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Burwell: Rams stuck in same self-destructive rut
• BRYAN BURWELL •
http://www.stltoday.com/sports/colu...cle_2dc5831b-26e7-518d-856a-b35ca531134d.html
PHILADELPHIA • If you separate the St. Louis Rams’ weekend visit to the City of Brotherly Love into neat little isolated segments and you squint just so, what happened Sunday at Lincoln Financial Field wasn’t all that bad.
You could glean another gem from young Austin Davis, who looks more and more like a legitimate NFL quarterback every Sunday. You could marvel at his poise, admire his toughness and grit, and take comfort in the fact that this kid knows exactly what it takes to put up big yardage in the air.
You could sit back and admire the
furious fourth-quarter comeback that turned a 34-7 blowout by the Philadelphia Eagles into a skin-tight 34-28 loss that came down to the game’s final seconds.
But football is not played in a vacuum, so you can’t dismiss the self-destructive mistakes that dug St. Louis into a hole too deep to get out of in the first place. You can’t ignore the Rams’ unfortunate (and maddening) weekly recurrence of needless penalties, crushing execution miscues, dropped passes and coverage breakdowns that turned this into another annoying loss that easily could have been another thrilling victory.
All around the visitors’ locker room after the game, you could hear so many players trying to dredge up the positives from this defeat, trying to concentrate on the dramatic comeback rather than the circumstances that put them there in the first place.
Yet even as they indulged in the positives, nearly every player quickly dismissed the “glass-is-half-full” rhetoric.
“We just showed that week in and week out we constantly shoot ourselves in the foot,” said Pro Bowl defensive end Robert Quinn. “And we have to eliminate those if we want to start putting W’s on the board. ... We try to look at the positives, but you keep going back to what we did wrong that cost us the game. We gave up a blocked punt, we had a busted coverage and the pass rush wasn’t there. Guys sold out until the clock said zero ... but costly penalties and stuff like that will definitely haunt you in the end.”
To a man, these Rams players are not delusional. They don’t sugarcoat what they have done to themselves and how their self-destructive habits have put at great risk this season, which is only four games old. But here they are at 1-3, stuck in the basement of the NFC West and looking into the teeth of a schedule that only gets progressively more challenging.
However, when you take a look at the NFL standings this morning, you will notice that there is no category for honesty, just the cold-blooded truth of W’s and L’s, and no matter what the Rams players and coaches think they should be and eventually might become, all we have to judge them on is the harsh reality of pro football’s most basic and unforgiving rule:
You are what your record says you are.
And for these Rams, a 1-3 record tells me they are still stuck in the same discouraging rut this franchise has been in for years.
They are getting closer to a breakthrough, but until they do, we can’t judge them on anything but 1-3. If they had found a way to get into that end zone on the game’s final drive, and the scoreboard had said “Rams 35, Eagles 34,” all would have been right with the world. We could have ignored some of these repetitious flaws and reveled in a marvelous comeback victory, because winning is the great deodorant of sports.
It’s why coach Jeff Fisher spent the first few minutes of his postgame remarks wondering how different the world could have been if not for the blocked punt for Philly’s first touchdown on the first possession of the game and the sack-fumble-touchdown for the Eagles on the Rams’ first possession of the second half.
“If we could eliminate both those drives,” said Fisher, “we certainly wouldn’t have been in the situation we were in.”
But you can’t wish away these repeated shots to the foot that have become a sad and irritating hallmark of this football team. You can’t wish away the 10 penalties (two more were declined). You can’t pretend that at least five Davis passes weren’t dropped by wide-open receivers. You can’t look the other way while serial dumb-penalty offender Ray Ray Armstrong gets caught by the refs for shoving an Eagles player in the middle of the field on special teams where the entire world could see.
Finally, we heard the first sign that Fisher’s irritation level with Armstrong and the other offenders on special teams has reached its limits. “Our special teams knows if you’re going to get another penalty after the play on special teams and (the call) is legit, then they’re going to watch the rest of the game in the locker room,” said Fisher. “I’m not going to tolerate that anymore.”
I hope his outrage extends beyond special teams, too. The season is a long way from being over. There are signs that things have the potential to get better, especially on offense. Davis (29 of 49, 375 yards, three TDs) was a handful of dropped passes away from the first 400-yard game of his brief NFL career. After a bumpy first half, he lit up the Philly defense in the second half (19 of 30, 252 yards, two TDs, 112.1 pass efficiency rating). But it was his fourth quarter (11 of 18, 142 yards, two TDs) that was absolutely eye-popping. His fourth-quarter pass efficiency rating of 122.9 reinforced the notion that the ground-and-pound days of the Rams’ offense ought to be a thing of the past.
Conspiracy theory debunking alert: Zac Stacy really is hurt. The starting tailback injured his calf on the fumble late in the third quarter and spent the rest of the game sidelined. After he gained 42 mostly unspectacular yards (3.8 yards a carry), a lot of loony conspiracy theorists in Rams Nation immediately drew a conclusion that Stacy must have been treated by the same mystery doctor who decided that Shaun Hill was hurt, too. Stop it, just stop it. But with Stacy sidelined, backup Benny Cunningham did make a noticeable difference in the running game (47 yards on seven carries for a 6.7-yard average and a 14-yard TD). It will also be fascinating to see if this changing of the guard in the backfield ultimately will lead to a similar boost in offensive production that the Davis-for-Hill swap gave to the passing attack.
The clock is ticking. People are tired of searching for that corner where prosperity is supposed to be lurking. Yes, every week you can see isolated signs of improvement. But they keep being overshadowed by the team losing. The Rams keep telling us they’re better than this, but it’s hard to hear their words over the din of their actions.
• BRYAN BURWELL •
http://www.stltoday.com/sports/colu...cle_2dc5831b-26e7-518d-856a-b35ca531134d.html
PHILADELPHIA • If you separate the St. Louis Rams’ weekend visit to the City of Brotherly Love into neat little isolated segments and you squint just so, what happened Sunday at Lincoln Financial Field wasn’t all that bad.
You could glean another gem from young Austin Davis, who looks more and more like a legitimate NFL quarterback every Sunday. You could marvel at his poise, admire his toughness and grit, and take comfort in the fact that this kid knows exactly what it takes to put up big yardage in the air.
You could sit back and admire the
furious fourth-quarter comeback that turned a 34-7 blowout by the Philadelphia Eagles into a skin-tight 34-28 loss that came down to the game’s final seconds.
But football is not played in a vacuum, so you can’t dismiss the self-destructive mistakes that dug St. Louis into a hole too deep to get out of in the first place. You can’t ignore the Rams’ unfortunate (and maddening) weekly recurrence of needless penalties, crushing execution miscues, dropped passes and coverage breakdowns that turned this into another annoying loss that easily could have been another thrilling victory.
All around the visitors’ locker room after the game, you could hear so many players trying to dredge up the positives from this defeat, trying to concentrate on the dramatic comeback rather than the circumstances that put them there in the first place.
Yet even as they indulged in the positives, nearly every player quickly dismissed the “glass-is-half-full” rhetoric.
“We just showed that week in and week out we constantly shoot ourselves in the foot,” said Pro Bowl defensive end Robert Quinn. “And we have to eliminate those if we want to start putting W’s on the board. ... We try to look at the positives, but you keep going back to what we did wrong that cost us the game. We gave up a blocked punt, we had a busted coverage and the pass rush wasn’t there. Guys sold out until the clock said zero ... but costly penalties and stuff like that will definitely haunt you in the end.”
To a man, these Rams players are not delusional. They don’t sugarcoat what they have done to themselves and how their self-destructive habits have put at great risk this season, which is only four games old. But here they are at 1-3, stuck in the basement of the NFC West and looking into the teeth of a schedule that only gets progressively more challenging.
However, when you take a look at the NFL standings this morning, you will notice that there is no category for honesty, just the cold-blooded truth of W’s and L’s, and no matter what the Rams players and coaches think they should be and eventually might become, all we have to judge them on is the harsh reality of pro football’s most basic and unforgiving rule:
You are what your record says you are.
And for these Rams, a 1-3 record tells me they are still stuck in the same discouraging rut this franchise has been in for years.
They are getting closer to a breakthrough, but until they do, we can’t judge them on anything but 1-3. If they had found a way to get into that end zone on the game’s final drive, and the scoreboard had said “Rams 35, Eagles 34,” all would have been right with the world. We could have ignored some of these repetitious flaws and reveled in a marvelous comeback victory, because winning is the great deodorant of sports.
It’s why coach Jeff Fisher spent the first few minutes of his postgame remarks wondering how different the world could have been if not for the blocked punt for Philly’s first touchdown on the first possession of the game and the sack-fumble-touchdown for the Eagles on the Rams’ first possession of the second half.
“If we could eliminate both those drives,” said Fisher, “we certainly wouldn’t have been in the situation we were in.”
But you can’t wish away these repeated shots to the foot that have become a sad and irritating hallmark of this football team. You can’t wish away the 10 penalties (two more were declined). You can’t pretend that at least five Davis passes weren’t dropped by wide-open receivers. You can’t look the other way while serial dumb-penalty offender Ray Ray Armstrong gets caught by the refs for shoving an Eagles player in the middle of the field on special teams where the entire world could see.
Finally, we heard the first sign that Fisher’s irritation level with Armstrong and the other offenders on special teams has reached its limits. “Our special teams knows if you’re going to get another penalty after the play on special teams and (the call) is legit, then they’re going to watch the rest of the game in the locker room,” said Fisher. “I’m not going to tolerate that anymore.”
I hope his outrage extends beyond special teams, too. The season is a long way from being over. There are signs that things have the potential to get better, especially on offense. Davis (29 of 49, 375 yards, three TDs) was a handful of dropped passes away from the first 400-yard game of his brief NFL career. After a bumpy first half, he lit up the Philly defense in the second half (19 of 30, 252 yards, two TDs, 112.1 pass efficiency rating). But it was his fourth quarter (11 of 18, 142 yards, two TDs) that was absolutely eye-popping. His fourth-quarter pass efficiency rating of 122.9 reinforced the notion that the ground-and-pound days of the Rams’ offense ought to be a thing of the past.
Conspiracy theory debunking alert: Zac Stacy really is hurt. The starting tailback injured his calf on the fumble late in the third quarter and spent the rest of the game sidelined. After he gained 42 mostly unspectacular yards (3.8 yards a carry), a lot of loony conspiracy theorists in Rams Nation immediately drew a conclusion that Stacy must have been treated by the same mystery doctor who decided that Shaun Hill was hurt, too. Stop it, just stop it. But with Stacy sidelined, backup Benny Cunningham did make a noticeable difference in the running game (47 yards on seven carries for a 6.7-yard average and a 14-yard TD). It will also be fascinating to see if this changing of the guard in the backfield ultimately will lead to a similar boost in offensive production that the Davis-for-Hill swap gave to the passing attack.
The clock is ticking. People are tired of searching for that corner where prosperity is supposed to be lurking. Yes, every week you can see isolated signs of improvement. But they keep being overshadowed by the team losing. The Rams keep telling us they’re better than this, but it’s hard to hear their words over the din of their actions.
