Ram Offense Will Strive for Best of Both Worlds : Pro football: Zampese’s passing attack will be melded with Knox’s disciplined ground game.

Put Ground Chuck and Air Zampese together and you have the makings of a strange offensive brew, right?

One style, based on careful, consistent repetitive rushing that eliminates both major mistakes and large doses of creativity, has won games for two decades.

The other has been bedeviling NFL defenses for nearly a decade with an array of pass plays.

“This whole same thing went on with John (Robinson), too,” Zampese said with a sigh. “Everybody perceived John as being a running guy and everybody perceives Chuck as being a running guy.

“But both guys have been very successful utilizing the best personnel, letting them do what they do best. You go back to when Chuck was in Buffalo with Joe Ferguson, they threw the ball quite a bit.”

The last two years, the Rams threw, too, but the production disappeared and the mistakes piled high.

Zampese thought he might disappear, too, after a season during which the Rams fumbled away six center-snap exchanges, turned the ball over 40 times and averaged only 80.3 yards rushing. But he was the only member of the former Robinson staff who stayed.

Summoned to a meeting with Knox last January, Zampese was ready to face reality. The new boss was in town, and . . .

“I didn’t really know what was going to happen,” Zampese said.

“At the time, I didn’t know who was going to be here and who wasn’t going to be here. . . . I wasn’t sure going in, and I didn’t know who else until he told me he wanted me to stay. And I wanted to stay. I didn’t want to go any place else.”

Knox remembered how dangerous the Rams had been not so long ago. He knew that the key players were still in place, and he knew his brand of discipline, mixed with Zampese’s approach, might bring the offense to life. He also knew that without Zampese, the whole offense would have to be revamped, and he didn’t want that.

“I think what Chuck wanted to do is keep the same philosophy--throwing the football--because the guys have been involved in it and they know it,” Zampese said. “We have the personnel to do it with.

“He’s going to do whatever the ability of the players allows him to do. That’s his philosophy, within limits. I mean, we’re not going to go out and just start slinging the ball all over the place just because you’ve got a quarterback who can and receivers that can go ahead and run and get the ball.

“There’s no question in his mind that you win by first minimizing the number of mistakes you make, sort of allow the other team to screw it up if they will.

“Those kinds of things are big for him, the discipline part of it, the paying attention to the small details of the game are the things that he stresses. And he’s been very comfortable, very successful doing it that way.”

How comfortable will Zampese be as the sole holdover of a failed staff in a new offense that is expected to stress the basic running attack more than before?

No problem, Zampese says now.

One of Knox’s first hires was Ted Tollner, Zampese’s old friend from their days at San Diego State, as the quarterback coach and the man who would work most closely with the coordinator. Knox didn’t fill the offensive staff with members of his Seattle staff, but primarily hired experienced coaches from other teams.

“I’ve been in that situation for a short period of time, and sometimes it can be awkward if you’re the holdover guy,” Tollner said. “I can’t answer for Ernie, but I haven’t seen any signs of it.

“I think offensively, Chuck has hired a variety of offensive assistants. It hasn’t been the whole Seattle offensive staff and Ernie coordinating it. . . . So he’s molded us into what he and Chuck have talked about the way they want to go.

“It’s basically the system they’ve had before with whatever Chuck wants Ernie to do within that.”

Said Knox: “I’ve known Ernie Zampese a long time and have got a lot of respect for him. I wasn’t concerned about that at all. I knew he was good friends with Ted Tollner, he knew (line coach Jim) Erkenbeck and (backfield coach) Chick Harris. I mean, those guys have known one another in coaching over the years, so I had no reservations whatsoever.”

There has been relatively little adjustment for him, the 56-year-old Zampese says, other than one minor difference.

“For so many years, I was always the youngest guy on the staff,” Zampese said. “Now I’m the oldest (among the assistants). That feels a little bit different, no question about that.”

The system, at least for now, has remained relatively untouched. Even though Zampese concedes that the last two seasons were not highlights of his career and the system he has developed, he says he still believes in it.

“When things are happening to you and you’re not successful, I think from time to time everybody has a sense of, ‘My gosh, can this still work? Are we doing the right things? Should we change?’ ” Zampese said.

“I think the biggest mistake people make is to say, ‘Gosh, this stuff doesn’t work anymore,’ and change to something completely different that you really don’t believe in. I think the guys that are successful have a system that they really believe in and teach it to the players they coach.

“And if you do have a true belief in what you’re teaching, I think the players can sense that. They know whether you really believe or you’re giving them lip service. I think then you help them gain confidence in what you’re doing.”

The goal this summer for Zampese is to rebuild that confidence and maintain a sense of discipline that last year’s offense lacked.

“You fumble a center-quarterback snap, everybody involved with the offense has to take their personal responsibility for it,” Zampese said.

“We had an awful lot of things like that happen last season and I think those are the things that Chuck’s trying to shore up, to say, ‘Hey, the huddle itself is important.’ How you get into the huddle, where your eyes are at--are your eyes on the quarterback, are you looking at him?--run the play through your mind even before you break the huddle . . . all those things.

“Everything is important.”