Rams, Raiders Causing Separation Anxiety

Separation anxiety is running rampant throughout the broadcast booths of the NFL, now that analysts and color commentators across the country have conducted the secret handshake and determined that this will be the cliche they will hammer into the ground in 2000:

“Look at the separation he got on that play!”

“Let’s take another look at that separation!”

“See how he created the separation necessary for that screen to develop!”

Brothers and sisters, Los Angeles and Anaheim can tell you a few things about separation.

In the spring of 1995, separated by only a few days, moving vans came and separated professional football from the greater Los Angeles area. First went the Rams, a Southland institution for 50 years. Then the Raiders, who had regularly filled the Coliseum with fans newly sprung from Southland institutions.

They departed, respectively, for Shangri-La and Eden, otherwise known as St. Louis and Oakland.

There, Angelenos and Orange Countians swore, they would rot for eternity, or at least until Georgia Frontiere and Al Davis were forced to sell.

Bad news on the local grudge front, however:

Seven weeks into the 2000 season, the Rams of St. Louis and Oakland’s Raiders Version 2.0 are a combined . . . 11-1.

The Rams, playing their mutant form of Millennium Ball, are 6-0 after a routine 30-yards-and-a-cloud-of-central-air-conditioning 45-29 victory over Atlanta inside the TWA Dome.

The Raiders, sticking to the more traditional approach of gouging eyes for 59 1/2 minutes, then handing it over to the foreign kicker, improved to 5-1 with a 20-17 triumph over the Chiefs in Kansas City, ending an 11-year losing streak at Arrowhead Stadium.

Super Bowl XXXV, here they come.

And what will Los Angeles have to show for it?

The Cardinals or the Chargers (combined 2000 record: 2-11), getting pummeled in 2001 at a football stadium near you?

Yes, we are bitter. The St. Louis Rams are scoring 43.7 points a game and giving up 29 points a game. The Anaheim Rams had the same kind of defense without the offense. The St. Louis Rams believe they are revolutionizing the game by eliminating the punter (don’t need one) and the field-goal kicker (got hurt, didn’t need him). Actually, the Anaheim Rams pioneered that approach years earlier. Not by design, of course. Their roster did feature a punter, except he couldn’t punt, and a field-goal kicker, except he couldn’t kick.

It’s true: The Anaheim Rams were the first team to make do without a punter and a field-goal kicker.

Of course, it also took them until Thanksgiving to score 45 points.

You watch the Rams today and are convinced they are either playing a different sport from everybody else or in a different century from everybody else. They don’t play defense (don’t need it), they hire an entire relay pool of sprinters to play wide receiver, they bring in the consummate Arena Football passer to spray the football around the arena and they play their home games on a synthetic surface faster than the Bonneville Salt Flats. Marion Jones should have run on this stuff in Sydney. FloJo’s world records wouldn’t have lasted through the preliminary heats.

It is 21st century football. Or 22nd. Against Atlanta, the score was 7-7 before either team had run a play from scrimmage. How is this possible? By Falcon Darrick Vaughn running back the opening kickoff 96 yards, followed immediately by Ram Tony Horne running back the ensuing kickoff 103 yards. Never before seen in an NFL game.

On the first of those kickoffs, Ram kicker Jeff Wilkins pulled a thigh muscle, rendering him useless for the rest of the game. The Rams didn’t even notice. They handed the plastic tee to a wide receiver for kickoffs and scrapped the rest of the kicking game. This resulted in two Ram touchdowns on fourth-down plays that ordinarily would have been wasted on three-point attempts and a league-record four two-point conversions instead of the so-yesterday single point through the uprights.

The Raiders, a bunch of sepia-toned leatherheads by comparison, were jubilant once their once-lost field-goal kicker was found again. Rookie Sebastian Janikowski, who spent his first five weeks in the league serving as 255 pounds’ worth of kindling in the “Al Davis Has Lost It” bonfire, finally made two field goals longer than 40 yards at Kansas City--including the game-winner, a 43-yarder, with 25 seconds to go.

To shake out the jitters before the decisive kick, Janikowski stopped banging the football into the sideline net and, just to burn off some nervous energy, put his helmet-less head down and made a bull run at linebacker Greg Biekert, goring Biekert in the chest. Biekert laughed, Janikowski laughed, Janikowski jogged out there and put the foot to the Chiefs.

Was this guy born to kick for the Raiders or what?

Elsewhere around the league, minds were being blown in Green Bay, where 49er J.J. Stokes tried a derisive post-touchdown Lambeau leap into rows of irritated Packer fans--who promptly tossed him back like a visitor’s home run ball at Wrigley Field--and in Seattle, where the Colts’ Edgerrin James rushed for 219 yards to break the franchise single-game record previously set by . . . who?

Alan Ameche? Lenny Moore? Tom Matte? Lydell Mitchell? Eric Dickerson? Marshall Faulk? Would you believe Norm “Boo” Bulaich, who never rushed for more than 741 yards in a single season but ran for 198 in a 1971 game against the New York Jets?

Back in Maryland, where Bulaich used to take handoffs from the likes of Johnny Unitas and Earl Morrall, Tony Banks was leading the Ravens to no touchdowns for the third consecutive game while conjuring horrific visions of Marty Domres ‘73, Bill Troup ‘78, Jack Trudeau ’86 and Tony Banks ‘96-98. En route to a 10-3 loss to Washington, things got so depressing for the visiting team that the usually staunch Raven defense sulked down the stretch, enabling the Redskins to hold the ball for the final 5 1/2 minutes.

A few miles away at RFK Stadium, Chiefs’ owner Lamar Hunt, wanting to get away from it all, skipped the Chief-Raider game, preferring to take in a little soccer. Hunt was so thoroughly engrossed watching his Kansas City Wizards win the Major League Soccer championship--1-nil over Chicago--that he was unaware his Chiefs had lost to hated rivals halfway across the country.

“They lost?” Hunt said when given the news.

“Oh well. I’m sorry about that, obviously. But this is a great day for soccer and the Wizards, and that’s good.”

Can you believe the separation Hunt got on that one?