The Rams Take a Look at The Flip Side : Ellard’s Injury Put Anderson in the Spotlight Against 49ers

Ask, and Flipper shall receive, usually 22 yards at a time.

Most weeks, the Rams ask Flipper Anderson to run up and down the field all game long, scare any defensive back required to guard him, and then throw his way only five or six times.

As long as he catches three or four of those long passes, and as long as his complement, Henry Ellard, is there to work the precision-possession routes Anderson’s sprints open up, the Rams are content to let Anderson be the most dangerous 45-catch-a-season receiver in the league.

But then there are games such as last Sunday against the San Francisco 49ers, and Anderson gives the Rams reason to wonder what kind of damage he could wreak if he caught eight or nine or 12 passes every week.

With Ellard sidelined and Aaron Cox out early, Anderson was the Rams’ only receiving weapon, not merely a bombardier, catching eight passes for a season-high 149 yards.

He caught long passes, medium passes, timing passes, tipped passes and slipped passes. Everything the Rams asked for, Anderson gave them. On a day when Jerry Rice was almost invisible, Anderson did a nimble impression of the league’s most dominant wide receiver.

“Sometimes I go into a game and I get one, two balls thrown at me, and I’m expected to make the play,” Anderson said. “But when you’ve got an opportunity like Sunday, get 10, 15 balls thrown your way, you get more of an opportunity to catch the ball, and it doesn’t look as bad if you miss one.”

Such is Anderson’s lot on the Rams, as long as Ellard is around to catch 75 passes a season. Anderson gets only a handful of shots to catch the ball, and when he gets them, he is expected to change the pulse of the game.

And when he doesn’t--remember the drop of a wide-open bomb from quarterback Jim Everett against the New York Giants?--everybody wonders why.

This year, Anderson has caught 33 passes for 722 yards. His 21.9-yard average is by far the highest in the league, more than three yards a reception more than his nearest rival, the Raiders’ Willie Gault.

Think the Rams don’t often imagine what 22-yards-a-catch would mean to their offense if Anderson caught twice as many passes?

“He is prepared to expand into a 75-catch-a-year guy,” Coach John Robinson said. “What is his average for the year? Twenty-one? That’s way up there. That’s higher than Rice’s. I think his skills are coming up there to do that.”

Before last week, however, Anderson caught 10 passes in the past six games. Against the Chicago Bears, he had one catch for 53 yards. Against the Atlanta Falcons, he had two catches for 61 yards, and against the New York Giants, he had one catch for 30 yards and that celebrated drop.

“A guy like Flip, he’s such a big-play guy, and big plays can come or go,” receivers coach Norval Turner said. “Just like the Giant game. I mean, he catches that ball, his average is probably what it was a year ago.

“It’s so close to going one way or the other when you’re a big-play guy that you can be playing as well and not getting the numbers, you know what I’m saying? It just comes at a certain time. He had a period there in the middle where I think he was in a little bit of a slump, and I think he’s come out of it.”

For the player who set the single-game receiving-yards record last year (336 against the New Orleans Saints) and averaged 26.0 yards a catch, 10 catches in six games didn’t figure. Ten catches in six games is why Anderson concedes he probably won’t make the Pro Bowl again this season.

All while the offense struggled.

“I think when the game’s over,” Robinson said, “you kind of say, ‘God, we should’ve gotten him the ball more.’ I think for a while there we were looking three or four times a game to him deep, and that was about it--forgetting a little bit about the consistency of getting him balls underneath.

“But you get stuck with those kinds of things, you wind up throwing to certain people, you start thinking certain ways about people, and that can be a limiting thing.”

Interestingly, the Rams also know that Anderson is at his most threatening when he isn’t being overused. Force the ball to him when he is double-covered, and 22-yards-a-catch turns into 17-a-pop and a slew of interceptions.

“Yeah, isn’t that a bummer?” Anderson said.

Putting the fear of Flipper into a defense’s head is almost effective enough, the Rams say, and forcing it to him lessens his impact.

“I think we’ve made, a couple different times in the season, a real concerted effort to say, ‘Hey, we’ve got to make sure we throw it up the field to him,’ ” Turner said.

“But what happens is at times this season when our offense hasn’t been as consistent--people talking about well, you’re not driving the ball, you’re not keeping the ball, you don’t have that consistency--well, there’s a give and take.

“You know, it’s exciting to see the big plays up the field to him, but your percentage is low on that. You take those shots, and when you don’t get them, it’s hard to drive the ball.

“So the best thing with Flip is for us to pick and choose, then give him his shots up field.”

Anderson, for his part, says he doesn’t mind letting Ellard assume most of the pass-catching burden, since Ellard is so competent at the medium-range patterns.

His job is to hit the home run, and if that can’t happen every game, he can learn to live with it.

“Every receiver would like to catch 70, 80 balls a year,” Anderson said. “But in this offense, Henry, he’s the guy who does all that. I’m just the spot receiver and get what I can.

“As a personal goal, every receiver would like to get 1,000 yards, and however I go about getting that, it doesn’t matter whether I do it in 40 catches or 80.

“It’s all right with me. I don’t mind being Flipper. I don’t have to be Jerry Rice.”