Rams Find Meaning in Today’s Game : Pro football: They need to sweep their last two games to avoid finishing with the worst record in Robinson’s career.

Eliminated, overestimated and currently embroiled in a public discussion over whose job should be terminated, the Rams will start trying Sunday to escape 1990 without further embarrassment.

Playing for pride--and possibly to give Coach John Robinson a dignified send-off after eight seasons at the helm--the 5-9 Rams must sweep their final two games--beginning Sunday against the 3-11 Falcons in Atlanta--to avoid finishing with the worst record in Robinson’s career.

Given the wide understanding that these may be the final weeks of Robinson’s Ram tenure, either by his choice or by Ram management’s, does finishing proudly mean anything more to Robinson than it otherwise might?

“It’s important for us to go out with the best feeling we can, nothing to do with the first part one way or the other,” said Robinson, who has dropped hints about the possibility of leaving but won’t talk directly about it.

“You want to play good. You don’t want to do it for some other reason. There’s plenty of reasons, just the fact that you’re on a team together, that you spend seven months trying to reach a level of excellence. Those are plenty of reasons.”

After the season, Robinson has said, he and Executive Vice President John Shaw will decide whether he should return and, if he does, how the organization might be revised to better avoid 1990-type disasters. Robinson apparently wants more say-so in personnel matters and a pledge that the Rams will spend more money in the free-agent markets.

But Robinson says that despite his situation, his players should be willing to avoid the natural letdown of playoff elimination by remembering their own dignity.

That, he says, is how you get through meaningless games on the weekend before Christmas against 3-11 football teams. And if the Rams get through Sunday, all they have left is the last game on the NFL regular-season schedule, New Year’s Eve in New Orleans against the barely-alive Saints.

“I think we’re all disappointed that we’re out of it,” Robinson said. “(But) I think the players have a sense of responsibility to themselves and to each other to try to play well and try to stick together, not become disillusioned.

“I think you have a professional pride that you’re going to try to do the best you can. I think there’s a commitment a person makes to his team when the team starts each year that, ‘Hey, we’re going to do the best we can this year.’ I don’t think anybody ever says, ‘We’re doing the best we can until we find that it isn’t going to work, then we’re going to quit.’ ”

Robinson added: “I hope we’re focused and concentrating on what to do. (But) we’re obviously not going to play with the kind of emotion that you play with against the 49ers.”

Way back in the sixth week of the season, the Rams beat the Falcons, 44-24, in Anaheim Stadium, pulling themselves up to 2-4. Afterward, Robinson and a host of his players declared the team right back in the thick of things.

The Falcons have won one game since, the Rams three. And Fulton-County Stadium is going to be full of players who have every reason to be slightly less than emotionally-crazed Sunday.

The Falcons will probably start their third-string quarterback, Hugh Millen, because of injuries to their first two quarterbacks. Robinson has plans to play several of his younger second-string players.

Said veteran right tackle Jackie Slater: “I look at these last two games as an opportunity for us to try to prove that we’re a championship-type football team in our hearts, although things haven’t worked out.

“Regardless of the outcome of these games, I’m going to be looking at myself and I’m going to be looking at the guys I’m playing with, looking at their effort and looking at their desire to win the football game and compete every down.

“More than anything else, we’ve just got to live with ourselves and our efforts. And I think if we have the right kind of efforts then we’ll have the right kind of outcome--that’s a victory.”

And Slater said he does not believe that any change of the coaching staff is in order, whether or not the team wins its last two games.

“You have a tendency not to look so hard at the dismal season that we’ve had, I guess,” Slater said. “But we have a good coaching staff, and I think we have a nucleus of guys right here on this football team to return to the championship-caliber team we think we are.”

Ram Notes

What has happened to the Atlanta Falcon team that seemed so promising in the exhibition season and through the first few weeks of the regular season?

“Unfortunately I guess we’ve had about seven or eight games where we’ve gone right down to the final series where we’ve got a chance to either win it or lose it, and we haven’t gotten the job done,” Coach Jerry Glanville said. “I can’t tell you how many games we’ve lost with a minute left in the game, where we had the chance to win the game with a minute, and we just haven’t been able to get that final push and get it taken care of.”

Glanville, who went the final three years of his Houston Oiler tenure by taking the team to the playoffs, says he has been affected by his new team’s losses.

“A piece of you dies every week inside of you and it’s been tough on everybody,” he said. “I still think we’ll be a very good football team, I think we’ve got some real good players. All that doesn’t matter until you go get it done. We haven’t been through one of these in a while and it’s not easy on anybody.”