New Vermeil Has Some Different Ideas

After two seasons the Rams were 9-23, his players were threatening mutiny and team management insisted upon a more easy-going Coach Dick Vermeil, or he would have been fired.

He changed, hired offensive coordinator Mike Martz and got lucky. The Rams were able to get malcontent Marshall Faulk for two draft choices from Indianapolis, and after a serious knee injury to quarterback Trent Green, the team was forced to play Kurt Warner at quarterback.

As a result, Vermeil is returning to the Super Bowl for the first time since leading the Philadelpha Eagles into Super Bowl XV in 1981, losing to Oakland, 27-10.

“Everybody thinks I should be very negative about our first two years here,” said Vermeil, a former UCLA coach. “I really don’t. I came here expecting it to be where it was, and it wasn’t as bad as I thought it could have been. You don’t expect to get many accolades when you’re losing. Our criteria in our country, and especially in the NFL, is winning. They don’t care if you take over a losing organization. They don’t care if you’ve been losing for a long time. All they care about is winning.”

Now that his team has won, he said he will do things differently before this Super Bowl.

“I went to this game one other time, and think one of the biggest mistakes we made is we almost gave the impression to our city and to our ourselves that it was over, that we had already achieved our goal--we won the NFC championship,” Vermeil said. “I’m not letting that happen again. We’re not finished with what we set out to do.”