Rams Look Just Super

Throw out the book on what it takes to win in the NFL playoffs.

Actually, you shouldn’t even have a book anymore. It’s 2000; keep your info on a CD-ROM.

Either way, there’s a dire need to rewrite.

The St. Louis Rams are going to the NFC championship game with a style of football that’s heavy on the dazzle, light on the manly stuff. No frozen tundras, no Ice Bowls, no blood and guts, no reason for John Madden to say, “Boom! Crash! Bang!” Now Smash Mouth refers to a band played over the loudspeakers, and the tears are most likely to be found in the eyes of the winning coach.

It’s a world where 37 points may not be enough to win. It’s a world of speedy guys sprinting on green carpets, a world where the key play of the game features a guy running 95 yards without a defender touching him.

It’s a style that enables a team to have a 35-17 lead after three quarters despite gaining only 23 rushing yards.

Things are changing in this society, from the line of scrimmage to Wall Street. New rules apply. That’s why you should go ahead and sell your Coca-Cola stock and buy shares of some Internet company that has never posted a quarterly profit. And you can start to believe that this could be the year a dome team finally wins the Super Bowl.

The final tally on a Sunday afternoon in the Trans World Dome:

Rams, 49.

Minnesota Vikings, 37.

Football conventional wisdom, 0.

The Vikings tried to do things the old way. The first order of business in the NFL is to establish the run, right? So Minnesota handed the ball to Robert Smith five times on the first drive and gave it to fullback Leroy Hoard twice, including a third-and-five play.

When the drive stalled they played it safe, stuck with the notion that it’s best to at least come away with something on the first drive and settled for a field goal.

Then St. Louis came back with the new-school, high-speed modem approach. On the first play, Kurt Warner threw a pass to Isaac Bruce for a 77-yard touchdown play that said, “Establish this.”

Four plays into the Rams’ next possession, Warner dumped the ball to Marshall Faulk who took it 41 yards for another score. On that play Faulk showed off the versatility that helped him gain an NFL-record 2,429 yards from scrimmage this season.

But he’s still a running back, and he picked up 1,381 of those yards by carrying the ball out of the backfield.

Yet the Rams handed the ball to the NFC’s third-best rusher only twice in the first half, and one of those was fumbled away on the exchange.

“Normally, you might think, well, let’s go in and play these guys and mix the run a lot more early, and that kind of stuff,” said Ram Coach Dick Vermeil, who actually managed to get through this postgame news conference without crying. “But that’s not the way we play. That’s just not the way we play. We stayed with the way we play.”

That meant they aired it out. The pass-to-run ratio was 4-1 in the first half and 24-11 through the first three quarters. Even with a huge lead, when you’re supposed to run to kill the clock, they kept throwing. They finished with 374 passing yards and 31 rushing yards.

“It’s kind of a pragmatic approach,” Ram offensive coordinator Mike Martz said. “You do what it takes to get the ball in the end zone.”

Meanwhile, the Vikings looked as if they were following a game plan written with a quill and scroll. They played it the old and safe way at the end of the first half.

Holding a 17-14 lead, they got the ball with 52 seconds remaining. They were at their own 23-yard line, but with Randy Moss’ speed and Jeff George’s arm they’re never too far away to make a big scoring play.

Instead of going for the big punch right before the bell they ran a draw play to Smith, let the clock run down to 12 seconds and then took a knee to end the half.

After coming back from an 11-point deficit--and with the memory of their game-changing turnover against the Atlanta Falcons in the final minute of the half of last year’s championship game still in their minds--Viking Coach Dennis Green didn’t want to risk losing momentum before the half.

Except you can’t think that way against the Rams. You need to think about scoring every time you get the ball, because you know they’re going to put points on the board when they get it back. Sure enough, Tony Horne broke through a crease and returned the second-half kickoff 95 yards without a Viking getting close enough even to talk to him, let alone tackle him.

A quick three-and-out by Minnesota, another touchdown for the Rams and the Vikings were done.

The rest of the third quarter and most of the fourth simply served as an indoor track meet for the Rams’ receiving corps of Bruce, Torry Holt and Az-Zahir Hakim. Speed is the distinguishing characteristic on this team. Put them on the artificial turf and they look even faster.

“It’s unreal, man,” Minnesota cornerback Jimmy Hitchcock said. “Unreal speed. I thought we were fast. I thought we had the fastest team in the league. Until today.”

The old school gets one last chance next weekend. The Rams face a Tampa Bay team that conjures up images of Nitschke and Csonka.

But the Buccaneers’ chances look slim. They have to play here at the Trans World Dome against a team that is averaging 34 points a game. The Buccaneers have a fearsome defense, but even if they can hold the Rams to a little more than half of that average it still means Tampa Bay’s anemic offense has to score three touchdowns, and that’s hard to imagine.

Harder to imagine at this stage, believe it or not, than the Rams going to the Super Bowl.

J.A. Adande can be reached at his e-mail address: j.a.adande@latimes.com