Rams, Saints in Must-Win Situations
As late-season games go, they don’t get much bigger than this--at least not until next week--so the Rams and New Orleans Saints are making the most of tonight’s rematch in the Superdome.
The Saints have to win this game to save their season because:
--At 6-5, another loss would sink their playoff hopes another foot deeper into Mississippi River mud.
“It’s a must-win as far as I’m concerned,” Saint Coach Jim Mora said. “If we have any aspirations of making the playoffs as a wild-card team, I think this is a must game.”
--The Rams apparently didn’t take last month’s 40-21 beating at Anaheim Stadium seriously enough, so the Saints are out to prove that defeating the Rams five out of the last seven times hasn’t been a fluke.
The Saints, it turns out, weren’t above war-dance rituals and motivational techniques to prepare their players. Mora opened the week by tearing to pieces a doll dressed as an NFL referee to make a point about officiating.
The papers here twisted a Robinson quote about the Rams “forfeiting” the first meeting in Anaheim and turned it into a battle cry.
“I guess we got no credit for beating ‘em,” Mora was quoted as saying.
Robinson, not one to swap bulletin-board fodder, said he left the bonfire and mascot-stealing business years ago.
“We’re not in high school anymore,” he said.
The Saints, in fact, handed the Rams their most humiliating defeat of the season, the only game the Rams had no chance of winning. It occurred on the Sunday after a brutal last-second Monday night loss to the Buffalo Bills, and Robinson acknowledged that his team hadn’t recovered in time for the Saints.
“Something about the Buffalo game haunted us,” he said. “They talk about grieving when you die. We didn’t grieve over Buffalo. We said ‘Don’t worry about that.’ ”
Then came New Orleans, less than a week later.
“I can remember walking off the field after pregame warmups and saying to somebody, ‘Oh boy, we’re not ready,’ ” Robinson remembered. “And I was right. We humiliated ourselves.”
Dalton Hilliard burned the Rams for three touchdowns. The Saints’ pass rush, led by linebacker Pat Swilling’s two sacks, dropped the Rams’ Jim Everett five times and sent him into the night with a painful hip pointer that still bothers him.
So, based on this, it’s the Rams who have to win this game to save their season because:
--At 7-4, they’re still two games behind the San Francisco 49ers and need to stay at least that close until the Dec. 11 rematch with the 49ers at Anaheim Stadium.
--If the Rams lose tonight, they will drop into a second-place tie with New Orleans at 7-5, but will have lost the season series to the Saints and lost out on any playoff tiebreakers with New Orleans.
--Revenge. It really exists among division rivals such as these, and the Rams were certainly humiliated the first time around.
“We were embarrassed,” Everett said this week. “We’ll be at a different level than from when we played them last time, there’s no doubt in my mind. Everyone was not as emotionally high. Everyone was kind of low--myself, all my teammates. Boom, pie in the face. If there was an answer, I’d want to find an answer so it would never happen again. It’s never just one thing. We all just played very poorly, and we want to redeem ourselves very badly.”
Meanwhile, the Rams contemplate the mystery of the Saints’ Swilling, an outside linebacker who gives them far more trouble than Lawrence Taylor, who was held to two tackles in the Rams’ win over the New York Giants two weeks ago.
Left tackle Irv Pankey, who handled Taylor expertly, doesn’t match up as well against Swilling, who brings 13 1/2 sacks into tonight’s game.
Robinson explained: “Taylor tries to overpower the (offensive) tackle, he’s that kind of player. But he can’t do it. Swilling runs around you. Swilling is an escapist, and if you’re not playing well, the escapist humiliates you. Now, if you’re playing well, if you set right and get your hands on him, he doesn’t do it. But that’s on my mind, the pass rush. That’s No. 1. We must nullify that.”
Ram Notes
Receiver Henry Ellard suffered a strained right hamstring during Friday’s practice, but the Rams are still listing him as probable for tonight’s game. Ellard, the NFL’s yardage leader, said the hamstring felt better after Saturday’s practice but he wasn’t sure how effective he will be against the Saints. “It depends on how I respond to treatment from now to then,” Ellard said after Saturday’s practice. “The good thing is we play at 7.” Ellard said that he could not run at full speed Saturday.
After a 1-4 start, the Saints have won four of their last six. . . . The Rams have scored only one touchdown in the last four games they have played at the Superdome, and that was in the 1987 strike game.
Coach John Robinson on the difference between his defensive linemen, whom he views as run defenders or pass rushers: “The two-gappers have their butts close to the ground and have wrinkles in their foreheads. Those are the ones you can’t run the ball on. The pass rushers, their voices are higher and they want to shoot hoops. They’re different guys.”
Cornerback Jerry Gray leads the Rams in interceptions with four. . . . Robinson says the Rams and Saints are similar. “The up side of this football game is there,” he said. “We’re playing good football, they’re playing good football. We were 10-6 last year, they were 10-6 last year. It’s been a pretty good struggle between these two teams.”
The Saints rank first in the National Football League against the run, but are 22nd against the pass. . . . New Orleans quarterback Bobby Hebert, at 87.0, ranks third among NFC passers behind San Francisco’s Joe Montana at 115.5 and Jim Everett at 88.8. . . . Saint tailback Dalton Hilliard is tied for the NFC lead in touchdowns with 14.
