ramsince62 said:
I was in the coliseum the day that the Rams introduced their new uniforms. We had a "new" old QB (John Hadl) who had left the Chargers, a new coach (Chuck Knox), a speedster named Herald Jackson, a veteran called Jack Snow on the other side and a running back known as "Lawrence of Los Angeles"......thus began the Rams 5 year domination of their division . I can't begin to tell you the excitement those new uniforms generated that day, the coliseum was absolutely electric. The old QB become good again for one last campaign and the Rams posted a 12-2 regular season. Sadly, they lost to Dallas in the playoff's (I've hated them ever since)......those were great times...
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Sept 1974 - JOHN HADL
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It is indicative of the awesome strength of the Los Angeles Rams that those who root against them talk about John Hadl as though the physical condition of the 34-year-old quarterback was their one weak spot. "If Hadl gets hurt," says a wistful San Francisco 49er fan, "they might not be so tough. They lose him, they could be in trouble."
Maybe, but Hadl is tougher than a boiled combat boot; he last sat out a game with an injury when he was in the eighth grade. And he operates now behind an offensive line more protective than a housemothers' convention. Hadl aside, the Rams are glutted with enough talent to breeze to their division title with Sam Yorty playing quarterback. With Hadl on the job, the Rams are a leading contender for the NFL championship.
Chuck Knox, a businesslike technician, directed his team to a 12-2 regular-season record last year, his first as head coach, and could have been undefeated but for three points which added up to two losses. The Rams were first in the league offense and were first in defense, too. They led everybody in scoring and rushed for 2,925 yards, the third-highest total in NFL history.
Knox left himself with a tough act to follow but he says, "What we did a year ago is a thing of the past. You can't 21 dream about what you did in the past. The only things that count in this business are what you do today and what you will do tomorrow."
What the Rams did well in '73, they firmly expect to do again in '74. "I think we'll have as good or better a season than last year," says Hadl, "if we stay healthy and keep our heads. We're more mature now that we've been down the road together a little bit."
"We're a better football team at this point than a year ago," Knox says, "but our goals are still the same. We try to go out every day and have an excellent practice. We try to be a little better as a team and as individuals than we were yesterday. We constantly strive to upgrade the individual performance levels of our players. You do that and the winning takes care of itself
The upgrading philosophy undoubtedly is sound but most Los Angeles fans would settle for mere repetition from Hadl, who was named NFC Player of the Year after he threw 22 touchdown passes and, in marked contrast to most of his seasons in San Diego, only 11 interceptions. His favorite target in 1973 was Harold Jackson, a 5'10" speedster whose receptions accounted for 874 yards and 13 touchdowns.
The Rams' basic strength is a running attack that in camp looked like something out of Patton. Lawrence McCutcheon set a club record in 1973 with 1,097 yards and Jim Bertelsen had 854. Backing up that fine pair were Tony Baker, a short-yardage zealot who scored seven of the team's 18 touchdowns rushing, and Rob Scribner, who averaged 5.5 yards per carry.
Most coaches would be ecstatic with that running talent, but Knox really had too much, what with Les Josephson, the Rams' third-leading rusher of all time, and Heisman Trophy winner John Cappelletti, their No. 1 draft choice. Cappelletti looked remarkably impressive in the exhibition season, causing one Ram official to say, "He's good enough to play this game for the next 10 years." Knox also added a bull elephant to his corral when the poetically named William Cullen Bryant, a 227-pound body-builder, was switched from defensive back and gained 117 yards on 11 carries in his first game at his new position. For whatever it's worth, Bryant wears No. 32 on his jersey, just like Jim Brown and O.J. Simpson.
Defensively, the Rams yielded but 178 points last season. Led by the front four of Jack Youngblood, Merlin Olsen, Larry Brooks and Fred Dryer, they dropped the quarterback 45 times. Los Angeles intercepted 20 passes and allowed but 10 touchdowns through the air. The secondary, led by Dave Elmendorf, should be even better after the year's experience, and Knox has almost an excess of linebackers.
"Basically," Knox says, "it's the same offense and same defense as last year, with refinements." The Knox refining methods earned the Rams a stunning 31-13 preseason conquest of Miami.
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NOVEMBER 1974
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Gambling With Their Future
Carroll Rosenbloom and his Los Angeles Rams took a calculated risk when they traded Quarterback John Hadl and decided to go with inexperienced James Harris. The test should come in the playoffs
Joe Marshall
The Los Angeles Rams have taken the biggest gamble of the 1974 season, and if last Sunday's 20-13 win over the surprisingly stubborn New York Jets is any indication, they may have to hustle a bit to make it pay off.
Five days before the game, the Rams gave veteran Quarterback John Hadl to the Green Bay Packers for five high future draft choices. The Rams' windfall could prove to be the biggest chunk of future a team ever received in one trade, but for the present the deal left the Ram quarterbacking, and its Super Bowl hopes, in the inexperienced hands of James Harris. In five previous National Football League seasons Harris had started only three games. His backup, second-year man Ron Jaworski, had never thrown a pass in a regular season game.
After the slumping Hadl was benched three weeks ago in the second half of the 17-6 upset loss to, ironically, Green Bay, Harris took over and gave the Rams some much sought-after offensive punch. The following week against San Francisco he completed 12 of 15 passes for 276 yards and three touchdowns and ran for a fourth as the Rams won 37-14. Last Sunday against the Jets he completed only 6 of 15 for a paltry 49 yards, but he did run 12 yards for the first Ram touchdown. Certainly, he seems good enough to take the talented Rams to the division title in the erratic NFC West, but whether the Los Angeles quarterbacking is up to playoff and Super Bowl standards is another question.
The decline and departure of Hadl came with stunning swiftness. After Harris' fine game against the 49ers, Ram Owner Carroll Rosenbloom was asked about his deposed quarterback's status. "We expect John to be with us a long time," Rosenbloom answered. Yeah, like a day.
Rosenbloom insists that the sudden Hadl trade to Green Bay came about by chance, not design. He had brushed aside other inquiries about the veteran's availability and says the call he made to Packer Coach Dan Devine two hours before the trading deadline was purely personal. But Devine seized the opportunity to make the Rams an offer they could not refuse. In return for Hadl, Los Angeles will receive the Packers' first- second-and third-round draft picks in 1975 and their first-and second-round picks in 1976.
Rosenbloom sounds a bit like Chill Wills when he talks, his raspy voice heavily sincere as he articulates his words. A favorite phrase is "the Ram family," about which he speaks with emotion. "We feel the happiness of our team is the most important thing," he said last weekend. " John Hadl is human and he wanted to start. But how could our players appreciate and relish a victory if they see a member of their family sad?
"We would not have made the trade if we hadn't thought it was best for John. This gives him the chance to start immediately. I've been heartsick about the Hadl thing all week. It's a gamble for us. I guess the fans will fire me if I'm wrong."
There were a lot of people, including Hadl, who had trouble swallowing Rosenbloom's one-big-family talk. "I'm only mad at myself that I thought it would be different here than with any other team," Hadl told Mai Florence of the Los Angeles Times. "They give you this stuff about being a great guy and a team leader and part of the family, but in the final analysis it's just cold business."
And pretty good business, too. Rosenbloom had implied that Hadl would have remained on the Ram bench, which hardly seems to indicate that he is a property worth five high draft picks. Hadl may have been the NFC's Player of the Year in 1973, but the suspicion arises that the Ram risk was carefully calculated. In his first six games last year, all victories, Hadl was magnificent, completing 60 of 93 passes for 13 touchdowns, with only two interceptions. But after that he went sour. League statistics indicate that Hadl's performance in the last eight games would have ranked him no higher than 18th among NFL quarterbacks. In the divisional playoff against Dallas he completed only seven of 23 passes in a disappointing 27-16 loss. Experience is supposed to count in playoff games, but Hadl was intercepted on the first play from scrimmage and fumbled the ball away late in the fourth period. This year his slump continued.
The man who finally sat Hadl down, Head Coach Chuck Knox, was virtually unknown when he took the Ram coaching job last year. In fact, an L.A. television station could not find any sponsors for a proposed Chuck Knox Show. Knox had spent the previous 10 years coaching offensive lines for the Jets and the Lions, yet of seven teams looking for a head coach in 1973, only the Rams made him an offer. It was Knox' first head coaching assignment since a three-year stint at Ellwood City (Pa.) High in the late '50s.
Knox' formula for winning is improving individual performance—"You do it by outworking your opponent"—but he has also demonstrated an uncanny gift for judging talent. Last year he put six new starters into what had been a so-so Ram defensive unit, and it became the best in the NFL. In revamping his running attack he developed the league's deepest set of runners, a group that amassed the third-highest rushing total for a season in NFL history. Los Angeles led in total offense, too, and in the regular season lost only two games, one by one point, the other by two.
Knox' most productive move (he was not instrumental in the acquisition of Hadl from San Diego) was putting Lawrence McCutcheon into the starting backfield. McCutcheon, who prefers to be called Lawrence because his brother is named Larry, was drafted in the third round in 1972, but a slow recovery from knee surgery kept him out of the back-field that year. In 1973 Knox gave him another chance, and McCutcheon fumbled the ball away three times in three exhibition games. But Knox did not give up on him. Ram Scout Tank Younger taped a handle to a football and presented it to McCutcheon for his personal use. Everybody chuckled, but McCutcheon stopped dropping the ball. He started predicting that he would gain 1,000 yards and teammates and sportswriters had trouble hiding their smiles. But despite missing two full games and half of another, McCutcheon ended up with 1,097 yards, the most ever by a Ram. This season McCutcheon already has had four 100-yard games and leads the NFL with 649 yards' rushing. Now he is talking of a 1,500-yard season, and nobody is hiding a smile.
For all his success, Knox' reputation as a judge of talent rides now on his decision to make Harris the Rams' No. 1 quarterback. No one has ever doubted Harris' throwing ability, least of all Harris himself, but his early pro career hardly inspired confidence. It started in Buffalo in 1969. The first headline he got in the Buffalo Evening News, on Jan. 29, 1969, read, "A 6-4 Negro QB, Harris, Drafted 8th by the Bills." The pressure was on. An alumnus of Grambling, he was called by one scout, "a black Joe Namath," and in September 1969 he attracted national attention when he became the first black quarterback to start an opening game in the NFL. He was confident enough. "I actually thought I was great," he says now with an easy smile. But he was injured that day, hardly played again that season and saw little action in 1970. The confidence died or, as he puts it, "I withdrew into a shell." After the opening game of the 1972 season Buffalo let him go, and he was waived out of the league. He went to work in Washington in the Department of Commerce's Office of Minority Enterprise. "Things started looking downhill," he says. "I stopped working out." Younger, another of the many Grambling people in pro football, persuaded Tommy Prothro, then coaching the Rams, to give Harris a chance.
With Los Angeles, Harris tried a new approach. "I decided just to do the best I could, and not compete," he says. "I had never relaxed in Buffalo, and it had hurt my performance." As backup quarterback he willingly marked time, and now that he has been thrust into a starting role again, he is not afraid to admit that he feels the pressure. Still, as he says, "Passing's my meal ticket. That's why I'm here. I feel confident when I'm dropping back to pass. I'm not going to miss a man who's open, and there's almost always somebody out there who's open."
Harris heard of the Hadl trade while driving down a Los Angeles street. A traffic light had just turned yellow in front of him, and his foot was poised over the brake pedal, when the news about Hadl came over his radio. His foot never moved, and his car floated right through the light and the intersection. The Rams are gambling that he'll float them as smoothly to the Super Bowl.
