With Warner, Rams Will Roll

Barring an injury to their quarterback, it will be the upset of the century if anybody but the Rams wins this game.

It’s true, sure, that the quarterback is the big man on any NFL team, but the Rams are more than normally dependent on theirs.

On their way to a 14-2 mark this season, it was Kurt Warner who got them going each week as the field leader of Coach Mike Martz’s unique offense and as the magic-armed passer who made possible their 503-point roll, becoming the only football team that ever scored 500 three years in a row.

They’ll need him in Super Bowl XXXVI even if they decide to run the ball with their other superstar, the inimitable Marshall Faulk, and even if they run it well.

For the underlying explanation is always the same when Faulk gains, say, 159 yards, as he did last week to eliminate the Philadelphia Eagles: No defensive team can ever focus fully on Faulk, on any down, when it’s always likely that play-caller Martz, who loves pass offense more than he loves the Rams, will call on Warner to throw it.

“The three things a quarterback has got to have are intelligence, toughness, and passing accuracy,” Martz said the other day. “And that’s Warner.”

Fluke Team

Here’s another way to look at XXXVI: It’s a fluke that the Patriots are even here. They’re a nice little team, but they don’t belong in this game.

For wildly different reasons, the AFC’s four best teams, Pittsburgh, Oakland, Denver and Indianapolis, imploded--most recently the Steelers, who gave the game to New England last week on a blocked field-goal attempt.

The thing to keep in mind about blocking field-goal attempts is that it is extremely difficult. The timing is such that it’s impossible for a sprinter to get through an NFL line fast enough--provided the kicking team is properly coached--unless the snap is fumbled, which this one wasn’t.

The Patriots not only blocked the kick, they ran it all the way back. The swing was 10 points in a game that Pittsburgh lost by 7.

A week earlier, the Patriots not only got the ball back from a courageous referee--who had first seen an interception incorrectly as a fumble--they also lucked into a passing team from Oakland that unaccountably quit passing, fearing the snowstorm. Talk about flukes. The New England passer, Tom Brady, greeted the driving snow as if it were so many sunbeams.

As the snow piled up, Brady, throwing on virtually every down, completed 18 of his last 19 passes on the three scoring drives that took the Patriots to Pittsburgh, where Steeler Coach Bill Cowher was waiting to give them that blocked field-goal attempt.

Brady is the Patriots’ best quarterback. He’s as bright as Warner and as unflappable, but he’s hurt.

The other quarterback, Drew Bledsoe, is immobile. The fluke run is over.

Making Mischief

Football’s best teams this season are in the NFC--San Francisco, Green Bay, Philadelphia and Chicago--and the Rams beat all but the Bears, whom they didn’t play.

They have, in fact, overrun so many opponents in Martz’s three years as the Ram offense designer and play-caller that they are now a viable candidate for the dominating team that football fans have pined for since the days when the Green Bay Packers won five NFL titles in 10 years and the Pittsburgh Steelers won four in six.

Like Martz’s Rams, those teams weren’t successful every Sunday, or every season, either.

But they did succeed over a long period of years, which is one definition of dominance. For the Rams, this is only Year 3. Even so, Martz has already made some diverse mischief far beyond the scope of the old Packers or old Steelers:

* This season as the Rams rolled on the arm of Warner, their spectacular passing was the talk of the league.

* Then in playoffs, they did it another way, with defense, overwhelming one of the great quarterbacks of the era, Brett Favre of Green Bay, 45-17.

* Last week, Martz did it another way, with a ball-control running attack starring Faulk, who kept Philadelphia’s great scramble passer Donovan McNabb off the field long enough in a 29-24 victory.

The mystery is which way the Ram coach will go next. All those entranced by Martz’s pass offense want Warner one more time.