Rams Do It All--Except Win : Pro football: They overcome big Falcon lead, threaten to break streaks, then lose, 30-28.
They rallied, rollicked and wrestled their way to the lead, only to be undone by a backup quarterback, the pass rushing of 185-pound cornerbacks and all the usual ugly twists, strange mistakes and unforeseen turns of fate that haunt the Rams when they travel.
The Rams might as well tell the football world: Have team, will unravel.
Poised at the doorstep of a victory that could have wiped away a slew of Ram tendencies and sent the team soaring into the second half of 1992, they fell short once again, losing to the Atlanta Falcons, 30-28, before a Georgia Dome crowd of 62,168.
After Sunday, the Rams (3-5) have lost 12 in a row on the road, 13 within the NFC West, seven under a roof and three in a row by a total of eight points at the stadiums of their three division rivals.
The Rams got a career day out of Cleveland Gary, who had 130 yards rushing in the first half and finished with 144 yards and two touchdown receptions.
They got one of Jim Everett’s better performances. He completed 22 of 33 passes for 253 yards and four touchdowns against a big Atlanta rush that had six sacks.
The Rams stormed back from a 17-0 deficit and took the lead in the third quarter. They got the Falcons’ second-line quarterback at crunch time. And the Rams still couldn’t win on the road, in the division, indoors.
Frustrated? The Rams sounded enervated.
“I don’t want to talk a whole lot about a lot of things,” Knox said right before ending his five-minute post-game press conference. “I know we just lost a tough game. That’s enough.
“Enough’s enough.”
The Rams, in their three-point loss in San Francisco on Oct. 4, their three-point loss at New Orleans on Oct. 11 and Sunday, have been through enough of these fall-behind, make-a-charge, lose-at-the-end games to see a pattern.
Enough has become more than enough.
“We’re developing a personality, I think,” tight end Jim Price said. “We’re not going to sit down for anybody. We’re just going to come out and play hard every game. That’s what we’ve been doing.
“Sooner or later, we’re going to come up with the plays.”
The Rams had the game in their hands when they pulled ahead, 28-23, in the third quarter on Everett’s fourth touchdown pass, a four-yarder to Price.
The Rams seemed like winners when Falcon quarterback Chris Miller hurt his left knee--and fumbled away the football--on Atlanta’s next possession.
Miller is scheduled to undergo arthroscopic surgery this afternoon to assess the seriousness of the damage, but the early prognosis Sunday evening was that Miller had probably torn cartilage in his left knee and suffered a deep bone bruise.
If that diagnosis is correct, the Falcons said, Miller should miss four to six weeks.
But on Sunday, one more score on any of the Rams’ last five possessions after Miller’s injury probably would have won the game, ended the droughts, brought them to a .500 record and given the Falcons a 2-6 record.
Instead, Atlanta backup Billy Joe Tolliver ground out a game-winning drive on his first series, completing six of nine passes. The last was a 13-yard pass to Michael Haynes, slicing in front of Ram cornerback Todd Lyght for a touchdown early in the fourth quarter.
“I take full responsibility for the loss,” said Lyght, who also surrendered a 38-yard touchdown to Haynes in the first half. “That’s all I’ve got to say.”
The Falcons were nominating heroes.
“We’re real proud of Billy Joe (for) coming in and taking us into the winning drive,” Atlanta Coach Jerry Glanville said.
“They came with an all-out blitz,” Tolliver said of the Haynes score. “I’ve got to believe that Mike Haynes against anybody in the league is a pretty good matchup.”
The Rams said they were a little surprised Tolliver could step in so quickly and fire away so calmly.
“He had a whole lot of poise,” Ram defensive tackle Marc Boutte said of Tolliver. “I saw a whole lot of guys just look right at him. He just came in and said, ‘Let’s go.’ ”
Lyght was assuming more than his share of blame.
After charging through the Falcon defense for three consecutive long touchdown drives in the second and third quarters, the Ram offense managed two first downs on their last five possessions. Everett was sacked three times in those series.
He seemed discombobulated by the blitzing of Falcon cornerbacks Tim McKyer and Bruce Pickens, who combined for two of the team’s six sacks.
“I thought for sure we were going to go down the field,” receiver Jeff Chadwick said, “especially with the way we marched down at the end of the first half (on the Rams’ second touchdown drive, culminating on a two-yard pass to Gary).
“But they surprised us with a couple things that maybe we weren’t expecting. (They) changed up their blitzing scheme. Hey, if they know that you’re picking it up, they’re going to bring another guy. They’re just going to go at you. That’s what they do.”
The Ram special teams were shaky, giving up a 60-yard return to Tony Smith on the game’s opening kickoff to set up the Falcons’ first score, a Smith 45-yard punt return later in the first quarter and a Vernon Turner fumble on the second-half kickoff.
Knox gave the defense a big vote of confidence by forgoing a fourth-down try in the fourth quarter, electing to punt on fourth and three from the Ram 22 with 1:54 to play, hoping to stop Falcons quickly.
“If you go on fourth down there and don’t make it, the game is over,” Knox said.
The Rams, using all of their timeouts, were able to stop Atlanta on three plays and got the ball back at their own 11 with 1:12 to play.
“We had enough time,” Knox said.
They didn’t get enough yards, giving up the ball on downs at their own 41 when Chadwick couldn’t catch Everett’s pass over the middle on fourth down with 10 seconds to play.
“We really needed this game,” Chadwick said, “and we felt like we had it. We’re up, 28-23. We were feeling like we could get it done. We just kind of sputtered there on offense and defense a little.”
And a little was enough.