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From Bryan Burwell, it's a pretty good article on how Fisher is changing the culture around Rams park.
On your typical football Sunday, the cavernous back corridors of the Edward Jones Dome have in recent years taken on the atmosphere of grim catacombs. By the end of another disastrous afternoon of bad football, this was the place where the Rams players and coaches would be seen making their routinely uncomfortable, grim-faced marches in stony silence.
But late Sunday afternoon just outside the Rams' palatial locker room, there were no sad processions to be seen. The home team had discovered another fascinating and unsightly but beautiful way to win a football game, and the giddy fans who'd wrangled some postgame backstage access were lining up to trade high fives, good times and photographs with the second most popular football guy in St. Louis.
We will, at least for the moment, concede that rookie kicker Greg (Young GeeZy) Zuerlein may have rapidly ascended to the top of the popularity charts with his thunderous right leg and record-setting kicks that lit up the Dome and helped the Rams to a surprising 19-13 over NFC West rival Seattle. But No. 2 with a bullet has to be head coach Jeff Fisher, who, through the cult of his confident and experienced personality, has transformed this young football team into impressionable quick studies.
Suddenly, the Rams are 2-2 only a quarter of the way through Fisher's first season in charge. Most preseason prognostications for this team were that they'd hit that win total some time in December. But here it is the first of October, and the Rams are interesting, not woeful. And as the mob scene around him indicates, a lot of people are starting to understand that Fisher has become the most dominant reason this green, but growing football team is improving faster than anyone could have imagined.
It's no one thing that you can point to on game tape that is the cause for the change. It's not one player who's suddenly raised his game to an otherworldly level, or some magical X's and O's that dance off the pages of the playbook. In fact, the uncomfortable truth is, this team is still loaded with so many obvious personnel flaws that they practically glow in the dark.
There will surely be more than a few more Sundays (or Thursday nights) when the Rams have one of those reflexive hiccups and lose a game that was right there for the taking. This young team is still very much a work in progress. But here's what's changing. These young players have been blended with the proper strong-willed veterans and they're displaying all the early signs of a team that believes it can win despite all obstacles put in front of it.
You have to know that any Rams team over the past four or five seasons would never have won a game like this. But what we've seen in only a few short months is how quickly that nonsense has changed under Fisher's guidance. There were at least 25 or 30 plays against the Seahawks when the Rams could have and probably should have done more than enough to lose. There were so many physical mismatches and unsightly man-on-man defeats that could have provided the Rams with enough head-dragging emotional excuses to quit. But in the NFL's rugged world, losing is a choice that is always the preferred option of those who have been conditioned to that hopeless condition.
Fisher has demonstrated an ability to change that loser's mentality and change it quickly. He's conditioned his young team to believe that there is always a way to win a game. "I think it kind of goes back to that attitude change that we've talked about since Coach Fisher's been here," said quarterback Sam Bradford. "He made a big emphasis about winning games in the fourth quarter, early (on). As far back as OTA's, he's made it known that we were going to be in close games and that this team was going to be tough enough to go down and win them late in the game. Whether it be defensive getting the stop or the offensive going down and putting up points. And I think everyone's really bought into that. We've been in some close games, and we pulled two out, and I think there is a big difference because in the past I'm not sure if we would've done that."
No one will ever mistake these Rams for world beaters just yet. But if that's what you're dwelling on, you're clearly missing the point of what's actually happening with this football team.
The Seattle defensive line was frighteningly superior to the Rams' patchwork offensive line. There were physical mismatches from one end of the line to the other. It was sometimes hard to look at all the ways that the Seattle front four dominated the Rams' offensive front. Yet when it mattered most, the line held its ground, did its job and kept Bradford on his feet long enough to make some critical plays on all the scoring drives.
You want to know what a difference an extremely experienced and highly successful head coach can make? How's this:
Before the game, Fisher gave the game officials a heads-up that the Rams were going to run a fake field goal play at some point in the game. He outlined every circumstance where the trick play might happen, how it would be executed and then just before sending the kicking team out onto the field in the second quarter to execute the game-changing play, which resulted in the only touchdown of the game for the Rams, Fisher quietly alerted them one more time just to be sure.
This is the sort of meticulous preparation that gives Fisher a decided edge on any given Sunday. And here's another bit of thorough preparedness. According to several special teams players, Fisher specifically kept that play in his hip pocket for the first three games because he told the players he wasn't going to waste it in a game officiated by replacement refs for fear that they'd botch the whole thing up, thus putting every team on the rest of the schedule on high alert about the Rams' special-teams trickery.
Fisher was waiting for an experienced crew of regular referees to take the field, and the moment he realized that Mike Carey's crew, loaded with 115 years worth of NFL game experience, would be working the Seattle game, Fisher decided Sunday's game was his best opportunity to spring it.
And did you witness the masterpiece theater of game management that Fisher gave us Sunday? Did you see how he manipulated the game clock and burned his timeouts to perfection over the final seven and a half minutes of the first half, turning a 7-3 Seattle lead into a 13-7 halftime lead for the Rams?
There's a noticeable calmness about how he works on the sidelines, and it's not unlike watching a poised veteran quarterback sitting in the pocket during the heat of a frantic two-minute drive.
"We have that confidence that all the decisions on game day are going to be made correctly," linebacker James Laurinaitis said. "He's a great game-day decision maker."
On your typical football Sunday, the cavernous back corridors of the Edward Jones Dome have in recent years taken on the atmosphere of grim catacombs. By the end of another disastrous afternoon of bad football, this was the place where the Rams players and coaches would be seen making their routinely uncomfortable, grim-faced marches in stony silence.
But late Sunday afternoon just outside the Rams' palatial locker room, there were no sad processions to be seen. The home team had discovered another fascinating and unsightly but beautiful way to win a football game, and the giddy fans who'd wrangled some postgame backstage access were lining up to trade high fives, good times and photographs with the second most popular football guy in St. Louis.
We will, at least for the moment, concede that rookie kicker Greg (Young GeeZy) Zuerlein may have rapidly ascended to the top of the popularity charts with his thunderous right leg and record-setting kicks that lit up the Dome and helped the Rams to a surprising 19-13 over NFC West rival Seattle. But No. 2 with a bullet has to be head coach Jeff Fisher, who, through the cult of his confident and experienced personality, has transformed this young football team into impressionable quick studies.
Suddenly, the Rams are 2-2 only a quarter of the way through Fisher's first season in charge. Most preseason prognostications for this team were that they'd hit that win total some time in December. But here it is the first of October, and the Rams are interesting, not woeful. And as the mob scene around him indicates, a lot of people are starting to understand that Fisher has become the most dominant reason this green, but growing football team is improving faster than anyone could have imagined.
It's no one thing that you can point to on game tape that is the cause for the change. It's not one player who's suddenly raised his game to an otherworldly level, or some magical X's and O's that dance off the pages of the playbook. In fact, the uncomfortable truth is, this team is still loaded with so many obvious personnel flaws that they practically glow in the dark.
There will surely be more than a few more Sundays (or Thursday nights) when the Rams have one of those reflexive hiccups and lose a game that was right there for the taking. This young team is still very much a work in progress. But here's what's changing. These young players have been blended with the proper strong-willed veterans and they're displaying all the early signs of a team that believes it can win despite all obstacles put in front of it.
You have to know that any Rams team over the past four or five seasons would never have won a game like this. But what we've seen in only a few short months is how quickly that nonsense has changed under Fisher's guidance. There were at least 25 or 30 plays against the Seahawks when the Rams could have and probably should have done more than enough to lose. There were so many physical mismatches and unsightly man-on-man defeats that could have provided the Rams with enough head-dragging emotional excuses to quit. But in the NFL's rugged world, losing is a choice that is always the preferred option of those who have been conditioned to that hopeless condition.
Fisher has demonstrated an ability to change that loser's mentality and change it quickly. He's conditioned his young team to believe that there is always a way to win a game. "I think it kind of goes back to that attitude change that we've talked about since Coach Fisher's been here," said quarterback Sam Bradford. "He made a big emphasis about winning games in the fourth quarter, early (on). As far back as OTA's, he's made it known that we were going to be in close games and that this team was going to be tough enough to go down and win them late in the game. Whether it be defensive getting the stop or the offensive going down and putting up points. And I think everyone's really bought into that. We've been in some close games, and we pulled two out, and I think there is a big difference because in the past I'm not sure if we would've done that."
No one will ever mistake these Rams for world beaters just yet. But if that's what you're dwelling on, you're clearly missing the point of what's actually happening with this football team.
The Seattle defensive line was frighteningly superior to the Rams' patchwork offensive line. There were physical mismatches from one end of the line to the other. It was sometimes hard to look at all the ways that the Seattle front four dominated the Rams' offensive front. Yet when it mattered most, the line held its ground, did its job and kept Bradford on his feet long enough to make some critical plays on all the scoring drives.
You want to know what a difference an extremely experienced and highly successful head coach can make? How's this:
Before the game, Fisher gave the game officials a heads-up that the Rams were going to run a fake field goal play at some point in the game. He outlined every circumstance where the trick play might happen, how it would be executed and then just before sending the kicking team out onto the field in the second quarter to execute the game-changing play, which resulted in the only touchdown of the game for the Rams, Fisher quietly alerted them one more time just to be sure.
This is the sort of meticulous preparation that gives Fisher a decided edge on any given Sunday. And here's another bit of thorough preparedness. According to several special teams players, Fisher specifically kept that play in his hip pocket for the first three games because he told the players he wasn't going to waste it in a game officiated by replacement refs for fear that they'd botch the whole thing up, thus putting every team on the rest of the schedule on high alert about the Rams' special-teams trickery.
Fisher was waiting for an experienced crew of regular referees to take the field, and the moment he realized that Mike Carey's crew, loaded with 115 years worth of NFL game experience, would be working the Seattle game, Fisher decided Sunday's game was his best opportunity to spring it.
And did you witness the masterpiece theater of game management that Fisher gave us Sunday? Did you see how he manipulated the game clock and burned his timeouts to perfection over the final seven and a half minutes of the first half, turning a 7-3 Seattle lead into a 13-7 halftime lead for the Rams?
There's a noticeable calmness about how he works on the sidelines, and it's not unlike watching a poised veteran quarterback sitting in the pocket during the heat of a frantic two-minute drive.
"We have that confidence that all the decisions on game day are going to be made correctly," linebacker James Laurinaitis said. "He's a great game-day decision maker."
