COMMENTARY : Don’t Bury Rams; They Show Unique Talent for Winning

To begin with, you don’t want to minimize the skills of the Los Angeles Rams because they beat the New York Giants in overtime with the help of an interference call so thin it was almost a scandal.

You want to remind yourself, instead, that the Rams this season have been a special group of opportunists. When the money has been on the line, they have made the plays.

And you had better not assume they won’t make them next Sunday in San Francisco.

The next thing you want to consider is the cerebral flameout of the Giants coach, Mr. Bill Parcells, who may have blown the game to the Rams with a decision too dumb to comprehend.

Parcells is sitting on a 6-0 lead with 35 seconds remaining in the first half. His team is dominating the match. It is deep in its own territory. Instead of squandering the time, the bench orders a pass that makes no sense at all. It is intercepted by the Rams who, characteristically this season, quickly strike with a scoring pass.

So they leave the grounds 7-6 in front at the half, and this affects the outcome as much as the interference call, which, inevitably, will lead to general review of that infraction when the collective brains of the rules committee are brought next into session.

The interference rule in the NFL always has been, and remains, a stupendous joke. Arbitrarily, you can’t award penalties of 35, 40, even 50 yards in a game whose field measures only 100 yards.

It turns tactical endeavor into a farce. To march 50 yards, a team can require 10 plays.

Yet, through incidental contact on a pass, it can gain that much on one shot.

The NFL must interpret the interference call as the late and lamented USFL did. The USFL recognized two forms of interference. One, called incidental contact, brought a 10-yard penalty.

The other, willful contact, such as tackling a receiver, meant a penalty at the spot of the foul.

But when Sheldon White, cornerback for New York, brushes in an almost irrelevant way Flipper Anderson of the Rams while the teams are playing in overtime Sunday, and when this means 27 yards for the Rams, the connoisseur, not to mention the sport, has something serious to think about.

This puts New York out of business, but not before the Rams jump on the opportunity and throw a touchdown pass immediately after the penalty.

Repeatedly, the Rams made money plays, especially in the first half when, on defense, they stopped the Giants at vital junctures to turn touchdowns into field goals.

By the fourth quarter, the Giants have the lead by 13-10 and they have the ball, third down and two.

If they make the yardage, it is bon voyage Rams, but the Rams hold, force a punt and come back to tie the game, leading to the accident befalling the Giants in overtime.

The Rams have been performing in this unique way, explaining their enviable position today, and, working up a major foam over San Francisco next Sunday, you may be setting yourself up for a jolt.

The Rams are unique in still another way. As teams go in the NFL today, they aren’t very well paid. They don’t have the genius to split the atom, but they can count.

And, not counting enough at each payday, they grumble.

But still they play with diligence, and you have to toss a bouquet to their field leader, John Robinson, for getting them to expend such energy on short rations.

Robinson doesn’t arrange the payroll. All he does is persuade his forces to try as hard as colleagues on other teams who earn more.

As the late Walter O’Malley used to tell the laborers, “Money isn’t everything. The only thing that counts is friendship.”

If you are searching for still another reason why the Rams dispatched the Giants Sunday, it would be the way their blocking linemen took care of Lawrence Taylor and the rest of the Giants rush in the second half.

Mr. Taylor opened the game as some kind of monster, setting siege to the quarterback.

By the third quarter, the Rams were routing him by way of Hackensack. By the fourth quarter, he was no force at all.

The trouble with many who review publicized talent such as Taylor is that they tend to overdramatize each success. He brings down a quarterback--and all of a sudden he has invented the sack.

Other guys, meantime, are sacking quarterbacks with no fanfare.

Often, this is how superstars are created. Once word escapes someone is good, others feel a need to enter into the fawning spirit.

And the buildup leads to more recognition than is fair to competitors, who are on the job too.

Against the Rams, Taylor played a big first quarter and a fair second quarter. In the third and fourth quarters, he was in the toilet.

Let history record all four quarters, not just the first.

Watching the game on television, you were slightly staggered by the geographic ignorance of CBS, which kept linking the Rams photographically to Hollywood.

The Rams reside in Anaheim, which resembles Hollywood as Texarkana resembles Rome. The Ram players don’t live in Hollywood and they don’t function there. Forty miles removed, they rarely even get there.

If CBS wanted to be stupid altogether, it should have consummated a double play.