With Its Back to the Wall, Defense Rises to Occasion

John Robinson, head Ram pragmatist, looked at the scoreboard.

Rams 17, Oilers, 13.

He looked at the time left in the fourth quarter.

5:17.

He looked at the situation.

Houston ball at the Oiler 39, first and 10.

He had to look at things realistically.

“I was determined,” Robinson said, “to make them score and give us enough time to come back.”

Say this about Robinson: The coach knows his defense. By way of reflex, Robinson was preparing himself for the worst, which, in this Ram season, is the only way to prepare.

“That’s why I called timeout,” Robinson continued, alluding to the stoppage of play with 2:30 left and Houston still in possession at the Ram 28. “If we were going to get the ball back, I wanted to have more than 47 seconds to work with.”

Robinson harbored no delusions or grand illusions of oncoming defensive heroism. He was thinking victory--and the quickest path, in his mind, was a quick strike by Warren Moon followed by one of his own.

Neither precedent nor Robinson’s wildest imagination was prepared for the events that unfolded next.

Moon drove the Oilers to the seven-yard line, to first-and-goal with 1:45 remaining. After bucking Titanic odds by holding the Houston run-and-shoot to 13 points over 58 minutes, the Rams were reeling. Their defense huddled in the end zone. The Oiler touchdown celebration was booked next.

On first down, Moon handed the ball to running back Lorenzo White. A running play, designed to confuse a defense thinking pass all the way.

But Doug Reed can read and the Ram defensive tackle saw White coming. Reed held his ground, lowered his shoulder and stopped White at the six.

Second down. Moon wanted to get the ball to White again, but this time through the air. It wasn’t worth the effort. Moon passed, White received and Ram linebacker Larry Kelm interceded, burying White at the five for another one-yard gain.

Third down. The clock was ticking away--1:07 left now--but running a distant second behind the beat of Robinson’s heart.

Moon dropped back to pass and aimed a dart, in the end zone, for Ernest Givins’ chest.

Givins had Ram cornerback Bobby Humphery beaten. He had the football, too, but only for an instant. Moon struck Givins right in the top of the numbers, just below the collar, but the ball wouldn’t oblige beyond that.

Off Givins’ shoulder pads it bounded, landing incomplete over the end line. Fourth down. Finally, fourth down.

Moon took the snap, faded back and, for a moment, blue turned to red. Moon had become Steve Grogan, the New England Patriot quarterback who terrorized the Rams and their fans on the final play of the final game of the 1989 regular season. Do you remember? Can you ever forget? Grogan looked and looked and looked some more, scanning all of the New England seaboard, it seemed, before firing inches beyond the grasp of a touchdown-bound Hart Lee Dykes.

Moon brought that sinking feeling back in a rush--the petrifying dread, the impending nausea, the complete loss of all sense of time.

“That play took about 85 seconds,” Ram cornerback Darryl Henley swore.

“You know that ‘dead man’s feeling?’ ” Reed said, his face slackening and his eyes bugging. “You’re thinking, ‘Oh, my God. Here we are again.’ You’re praying for someone, somewhere, to make a defensive play.”

In the upset of the season, someone on the Rams did.

Oiler Allen Pinkett was open at the goal line, near the left flag, waiting for the football. Moon got it there, but not before Humphery, so close to a goat the play before, came racing in from the end zone to bat the ball away.

“I was just looking to do my job--staying ‘home’ and play the zone that was called,” Humphery said. “I’d already seen that Pinkett was wide open. I was looking to see whether Warren was going to throw or run--that was the decision he had to make at that time. . . .

“It was fourth down. If I get there and knock it down, the game’s over. So I got there.”

Right. With the Rams, it’s always that easy.

“I thought we’d stop ‘em all along,” Robinson said with a grin and a wink, everything but a rim shot. Robinson, as pleasantly surprised as anyone in the stadium, was in a giddy mood. “Who knows?” he said. “Maybe we’ll have a dominant defense.”

When not every reporter in the room laughed at this, Robinson decided to interpret.

“ That was a joke.”

With the Rams’ defense, you need every edge you can get, which is why Robinson and defensive coordinator Fritz Shurmur decided to drop eight defenders into the end zone for Moon’s final two passes.

“There must have been 14 people in the end zone,” Robinson said. “If you count the umpire and the back judge, there were 16 guys.

“We’ve taken some raps for playing this defense but in that situation, near the goal line, it’s very difficult for a quarterback to find an opening. Warren’s very good at hitting areas, but we were trying to take those areas away. We were hoping to distort him.”

Said Shurmur: “There wasn’t any place for him to go. We had eight guys there and he had only 15 yards of room. We filled up a lot of the spots he had to throw to.”

That’s one flaw in the run-and-shoot. It tends to function better at long range than at point-blank.

“They like to run that ‘go,’ ” Reed said, “but when you get down there, there ain’t no ‘go.’ All they can do is run a curl or spread it out. They need that space to run and shoot.”

This was one time it paid the Rams to have their backs to the wall.

And if it wasn’t exactly the linchpin to the season, the defensive stand of the year, it was, in Shurmur’s words, “obviously, a critical series for us. I think it showed the guys have a lot of fight left in them.

“You can call it luck, but we battled right to the end and made the play.”

At the very least, you had to call it exciting.

“If you’re going to hang around us,” Shurmur said with a weary smile, “you’d better not have a weak heart.”