The Power Game : These Days the Buck Stops With Rams’ John Robinson, Who Is Going Back to the Offense He Knows Best

You do not have to knock John Robinson over the noggin for him to wake up to the chilly reality of his business.

Eleven defeats in 1990 did that for him quite nicely.

You do not survive as long as the Ram coach has, succeed as long as he has, lead athletes onto the field as many times as he has, wrangle with team executives as often as he has, without understanding that an 11-loss season is not the easiest way for an NFL coach to win friends and influence people.

Even John Robinson, until 1990 untouched by the volatile winds of coaching change, gets spun around in times of trouble. Even he, whose Rams have made the playoffs six of his eight seasons, has to twist a little in the wind when his team delivers its worst non-strike performance since 1965.

No sir, you do not have to tell Robinson just how important the 1991 season is to his team and, by natural implication, to him.

“It’s crucial,” Robinson says, stopping hard on the second word. “You take a group of people that perceives themselves as winners, and clearly were going into last year--however you want to identify that, top five or six in winning over a period of time.

“You take that group and suddenly boom, they have a flip-flop season. Well, you can say, ‘Right yourself. Get going and we can be winners again.’ But you put two in a row and suddenly you’re no longer . . .

“Two in a row turns to three in a row, five in a row, then you have to retool the whole group.”

Suddenly, boom, and the Rams go from Super Bowl contenders to utter confusion and Robinson, who began 1990 with an NFL record of 71-50 and six playoff berths in seven seasons, is hearing criticism he hadn’t heard in 15 years in Southern California.

Robinson and his Rams got blasted down to the pavement in 1990 and now he’s relishing the fight to get back to his feet.

As if he were trying to fire up his team by force of personality alone, Robinson is seething with energy, bubbling with anticipation for the 1991 season.

“You get back to the point where you have a cause, you have a rallying point,” Robinson says. “You’re backed into a corner and you’ve got to fight your way out.

“I believe you always see people for what they are when they are getting up after a knockdown.

“I’m in here sometimes and I don’t want to leave the office. I wake up in the morning and I say, ‘Man, let’s go to work.’ ”

It is kind of a new morning at Rams Park, the busy, clean-up-the-mess morning after a 16-game disaster, the prelude to one of the most pivotal years in recent Ram history.

He calls it a nightmare, and it was.

The Rams, buffeted by injuries, holdouts, failed strategies and dismal performances up and down the roster, got off to a slow start in 1990 and never recovered. After being mentioned as Super Bowl candidates, they finished 5-11, the worst record in Robinson’s career, and played morosely at the end.

No one knows precisely how close the previously unbreakable union between Robinson and the Rams came to snapping last season, but the strain of 11 defeats showed through for everyone to see.

Robinson even got unofficial feelers from the Cleveland Browns, who had just fired Bud Carson, and Robinson doesn’t deny that he was weighing his options.

“It never got to the point where it was out in the open,” Robinson says. “I think it was all a question of time. When you’re in those positions, you have to say, ‘Hey, this could go either way.’ ”

Ram Executive Vice President John Shaw pointedly refused to give Robinson a vote of confidence midway through the season, and Robinson publicly wondered if he wanted to stay.

As the season wound down, the two seemed to be standing poles apart, unwilling and unable to move toward a compromise. Years of quiet tension, a private tug-of-war,

were about to explode.

“Things kind of fell apart last year,” Robinson says of Shaw and himself. “My relationship with John has always, over these eight years, been good.

“And I think last year, we were like friends who kind of drifted apart and then the intensity of the season and the things that get out in the press brought that to a head. There was no question we were all kind of fading off into our own little worlds there for a while.

“But I think, like friends, we kind of said, ‘OK, let’s resolve this.’ And I think there’s a great working relationship right now.”

The major impetus toward righting their capsized relationship came from owner Georgia Frontiere, who, days before the season finale, unilaterally gave Robinson a three-year contract extension and publicly hinted that Robinson would have broader authority within the organization.

So Robinson won the public tug-of-war, but is the private one still going on?

“When people ask me do I have more power or more say, obviously, the answer is yes,” Robinson says. “But it is in concert with everybody else working together. So the proper question is, are you guys working together well? And I think the answer is yes.”

Frontiere’s message was quite simple: Work together. Stop the leaks to the media. Stop the finger-pointing, the struggle for the final say in an organization whose power structure has never been too clear.

“Yeah, stop screwing around,” Robinson says. “Definitely, that was clearly the mandate. I think we both wanted it and I think we both responded.”

And now, Robinson says, there is a new understanding coursing through the organization, evidenced by the team’s work in Plan B and during the draft, which all involved agree was a smooth meshing of parts. No back-stabbing, no whispers, no mutters.

For now, the Rams are together, unified perhaps by everyone’s understanding that when there is chaos, 5-11 is almost always sure to follow.

“It gets said or talked about in relation to power or say or whatever those words are,” Robinson says. “But when you actually start to do it, it comes down to communication, willingness to work together, people arriving at we -type decisions.

“If John Shaw or (Player Personnel Director) John Math or anybody else in this group starts to struggle for power, starts to covet power, then everything gets out of whack.”

Before the draft, Shaw for the first time explicitly said that Robinson would have the ultimate responsibility for the selections. What Shaw isn’t so clear about is if that was a change.

If this was a power struggle, who won? Does it matter?

John Shaw does not speak with the media often, and he almost never comments on matters involving his relationship with Robinson. He prefers to let Robinson do the speaking for the team on almost every matter, and for nine years, Shaw points out, it has worked fairly well.

But recently, Shaw answered questions about the circumstances leading to Frontiere’s statement and his view of the future of the franchise.

Many suspected that Frontiere’s decision to give Robinson a new contract and a broader role in personnel matters meant the decline of Shaw’s star. But if he is a man elbowed out of the Rams’ inner circle, he does not sound like one.

“I think it’s unfair to evaluate a coach on one year’s performance,” Shaw says. “He’s been a very good coach for a lot of years in both college and professional football, and the organization believes he’s a very good coach and will perform at the level he’s used to performing.”

If it’s unfair to evaluate a successful coach after one bad season, then is it fair to judge him after, say, two poor seasons?

“That will be totally an ownership decision and I don’t believe that there’s any specific timetable as to him, and I don’t think there’s any reason to redefine now his status with the club,” Shaw says. “Georgia has extended his contract and she has every expectation that this club will be as successful as it has in the past.”

Although Frontiere decided to give Robinson the new deal, clearly, Shaw did not disagree and there is no reason to believe he is the loser in some private battle with Robinson.

What is evident is that Robinson will get final say on personnel matters--plus the responsibility, publicly and privately, through good and bad, for that power.

No more blaming other factors. The buck stops at Robinson. If there is one vivid result of the confusion in 1990, Robinson’s ultimate responsibility for the play of the team is it.

“I think Georgia’s statement attempted to clarify a lot of the confusion over John’s responsibilities,” Shaw says. “And I think her statement made it clear that he will be responsible for virtually all of the football decisions relative to the team and that Georgia fully intends to provide him with a substantial budget to meet his requirements.”

Shaw, who says he always has spoken with Robinson two or three times a week, does not deny that there was a period last season when he and the rest of the front office were uncertain whether Robinson would return. But Shaw said he wouldn’t characterize the tension as a power struggle.

“I think not,” Shaw says. “I think that the lack of communication was a direct response to the disappointment the entire organization had from ownership down, relative to the lack of success of the football team.”

So what’s the front-office expectation for this season? Is it imperative that Robinson get the team back on the winning track?

“I’d defer that question to the coach to answer,” Shaw says.

Robinson is back coaching these days, moving away from his chief executive officer role of seasons past. He will be hands-on coaching the running backs in 1991, and is determined to stamp the Rams as a power-running team, the kind of team he has most often won with.

Last season, no Ram ran for 1,000 yards, the first time that has happened since Robinson took over in 1983. Too often, the Rams ditched their running attack to try to get quarterback Jim Everett to win it by himself.

All that did was weaken the team’s physical resolve and get Everett exposed to the full fury of defenses. So this year, they will be running the ball.

“You know, if there’s any one thing I do, it’s put together a running game,” Robinson says. “If you can identify one part of the game that’s me, that I know I can do, that’s it.

“I feel safe in it because I know it’s right.”

Beyond acquiring more and better talent, beyond working smoothly with the front office again, Robinson’s plan for post-1990 is to instill a will to succeed in a team that lacked heart last season.

To do that, he says now, he did one of the hardest things he ever had to do. He fired defensive coordinator Fritz Shurmur and five other assistant coaches, many of whom were with him his whole Ram tenure.

Although the firings were announced the day after a meeting with Shaw, and it is widely assumed the front office encouraged the action, Robinson insists it was his decision alone.

“The decision to do what I did, I did because it was the right thing to do,” Robinson says. “There wasn’t even a slight degree (of front-office pressure). If I’d have decided to keep that whole group of people, I would’ve kept them.

“My reasons for making the decision was that what we were doing, how we were approaching what we were doing defensively just wasn’t working. I don’t think we were able to bring anything to the table for the next year that would’ve revitalized us.

“They’re good people and they’ve gone on to other jobs. I think (firing) Fritz Shurmur was particularly difficult because Fritz is a friend and gave 110% of himself all the time. You never doubted Fritz was doing everything he could to make the team successful.”

But once made, the break was clean. Out went Shurmur’s patented three-lineman, bend-but-don’t-break zone defensive strategy, and, quickly, in came the four-lineman, high-flying, high-risk, high-reward, high-blood pressure defense of former Philadelphia Eagle defensive coordinator Jeff Fisher.

Fisher and his new defensive staff have taken hold and already the Rams have moved to stock the defense, through Plan B and the draft, with players to fit the blitzkrieg mentality.

Robinson desperately wants to keep things new, the ideas fresh. One of the lessons he says he has learned from 1990 is that nothing is guaranteed, that the crash into an 11-defeat season is never more than a year away.

Patiently, proudly, the Rams under Robinson had, until last season, always seemed to be on the upswing, always aiming higher. Finally, in 1989, the Rams got to the NFC championship game, and losing it made 1990 seem even more to be their destined season.

Looking back now, Robinson can see that changes needed to be made even before 1990, especially on defense. But last off-season, no one seriously considered revamping the Rams.

“I think our team overachieved in ‘89, and won a lot of close football games with some big plays at the end and if you sat down and objectively analyzed our talent, it wasn’t equal to what the team achieved,” Robinson says. “I think we deceived ourselves in that area.

“We began with a little bit of a pat hand instead of trying to improve our hand. And that was the thing I regret and feel responsible for--and am never going to let happen again.”

There’s no pat hand this time. Almost every position on defense is open and already Fisher has the Rams’ first two draft choices--cornerback Todd Lyght and linebacker Roman Phifer--projected into starting roles. Kevin Greene isn’t a linebacker anymore, he’s an every-down defensive end.

Pete Holohan, Mike Lansford and Vince Newsome are gone, Doug Reed is in limbo and probably gone. The offensive line has been restructured. Young players such as defensive linemen Mike Piel and Bill Hawkins, linebackers Brett Faryniarz, Fred Strickland, and Frank Stams, and defensive backs Darryl Henley, Latin Berry, Anthony Newman and Pat Terrell are expected to perform now, not later.

And all those new pickups, from Lyght on down, are expected to step in and recharge the defensive batteries. That’s a lot of change to absorb in one off-season.

“Damn right we could fail,” Robinson says. “Sure. We’re out flailing away right now in terms of our attitude about what we’re doing, our willingness to change.

“Yes, I think it could be scary. That’s where I think you need a belief system and a fanaticism.”

And those players who don’t believe, Robinson suggests, aren’t wanted. Boom, and suddenly some very familiar faces are gone.

” . . . Our football players will see this the same way or they won’t play here,” he says.

He says these things firmly, convincingly. Can he be trying to convince himself?

“In the situation we’re in now, I am confident of my ability to know what’s right,” he says. “I’ve always been one to think that when the going gets tough, I’ve always been able to trust my own instincts or my own ability to respond.”

After 5-11, he has to.

No sir, you do not have to bang John Robinson over the head with 11 defeats for him to realize that coaching isn’t the most comfortable job in the universe.

Robinson is heading into his ninth season with the Rams, and many, including Al Davis, believe a decade is about the maximum life expectancy of an NFL coach with one team. Is Robinson feeling some burnout?

“I don’t think so,” he says. “I think sometimes those burnouts come after some good period. I think now we’re all clear-eyed and foaming at the mouth and ready to go.”

After eight years of a gradual climb, boom, suddenly Robinson is as far away from winning as he has ever been. And the hill is getting steeper.

It has been a long and almost continuously pleasant ride with the Rams, but no NFL coach has been with his team longer without getting his team to a Super Bowl.

“I think there was a sense that we were going to get there until this year,” Robinson says. “Now that sense has been wiped away by last year. Now get that sense back. Get it back that the Rams are close.

“I am convinced that I will be there. It’s something I take for granted. You have to think, ‘Hey, I’m going to win. Deal the cards one more time, and I’ll get that hand.’ ”

Yes sir, you can see what a man is about after he has been thrown to the floor. John Robinson doesn’t have to be knocked on the noggin to understand that getting up is the truest test of all.

JOHN ROBINSON WITH THE RAMS

Year Record * 1983 10-8 1984 10-7 1985 12-6 1986 10-7 1987 6-9 1988 10-7 1989 13-6 1990 5-11 Total 76-61

* Includes playoff games