Anaheim Forecast Is for Gray Sky Sunday : Rams: After missing first three games, big-play cornerback returns to lead defense against Esiason and Bengals.

Try as they might to put his absence out of their minds, Ram defenders learned too well in the last few weeks just how dependent they are on Gray’s anatomy.

Playing the first three games without Jerry Gray, a four-time Pro Bowl cornerback, the Ram defensive unit has been playing rudderless football, falling easy prey to offenses exploiting the void.

No Jerry Gray meant no big-play man in the secondary, unless you count his replacement, Mickey Sutton, who unfortunately for him, is 5-feet-8 on his tippy-toes and seemed to trigger big plays against the Rams, not for them.

The Rams are clearly relieved that Gray’s injured knee is strong enough for him to play Sunday at Anaheim Stadium against the Cincinnati Bengals, a team with as imaginative and dangerous an offense as there is in the NFL.

“When Jerry was injured, it hurt us just thinking, ‘Well, Jerry’s not out here,’ ” safety Anthony Newman said. “We had to go out and play ball, but just the sight of seeing Jerry over there at corner or wherever he’s at, that feels good because we know we’ve got a player there. Mickey did real well at the corner spot, but . . . “

But Sutton is not Gray. With Sutton in there, the Rams had to shift a lot of help to his side, leaving the other cornerback, Bobby Humphery, to fend for himself more than they liked, resulting in two touchdown passes thrown against him.

Without Gray, the Ram defense got stretched beyond comfort, beyond normal defensive limits, beyond control.

This defense is too fragile, too deeply planned around his capabilities and authoritative presence to lose Gray without major complications.

“I think when you have a good corner, a guy you have confidence in who will be out there and can cover, it lets you do some other things with other parts of your defense in terms of saying, ‘Hey, he handles that part. We’ll put the help somewhere else,’ ” defensive coordinator Fritz Shurmur said.

And the Rams come out of this Gray-less period 1-2, expecting his return to be both the emotional and physical boost to push them back to respectability.

“I think there’s a kind of a rallying thing, a confidence, a security, something there that helps you in crisis, particularly (against) the long pass, the play that he can make,” Coach John Robinson said of Gray.

“(In) the Redskin (exhibition) game before he goes out, zoom, he intercepts a pass for a touchdown. Those things don’t happen all that much, but it’s nice to have happen.”

The Rams are careful not to say that everything wrong with their defense this season was that Gray was missing and they were missing him. That’s too much responsibility to pin on anybody, Shurmur said.

Shurmur and Robinson talk about the defensive problems in more general terms, about linebacker Kevin Greene and defensive tackle Doug Reed finally wiping away the rust of their long holdouts and the younger players getting the experience to emerge as impact players.

“I don’t afford myself the luxury of saying, ‘Well, if I had another guy or whatever,’ ” Shurmur said. “When it’s over, it’s over and you go onto the next one.

“And we’re at the next phase now, and I think we’re a better team than we were a week ago. Jerry’s with us, we’ve healed some guys up, some of the guys who missed training camp have had a couple weeks of practice. I think all those things give us a chance to be a better defensive team this week.” But the coaches also talked about the missing big plays, which they knew Gray might have been there to make. In the one game the Rams won, they got their big defensive play of the year, a 44-yard touchdown return of an interception by Humphery against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

And with games against the Green Bay Packers and the Philadelphia Eagles on the line, without Gray, who has 19 interceptions in his career, the big play did not materialize.

“I think we played good enough to win all three games, but we haven’t made any plays in order to help ourselves,” said Gray, who for the first time in his six-year career has been able to watch the defense from the sideline.

“We’ve played good enough, but when it comes down to it, you have to make plays. It comes down to maybe five, six or seven plays a game, and if you make them, you win.”

Gray said he understands that his move back into the lineup, just in time to defend against the aerial bombs of Boomer Esiason, should give his teammates a psychological push. “I hope so,” he said. “I think just the emotion, getting the guys going and them seeing I’m trying to do the things I could do before I got hurt. I think it means a lot to a defense.”

Said Newman: “(Gray) is our quarterback back there. He knows what’s happening, he can communicate. He can tell us what’s going to happen before we even see it.”