Oilers Run and Shoot Themselves in Foot : Rams: After opening drive of the game, defense stymies Warren Moon and Houston attack with two interceptions and some big plays.

Forget the run-and-shoot, they said. The Houston Oilers could rip holes in this Ram secondary with a stroll-and-lob passing attack. The only thing that could slow down quarterback Warren Moon was if he drooled so much at the thought of playing these guys that he couldn’t get a good grip on the ball.

Then came word that Jerry Gray, the Rams’ Pro Bowl cornerback, would not play because of a sore knee. Could the game feature triple digits?

Bent on realizing those great expectations, Houston took the opening kickoff and went 66 yards for a 7-0 lead, Moon hitting Drew Hill on a 40- yard scoring play. Just a taste of the humiliation in store for the Rams’ defensive backfield, right? Well, not exactly. Pro football is, as Ram Coach John Robinson pointed out immediately after the Rams’ 17-13 victory, a strange game indeed.

“To have only three points scored in the second half of this game sounded impossible,” he said. “Most of us who try to predict what’s going to happen don’t ever get it quite right.”

Certainly, you can file this one under the Who-Woulda-Thunk-It? category.

Moon passed for 343 yards, but the Oilers managed to score only one touchdown. The much-maligned Ram secondary came up with two interceptions inside their own two-yard line, and cornerback Bobby Humphery deflected Moon’s fourth-down, last-ditch pass on the goal line with 47 seconds left to play.

“I think we had a real good scheme,” Robinson said. “Who knows? Maybe we’ll have a dominant defense. . . . That’s a joke.”

If nothing else, the Rams’ early season struggles have at least forced them to be realists, and they approached this game knowing they didn’t have the personnel to sack Moon at will or match up with the Oilers’ fleet receiver corps one-on-one. So they rushed four men and staggered seven players in a zone defense that forced Houston to nibble away underneath. Make them take 15 plays to go 80 yards and hope they make a mistake somewhere along the way, the theory goes.

Sunday, it worked. But the Oilers usually waited until they could smell the end zone before misfiring. Humphery intercepted a pass in the end zone. Darryl Henley, playing in his first game of the year, picked one off on the Rams’ two-yard line.

“We were geared up to make the plays. It was just a matter of time,” said Gray, who didn’t find out until just before the game that Robinson had decided it would be prudent if Gray rested his sore knee on this afternoon. “People are always dogging our secondary, saying we can’t cover, we can’t do this, that Warren Moon is gonna have a field day. But the thing we did today that we haven’t done all year is we hustled to the ball.”

With Moon throwing 43 passes, they had plenty of opportunities to hustle their hearts out. And while the Ram secondary was down one (Gray), it was also plus one (Henley). Henley, who had missed the entire season with a hip injury, was on Moon’s hit list. The Oilers threw the ball in Henley’s direction all day, but at least once wished they hadn’t. Late in the second quarter, Henley stepped in front of Curtis Duncan and intercepted a Moon pass at the Ram two.

“Facing Houston and Warren Moon and their receivers I felt a whole lot of pressure, especially coming off the injury and everything,” Henley said. “They had been picking on me, and Warren told me after the game that he saw me (on the interception), but he just underthrew it a bit.”

Gray wasn’t on the field, but Henley could feel his presence . . . as well as hear his voice. “He was there on the sidelines coaching,” Henley said, laughing. “I could hear him yelling stuff to me, so I had my little security blanket.”

The Rams didn’t exactly throw a blanket over the Oilers’ No. 1-ranked passing game on this afternoon, but they did manage to come up with the big plays they needed. Humphery got in front of Haywood Jeffires to snag a Moon pass on the goal line midway through the fourth quarter and then sprinted about 10 yards to deflect a spiral that would have sent the Rams to their sixth defeat had it traveled another few feet to the waiting Allen Pinkett in the waning seconds.

“It was a nice day for me and the whole team,” Humphery said. “We’re just trying to stay together as a team and work as a unit. When you make the big play to help the team win, especially in hard times, it’s sweet.”

Most of the Rams can’t remember times much harder than the first half of 1990. But for one day, at least, they were, well, flying high.

“We’ve been working in practice on flying around, getting to the ball,” Henley said. “Today, we flew around.”