Cunningham Is Life of Party, Dancing Past Rams, 27-21 : Pro football: He throws two touchdown passes in leading the Eagles to their first victory of the season.

One quarterback played Sunday’s football game like a one-man Dance Party spotlight, spinning and ducking and whirling his way deep into the heart of the Ram defense.

All Randall Cunningham had to explain was how it feels to perform the physically improbable on such a regular basis.

The other quarterback got slammed to the ground, blindsided and squished under the pounding of men several sizes larger than himself, feeling the fury of the Philadelphia Eagles’ defense more times than is normally considered healthy.

And afterward, Jim Everett, bruised of both body and mind, stood solemnly in the locker room trying to dissect what had gone so wrong.

Mostly, Sunday’s 27-21 Ram defeat by the Philadelphia Eagles was a tale of two quarterbacks, one of whom is going to be a whole lot more sore this morning than the other.

“Their quarterback had a magnificent game,” Ram Coach John Robinson said, “and they won.”

The Rams’ quarterback had a painful, harried day and they lost. Pretty simple.

Cunningham, refusing to be tackled, passed for 248 yards and two touchdowns and ran for 44 yards on seven carries. When the Eagles needed him, he was there, leaving a bundle of Rams dizzy and grasping at air in his wake.

Everett, under assault from a relentless and at times overwhelming Eagle pass rush, completed only 17 of his 35 passes, threw an interception, lost a fumble, was sacked twice and smacked on at least a dozen more occasions.

When the Rams needed a big play from him, he was running for his life and left on the ground with an Eagle sitting on top of him.

“We knew they would be coming after us,” Everett said. “And they were bringing it. They definitely were bringing it.

“You know when you’re playing a team like Philadelphia that it’s going to be a blood-bath. That was predictable. But we just didn’t do the job we had to.”

In the game’s crucial moments, in the third quarter and early fourth, the Ram offense simply could not muster the energy to push back the Philadelphia attack.

As the Eagles scored 10 points in the second half against a suddenly malleable Ram defense, the Rams’ offense struggled to do anything but move backward.

“It was the inability to make consistent plays offensively that let that game get out of hand,” Robinson said.

Too many times Everett backpedaled, not to scan the receivers’ routes but simply for his life, throwing the ball away only an instant before Reggie White or Jerome Brown or some other Eagle came down on him. After a productive first half, Everett completed just seven of his 17 second-half passes.

Meanwhile, Cunningham was magic, dancing around in the pocket, buying time and finding receivers breaking free downfield. The Eagles had struggled badly in their first two games, losing to Phoenix last week, but in Cunningham’s legs Sunday they found life. On Philadelphia’s touchdown drives, plus the kill-the-clock, eight-minute drive as the game ended, the Eagle defense gave Cunningham the ball and he made the most of the opportunities.

On the fourth-quarter touchdown drive that gave the Eagles the 13-point lead the Rams could not overcome, Cunningham made the play of the game, a scramble around Ram sackman Kevin Greene and pass to tight Keith Jackson for a 28-yard pickup to the Ram 39.

Earlier in the game, to set up the Eagles’ second touchdown in the waning moments of the first half, Cunningham deked to the left, causing the whole Ram defense to surge that way, then spun sharply the other way with an expanse of green in front of him for a 27-yard run.

“You know, he has a way of starting somewhere, and you start that way and he’s going the other direction,” Robinson said. “We had some times when we felt we were chasing him and chasing him the wrong way, it looked like.

“At times, he can take the initiative away from you. There was a period there where I felt we lost our initiative. We were standing to see which way he was going to go and then chasing, as opposed to putting pressure on him and then reacting to him. I thought we got standing around, mesmerized a little bit.”

The only mesmerizing thing about the early stages of this game was the speed with which the Eagle defensive line asserted itself against the Ram offensive front.

On the Rams’ first possession, after the Ram defense had forced the Eagle offense to punt--the Eagles’ only punt of the game--Everett lost the ball when White came on top of him from the right side. The ball bounded to defensive tackle Brown, who picked it up and did his best impression of Jim Brown to the Ram 31.

Not only did the play set up the Eagles’ first score--a 43-yard field goal by Roger Ruzek--it set the tone for the game.

The Rams came into this game planning to mainly use their passing attack to counter the Eagle attack, since the Buddy Ryan defensive style usually handles the run fairly effectively. And indeed, the Rams gained just 35 yards on just 15 carries, well off of their normal production.

Said center Doug Smith: “Reggie White and Jerome Brown are two of the best pass-rushers I’ve seen in a while, and when they bring it, they bring it. And they put some good pressure on us.”

The Ram offense was able to strike with a couple of big plays in the first half, Everett catching the Eagles gambling and hitting first Henry Ellard on a 50-yard touchdown pass as he streaked past linebacker Seth Joyner, then converting an Anthony Newman interception with a 10-yard pass to fullback Buford McGee.

That touchdown came with just 1:57 left in the first half and put the Rams up 14-10. But, in a real momentum-changer, the Eagles took that kickoff and sprinted up the field for a Cunningham-to-Calvin Williams 14-yard score.

In the third quarter, the Eagles stopped the Rams’ first drive cold, then Eagle defensive back Izel Jenkins slipped in to tip Keith English’s punt, giving the Eagles the ball at the Ram 40 and setting up Ruzek’s 18-yard field goal.

A series later, the Eagles gave the Rams an opportunity to get right back in the game when fullback Anthony Toney, who gained 103 yards on the day, fumbled a pass and Ram safety Michael Stewart recovered. But the Rams failed to convert when Mike Lansford missed a 48-yard field goal wide left and short.

When the Eagles took their next possession into the end zone on a Robert Drummond two-yard dive, it was 27-14, it was the fourth quarter, and the Rams were in deep trouble.

The Rams marched downfield one more time, scoring on a Cleveland Gary one-yard plunge to make it 27-21 with slightly more than eight minutes left in the game.

If the defense could just hold on one time . . . but they couldn’t, and the Eagles marched all the way to the Ram 13 in 14 plays as the game ended.

“The key series was the last series where they kept the ball for the last six (actually eight) minutes,” Robinson said. “I thought we would get it and score, but we didn’t.”