Maybe a Buddy Could Have Saved the Rams

As we all know, the Rams are not ready for this. No way on earth. They need more time, more practice, more talent, more depth, more fine-tuning.

What they really need, of course, is a bye. Till around 1997 would be good.

But the league office is a stickler about punctuality, and worse yet, it has a mean streak as wide as the vacant section on Anaheim Stadium’s east side today.

Not only is the league forcing the Rams to go through with this afternoon’s game, but look at who the schedule-makers have rounded up as the obligatory visiting opposition.

Buddy Ryan.

The grumpy old man the Rams could have hired two years ago, when the franchise was at the proverbial crossroads, but passed, leaving the franchise to languish at the bottom of the proverbial tank.

Rams fans don’t need this right now. It’s enough that they are cold and lonely and treated like earthquake victims at social functions and family gatherings. You follow the Rams, you say? How awful for you. I’m terribly sorry. Worse still, their allegiance is unrequited by an owner who begins this season with Bekins, Allied and Mayflower on her personal speed dial.

Rams fans don’t need to be reminded of how Ryan was eminently available in January, 1992, when the Rams were looking for a head coach and John Shaw was calling around about Buddy. They don’t want to hear that Shaw phoned Don Shula, Mike Ditka, Norm Braman, Bud Carson and Jimmy Johnson, received mixed reviews, was about to press onward and had the background search aborted when Georgia Frontiere burst into the room and said she positively could not live without Chuck Knox.

So Knox it was and 11-and-21-and-all-but-out-the-door it has been ever since.

Would it have been any different under Buddy?

Better, possibly.

Worse, unlikely.

But different, you can bet your unopened season-ticket application on that one.

First off, Buddy would have never tolerated two years of Jim Everett. That alone would have made taking a shot with him worth it. Buddy never liked Everett much when he coached the Eagles, and as he lobbied for the Rams job late in the 1991 season, he crowed that the first thing he’d do would be to bring in Jim McMahon and put some pressure on that skinny No. 11.

Everett-McMahon would have been something to see. By September, 1992, Everett’s crown had slipped, but no one yet was demanding the guillotine. Southern California still remembered McMahon as Dan Henning’s folly in San Diego. The debate would have divided the players, the fans, the media. Tuning in to a Rams game every Sunday would be no different than clicking on the WWF.

This is precisely what Knox strained to avoid in 1992, which is why he propped up Everett as his unchallenged No. 1 and kept good soldier Mike Pagel far, far in the background. The end result, of course, was everything that Knox had feared, a quarterback controversy in 1993 that yielded no winners--not Everett, not T.J. Rubley and certainly not Knox.

The post-Everett era would have started at least 12 months earlier with Buddy, who would have brought in the anti-Everett--Phil Simms, perhaps, or Steve Beuerlein--and sacrificed the occasional pretty 60-yard spiral for a set of gritted teeth in the face of a safety blitz.

Buddy would have also brought along some of his old die-hards, as he does everywhere he roams. You know the names--they’ll be the ones on the backs of the red jerseys this afternoon. Seth Joyner. Clyde Simmons. Wilber Marshall.

Or maybe Richard Dent, or Keith Jackson. Or how about this one: Reggie White. Buddy may be bombastic, vain-glorious and a public-relations fiasco with a smoking fuse, but you have to like the friends he brings to the training table.

Knox has his loyalists, too, players who jumped at the chance to follow Coach down the coast from Seattle to Anaheim.

Unfortunately, they were named Jeff Chadwick, Travis McNeal, Derek Loville, Jim Skow and Blair Bush.

The ongoing knock on Buddy, of course, is his unblemished record of failure in the playoffs. Oh-for-three--tough to argue with the facts. But Knox hasn’t won in the postseason since 1984 and the Rams haven’t been to a playoff game since the 1980s. Knox’s most recent postseason appearance, with Seattle, is 1988.

Poll Rams fans today and see if they’d settle for a first-round loss in the playoffs come January.

Two years ago, the word on Buddy was that he “wasn’t right for Orange County.” What exactly does that mean? That his teams win more games than they lose? That he knows how to draft? That he might curse during a postgame interview or knock over the cucumber finger sandwiches at Georgia’s kickoff party?

Given the track records involved--Buddy’s, the Rams’, the Angels’--I suspect Orange County would be commissioning crystal statues of Buddy right about now. At worst, there would be lines at the ticket windows, as opposed to the scene outside Anaheim Stadium Tuesday afternoon, five days before the home opener. I spent a half-hour there and witnessed a total of three purchases.

The Arizona Cardinals have doubled season-ticket sales, to more than 48,000, since the announcement of Buddy’s hiring. The Arizona Cardinals, also known in previous years as the Rams of the Desert.

Win or lose, lead with the left or with the right, Buddy drags bodies through the turnstiles. So what if many of them are the same ones who crane their necks at a six-car freeway pileup? They all look the same on the accounting ledger.

Buddy could have been Save the Rams all by himself. Instead, he comes to bury them today. Maybe it’s a good thing not many Ram fans will be there to see it.