Looks like flavor of the month is vanilla for Rams
During the 2001 preseason, with the memory of Super Bowl XXXIV still fresh, Mike Martz’s Rams and Jeff Fisher’s Tennessee Titans squared off in an exhibition game.
With the rivalry between the teams still simmering, the Titans committed five personal fouls and in an unusual move — for exhibition play, anyway — called a fake punt. But that wasn’t what got Martz riled up. After the game, he complained about all the Tennessee blitzes.
Fisher countered by saying he wouldn’t have blitzed so much if the Rams weren’t throwing the ball on every down.
You never know what you’re going to get in the preseason, as illustrated by that Rams-Titans game. That was the case as well 12 years later, with Fisher coaching the Rams in their preseason opener Thursday in Cleveland.
How much the coaches put into their preseason game plan, or choose to emphasize a particular game, often has a lot to do with the outcome. It was clear Thursday that the Browns, with a new coach (Rob Chudzinski) and playing at home, put more emphasis on the game than the Rams.
That seemed especially true on defense, where the Browns blitzed nearly twice as much as the Rams. Examining a TV copy off the game, the Browns blitzed 14 times on defense to eight for the Rams. (With a blitz defined here as sending more than four rushers at the quarterback.)
Even when the Rams blitzed it was pretty basic, usually sending a linebacker or two up the middle. Many of the Browns’ blitzes were more detailed.
“Sam (Bradford)’s third-down completion to Chris (Givens), there’s eight guys in gaps and overload blitzing, and Sam hung in there made the play,” Fisher said.
He was referring to a 20-yard completion to Givens on a sideline pattern on the Rams’ first offensive series of the night.
“So I thought overall the first group did good,” Fisher said, speaking of the Rams’ offensive line. “Jake (Long) was good. Jake and Chris (Williams) did well together. I thought Scott (Wells) was good. So considering we didn’t do a lot of game planning, I thought they handled things pretty well.”
But the Rams had enough in their pass protection package to keep their quarterbacks upright as much as possible once the starters were gone.
“What you do in at least the first (game), you carry in enough to where if you need to draw on some things, you can,” Fisher said. “We were prepared to ‘max’ protect, and we did. We did quite a bit in the second half.
“That means you’re not getting a lot of people out on routes. It means sometimes, it’s difficult on the quarterback. And you saw that was the case with Austin (Davis), where we’re keeping people in because they’re bringing people from all over. So he’s only got a couple options down the field. As a result, there’s an aborted play here and there.”
Meaning that Davis had to scramble more than he wanted because the Rams were sending only two or three receivers out on routes. Everyone else was kept in blocking, trying to pick up blitzes.
“At the end of the day you want to keep the quarterback from getting hit during the preseason,” Fisher said.
Because it’s the preseason, why not have a general gentleman’s agreement before the game? Something along the lines of: “Hey, we’re not going to blitz that often, how about you?” Particularly if it’s coaches who know each other well.
“The league frowns on it, and we just play,” Fisher said. “Sometimes you prepare for the worst and then if it’s a basic vanilla-type approach defensively based on your opponent, then so be it. We looked at things, we just didn’t work ’em on the field (in practice).”
So when the Browns were sending blitzers, Rams blockers simply had to stick to fundamentals and their basic rules, and react to what they saw.
Cleveland’s new defensive coordinator, Ray Horton, formerly held the same position at Rams NFC West rival Arizona.
He is a blitz-happy coordinator, so it’s not as if what happened Thursday was all that unexpected. Besides, teams seem to blitz more these day in the preseason than they did 10 or 15 years ago, and Horton probably wanted to work on some things against another team, even if it meant exposing part of his defensive playbook during the preseason.
As for the Rams, Fisher seems to be more old-school when it comes to not showing much of the playbook in August — that heated preseason contest against the Martz-led Rams in 2001 notwithstanding.
“Yes, we stayed very basic,” Fisher said. “And that was our intention. We’ve been practicing a lot of things but stayed very basic (against Cleveland).”
Defensive end Chris Long seconded that notion.
“We were very vanilla,” Long said. “We’ve got a lot up our sleeve. But the important thing right now is not give too much, not show too much. But also, just work on your fundamentals. Because you need to have a foundation, and a great way to do that is to get really good at doing your base defenses.”
If that’s the case, the Rams have plenty of room for improvement in their base defense. They got next to no pressure on Browns quarterback Brandon Weeden with a four-man rush. On Cleveland’s opening drive, the only series of the game when the entire starting defense was on the field for the Rams, the Browns converted on three of four third downs.
And over the first half, when most of the players on the field where either starters or top backups for both teams, Cleveland converted five of eight third-down opportunities.
“Too many third-down conversions,” linebacker James Laurinaitis said. “But it’s all stuff that’s correctable and we can learn from it.”
