Rams Prove Panacea for Aikman, Who Has Best Game of Season : NFL: Soft zone defense has soothing effect on former UCLA standout.

The quarterback wanted to put it up more. The coaches told him to shut up more. Heck, there were lots of discouraging words being heard at home on the Dallas Cowboys’ range last week.

Troy Aikman, the former UCLA standout, was complaining to anyone who would listen that the Cowboy offense was too conservative. He wanted to throw some long passes. The Dallas coaching staff thought Aikman was spending too much time talking to the media and yelling at receivers. They suggested he quit whining and start winning.

But just when the Cowboys were teetering on the verge of self-destruction, they ran into the Rams, the NFL’s favorite panacea for quarterbacks who are suffering from flagging confidence. It’s a sports psychologist’s dream: “Take a game with the Rams and call me in the morning.”

Sunday morning, the Cowboys, who hadn’t scored a touchdown in November, were a clubhouse brawl waiting to happen. Sunday afternoon, they were all but singing a country-Western version of “We Are Family.”

Aikman completed 17 of 32 passes for 303 yards and three touchdowns as the Cowboys defeated the Rams, 24-21. It was by far his best game of the season, surpassing his previous best by more than 50 yards. It also was the first time he had thrown for more than one touchdown in a game this year.

Clearly, Aikman is one of those quarterbacks who can testify to the soothing effects of the Rams’ soft zone defense. He’s thrown only 17 touchdown passes in his NFL career, but seven of them have come at the expense of the Ram secondary. Sunday, he even got that long pass he wanted, a 61-yarder to wide receiver Michael Irvin.

“We finally aired it out today,” a jubilant Irvin said.

Dallas Coach Jimmy Johnson and offensive coordinator David Shula maintained that the game plan didn’t change, however, just the opponent.

“We’ve been throwing it long, but we haven’t had people open,” Johnson said. “It’s the same offense we’ve been running all year. We tried to mix it up, tried to throw some on first down and run on second down. But they were the same plays we’ve run all year.”

Shula said it was just a matter of taking what’s available, and with the Rams, that’s often a long pass.

“We felt we had some advantages, personnelwise, over their defensive backs and thought we could throw it up to Michael (Irvin) and have a good measure of success, and it happened that way. It wasn’t new plays or anything like that. It was just something we saw in their defense that we could take advantage of.”

For his part, Aikman would like to point out that he never said the Cowboys didn’t have enough passing plays. He said they didn’t call enough passing plays. But Sunday afternoon, with Ram defensive backs so often sprawled face down as if they were grazing on the Anaheim Stadium turf, Shula couldn’t resist the temptation to grab huge chunks of yardage through the air.

“Let’s just say we took more shots than we’ve taken in weeks past,” Aikman said. “We didn’t necessarily change what we were doing, we just did a lot more of it. And I think it was good. It kept them from really zeroing in on us.”

It didn’t always look as if it would be a Sunday stroll through the ballpark for Aikman. On the third play of the game, he tried to force the ball through three Ram defenders and Vince Newsome intercepted the pass and returned it 11 yards to the Dallas 36-yard line. Five plays later, the Rams led, 7-0.

“It’s been a very tough week,” Aikman said. “All of this has been a distraction coming into the game. I think a lot of things that have been written and said this week caused me to press a little bit early in the ballgame. I was trying too hard there early. I didn’t feel like I was throwing the ball well early in the game.”

Johnson said he awarded Aikman with a game ball, not so much for his outstanding performance as for his resiliency. “He started off shaky,” Johnson said, “but he responded and played fantastically in the last three quarters.”

Shula, too, was monitoring the emotional status of the Cowboys’ sometimes volatile quarterback. He couldn’t see the look in Aikman’s eye from his vantage point in the press box, but he kept a long-distance relationship via the telephone.

“It’s been very tough times for everybody involved with the offense,” Shula said. “Then we started out with the interception. I’m very happy and proud of the way he hung in tough and kept throwing.

“We talked on the phone after the first series and I said, ‘Hey, how are you doing?’ He said, ‘I’m doing fine. I’ll get into a rhythm and then I won’t have any problems.’ ”

As predictions go, that one was right on target, like most of Aikman’s passes. The Cowboys doubled their first-down output of last week--nine against the San Francisco 49ers--and picked up 12 of them passing.

“I never questioned our ability to make this offense work,” Aikman said, “and I hope the team never has. I’m not out to prove anyone wrong. It was just a matter of us executing better. We were able to get touchdowns when we were inside the 20. That was the biggest difference in this game.”

By schedule-makers’ quirk, after 10 games, seven losses, and countless re-examinations of their 1990 course, the Rams will finally get a shot at their nemesis, the San Francisco 49ers.

If they win Sunday, the Rams will be only six games behind the 49ers, who are 10-0 and looking as if they might never lose again.

“It’s a great opponent for us to go in there and try to put together a good football game,” defensive end Doug Reed said. “Hey, if we can’t get up for that team, maybe it signifies that we just can’t do it.”

Said quarterback Jim Everett: “It’s a chance for us to regain some of our pride, to come together against the best and play good football.”