By Bryan Burwell
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Monday, Sep. 26 2005
This is weird, strange and downright disorienting. It's like arriving at a
Halle Berry film festival but the only thing they're playing are Star Jones
highlights from "The View." It's like going to a Metallica concert and Pat
Boone comes out singing "Tutti Frutti." We're looking around the National
Football League as we approach the quarter turn of the 2005 season, and all I
can say is, "Who are these people?"
Get a load of your runnin', gunnin' Rams, formerly known as the most
squeezeably soft bunch of offensive pretty boys in professional football.
They're starting to act like some knuckle-dragging football Neanderthals. The
old book on the Rams was, slug 'em in the mouth and they'll eventually vanish.
Well, somebody better remind these new-look Rams about their old reputation,
because I could have sworn that every time the Tennessee Titans puffed up to
start a fight Sunday, the Rams counterpunched with some very out of character
muscle flexing.
Steven Jackson was dropping his shoulders and plowing into flinching defensive
backs as he turned the corner with frightening power and breathless
elusiveness. Rookie offensive tackle
Alex Barron was running all over the place
with the ill-tempered disposition of a blitzing linebacker, rag-dolling anyone
in a Titans jersey. There were scuffles and skirmishes and all sorts of
extracurriculars going on before and after the whistle was blown. And if the
Rams weren't always instigating it, let's just say they seemed more than
willing to finish it.
"There is a toughness there that exists for this football team that is
developing," said Mike Martz at his Monday afternoon press briefing that was a
continuation of this peculiar alternate universe kind of stuff. He wasn't
raving about
Marc Bulger's 75 percent completion percentage or any other
high-octane details of a 31-27 victory. Old Mr. Fast and Furious preferred
admiring something altogether foreign to his team's flashy reputation.
Toughness. The man who loves to light up the scoreboard with a bold and
arrogant indifference to old-school convention has turned into a crooked-nosed
lover of football's more basic instincts. Martz wants to talk about the
intrinsic beauty of perfectly executed, smash-mouthed collisions by his rugged
new linebackers, Chris Claiborne and Dexter Coakley. He wants to rave about the
contagious aggression that seems to be spreading all over his team, and the
rather nasty, borderline uncivilized attitude that has somehow turned his fancy
boys into nasty men.
We are beginning to see the product of Martz's two-year offseason shopping
sprees, where via free agency and the draft, the Rams have added more
aggressive players on both sides of the ball. "I've watched a lot of game tape
on the Rams over the past two years," said CBS analyst and former NFL defensive
back Solomon Wilcotts, "and I'd have to say their linebackers and defensive
backs in the past were some of the worst tacklers I've ever seen in the NFL.
That's changed in a hurry. What you see now are point-of-collision hits where
runners are going down as soon as they're hit at the line of scrimmage. It's a
radical change from last year."
The radical change seems to be flowing over to the offense, too, with Barron's
surprising debut on Sunday providing an attitude injection to the offense. He
immediately made it clear that the old expressway to
Marc Bulger's spine around
the right edge of the offensive line has a physical, athletic, 6-foot-7,
320-pound roadblock in the way.
"When he came through minicamp, I was concerned about the toughness," said
Martz. "I just didn't see it. But since the day he stepped into this facility
in training camp, he's been remarkably different than what I remembered.
Everything that he's done, he's exhibited the toughness and that physical part
of the game that I didn't know if he had."
For the first time in ages, with all these new faces and nasty attitudes, the
Rams really appear to be on the verge of shedding their flashy but ever-so-soft
image as high-tech gunslingers and replacing it with the more substantial
impression of a tough-as-nails, physical force.
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