are, can only take so much before giving up or forging onward. First Buffalo, then most recently Minnesota. When will the nightmare end?

The Rams claim with some conviction that this is the day--no matter that their opponent, the New York Giants, share the NFL’s best record at 8-1.

Practice seemed desperately spirited, almost taking on horror-film sequel dimensions: “Sunday, the 12th, Part IV. The Rams Are Back and This Time They’re Taking It Personally!”

“I came into the last game with a stake in me,” cornerback LeRoy Irvin was saying last week. “And after the game, it was like someone took a big sledgehammer and drove that sucker almost all the way through me. But I’m still living. It’s just hard. The last game was real hard. Everyone took it personally. You can tell by the way you talk to the guys in the locker room; they’re still taking that game personally. That’s a good sign, the guys are just sick and tired of being sick and tired. And we’re trying to do something about it now.”

Too bad this isn’t the week the other New York club comes to town. Instead, the Rams get the Giants, an enigmatic team of sorts that has taken on the football world while its back was turned--with a cast of characters that includes two wide receivers you couldn’t pick out of a crowd and a presumed-to-be-finished tailback named Ottis Anderson.

Any comparisons of characters here to the raucous, Super Bowl champion Giants of three years ago are coincidental--and are almost never made.

“Nah,” Coach Bill Parcells said, “we’re not even close.”

The Giants have plowed along rather ungracefully, winning with workmanlike performances, such as last week’s non-memorable 20-13 victory over the Phoenix Cardinals. The Giants have won four games in a row, yet their largest margin of victory in that span was 10 points.

If you’re looking for exciting, couch-clawing finishes, tune in the Rams and then shield your eyes.

The Giants, operating as an efficient machine, have won the last two weeks without starting quarterback Phil Simms, who returns today from an ankle injury.

Lawrence Taylor still rages on defense--he leads the team with 12 sacks--but even his scowl has softened a bit compared to the stone-stared, mad-dog exchanges of yesteryear. You wouldn’t, for instance, compare the Giant defense to this year’s Viking defense, which makes teams change entire offensive game plans against them (See Rams. vs. Minnesota, Nov. 5; Jim Everett vs. Keith Millard).

Yet, the Giants have held their last two opponents, the Vikings and the Cardinals, to fewer than 200 yards and have allowed the fewest points in the league, 136.

Parcells said he designs his Giants to suit the East Coast environs. In a New York state of mind, it’s better for an offense to be understated. Think of the Giants as a really good-looking business suit.

“When you play in a cold-weather city like we do, the majority of the games we play at home are pretty close,” Parcells said. “I talk quite a bit about that; that’s the way it’s generally going to be. We can catch a day in our stadium when the winds are blowing 30 m.p.h. or it’s 25 degrees, and it’s pretty hard to do a lot offensively with the throwing game. You have to gear your team to where you play and have a philosophy that’s compatible with your environment. I’m not trying to sound too theoretical here, but I think if you go back to the really good teams in the history of this league, Green Bay and the Steelers, they had to play a certain way and had to create a team in that mold, so to speak. As a coach, I’ve learned from that.”

The Rams aren’t quite sure what they are. There have been as many offensive valleys as peaks, while the defense has gone mostly downhill. Today, the Rams get starting inside linebackers Larry Kelm and Fred Strickland back in the same lineup for the first time since early August, although some may call it fiction to think two players can turn a team’s defensive fortunes around double-handedly.

But if not them, who? If not now, when?

The LeRoy Irvin handicapping service still sees the league as an open race. “It’s a bunch of guys,” he said. “So it might as well be us. We might as well get our act together and make that run ourselves. Look at the Raiders. They were counted out, now they’re right back in it. It’s an up-and-down season.”

Ram Notes

Instead of flying back to New York after last week’s game against the Cardinals, the Giants stayed in Phoenix to prepare for the Rams. Coach Bill Parcells figured that the change would do his team good. “I only drive one road--it’s called Route 17 to New Jersey--every day,” he said. “Up and back, you know, 16 weeks of that every day. It’s nice to see something different. We just didn’t think about this last week; we’ve been planning on this all year.” . . . This is the fastest start for the Giants since 1930, when they opened the season 10-1.