skip to main |
skip to sidebar
I'll start with the good news that came out a little bit ago: the Rams will retire Deacon Jones' #75 at one of this year's home games. (I certainly hope it will be one of the weeks they're wearing throwback uniforms.)
It's always been one of the biggest and oddest of this franchise's failings that Deacon's jersey was never retired. The unofficial reason is that Deacon and ownership never got along. But never mind that. Deacon is certainly the best defensive player in Rams history, and you can make a very good case that he's the best in league history; top five, certainly. He's already enshrined in the Hall of Fame; honors from the team have been decades late in coming.
Thumbs up to Chip Rosenbloom for correcting a years-old injustice and finally getting the jersey of one of the Rams' greatest retired.
No word yet, however, if the Rams will publicly apologize for allowing Claude Terrell to wear #75 a few years ago.
photo from www.profootballhof.com
Defensive tackle La'Roi Glover announced his retirement this morning, bringing an end to a solid 13-year career with the Raiders, Saints, Cowboys and Rams. Glover was a Rams terror when he played with the Saints from 1997-2001, and he played in six Pro Bowls. He had a career year with 17 sacks in 2000.
The time was right for Glover to retire; he's 35, missed about half of last season and was becoming a diminishing factor on the Ram d-line. Having said that, his 11.5 sacks here in 2006-7 are nothing to sneeze at. He was a solid veteran leader for this team and was widely regarded as one of the Rams' toughest players.
And so time accomplishes something the early St. Louis Rams offensive lines never could: taking La'Roi Glover out of the game.
photo from stlouisrams.com
Trent Green retired last week, putting the wraps on a 15-year career that included a Super Bowl championship and two Pro Bowls. Trent never should have come back in 2008, having suffered severe concussions in Kansas City in 2006 and in Miami in 2007. Rams Nation is grateful he's just getting off the field in one piece with all his faculties intact.
Trent returned to his hometown Rams for a last hurrah in 2008, but it was mostly raspberries for the veteran QB. He threw six INTs in three games, and in two of those games, he would have had a higher passer rating by spiking every pass into the ground. The nadir was a four-pick game in a 27-3 loss to the Bears.
But Green's place in Rams history was, and is, already secure, as the man who unofficially launched The Greatest Show on Earth. His big-ticket free agent signing here prior to the 1999 season set a new tone for the Rams front office, and in the 1999 preseason, Trent looked nigh unbeatable, running then-new offensive coordinator Mike Martz's offense at peak efficiency.
Then it hit. It, of course, being brutal cheap-shot artist Rodney Harrison, who leveled his specialty at Trent's knee in the third preseason game, ending the QB's season and apparently blowing up the Rams' 1999 season in the starting blocks.
But that, of course, led to the rise of Kurt Warner and an as-yet unparalleled offensive surge, along with two NFC championships and a Super Bowl title.
And I don't think the Rams win those Super Bowls with Trent Green behind center. He did have success in Kansas City after leaving St. Louis the first time, but he never had Warner's uncanny accuracy and was a rather mistake-prone QB. The Trent Green I saw play after 2000 never would have beaten Tampa to get the Rams into Super Bowl 34. He would've thrown a bunch of picks.
But that doesn't make Green's years here in St. Louis unsuccessful or unimportant. He helped a losing franchise adopt a new attitude. And when he came back healthy for the 2000 season, he had every justification in the world to shout that he wanted his starting QB spot back. He easily could have created a team-dividing QB controversy. It wouldn't be the first or last time a QB in Trent's position has done so.
But Trent didn't. He took his clipboard (and generous backup-QB paycheck) gracefully, didn't split the team, didn't snipe at anybody, and when called on to sub for Warner, did a decent, if slightly turnover-prone at times, job. The harmony at the team's most important position helped it on to a couple more years of outrageous, memory-making success.
We thank Warner, and Marshall Faulk, and Isaac Bruce and Torry Holt, and many, many others for those great seasons. But we shouldn't forget to thank Trent Green, limited though his on-field contributions here were. For Trent lived up to one of the great virtues of athletics.
He was a team player.
It's for real this time: per Bernie Miklasz, the Rosenblooms are working with Goldman Sachs to find a buyer for the team. And having waited a year for somebody, anybody in St. Louis to step up and commit to a local effort to keep the team in town, the Rosenblooms are no longer restricting their search to buyers who will make that commitment. In other words, out-of-town buyers are invited.
So step right up, all you rich L.A. financiers.
As for St. Louis, time to start thinking about saying our goodbyes. This thing's really out of our control as fans now.
Lovie Smith signed another former Rams leader this offseason, bringing Pisa Tinoisamoa aboard on a 1-year contract. Tinoisamoa, cut by the Rams last month as a result of Will Witherspoon's move to weakside linebacker, joins Orlando Pace for the 2009 season at Soldier Field.
Tinoisamoa looked like a character risk when the Rams drafted him in 2002, but he turned out to be nothing of the sort, instead setting a Rams record for tackles by a rookie his initial season. He would lead the defense in tackles four times in six years with the Rams. Early in his career he was one of the best hitters the Ram D had, and last year overall was his best season since his rookie year.
Pisa's big hitting came with a price, though. Even as willing to play through injuries as he was - one season he stayed on the field and played one-armed, that is, until he hurt the good arm - he spent a lot of time on the injury report in his career. And despite his high tackle totals, he was frequently out of position on running plays and has been a key reason for big plays the woeful Ram run defense has allowed the last few seasons. The decision to move Witherspoon outside and the draft of James Laurinaitis to take the Mike LB role made Pisa the odd man out. And Pisa was never known as a great special teams contributor or the kind of versatile LB like Chris Draft who could back up multiple positions, so his value to the new-look Rams became very limited.
Given his liabilities in the run game, it's surprising to hear that Pisa's going to start in Chicago, but RamView wishes him the best. Reuniting with Lovie Smith can't be a bad thing for him at this point in his career. He's jumping from a 2-14 rebuilding project to a team whose aspirations for 2009 start with making the playoffs. He's the type of player-warrior who should fit in well in Chicago and who Bears fans should take to right away.
Meanwhile, the offseason scorecard for the Rams? Best wide receiver last year, maybe in team history, gone. Best offensive lineman last year, maybe in team history, gone. And now leading tackler on defense, gone.
I trust Steve Spagnuolo will be smart enough this season not to blame losses on account of not having enough players.
...inasmuch as I'm finally updating this puppy for the first time since before the draft, that is. Thank a very busy work schedule and a dying (now dead) home computer for that. But 2008, which should be buried, now has an archive page, and I did get some time to update the Rams' all-best and all-worst pages.
Obviously there was no need to update the best games page after 2008, but certainly last year saw a couple of the worst efforts in team history, led by the 47-3 (40-0 at halftime) debacle against the Jets that takes over at #1 on the list of worst games the Rams have played in St. Louis. The 38-3 season-opening loss takes a spot as well, as does the 2006 embarrassment in the Dome where the Bears had more fans present than the Rams did. It's hard to get worked up any more about the Rams losing to Kurt Warner, so one of those losses fell off the list, along with a dreadful Bears game in '97 and the divisional playoff loss to Atlanta in '05, which WAS the Rams' last playoff appearance, after all.
The Julius Jones TD run in Seattle last year joins the list of worst plays in St. Louis Rams history, replacing one of those plays where seven or eight Ram defenders missed tackles and allowed a TD. Those kind of plays are getting too hard to distinguish any more, they happen so often.
The All-St.Louis roster got just a minor tweak, with Ron Bartell replacing Mark Setterstrom on the practice squad, a place where I like to recognize players who are fan favorites or young up-and-comers, Bartell being the latter.
The all-worst team was just a little busier. Joe Klopfenstein claims a spot at tight end. Linehan cements his spot as worst coach in Rams history. And Drew Bennett ascends to the summit as the worst wide receiver and the worst free agent signing in team history.
Drew Bennett actually comes across as a really nice guy. Even though he was on injured reserve almost all of last season, he was still in town visiting sick kids in the hospital around the holidays. And he was a good teammate by all accounts. He stayed out of trouble off the field. A lot of NFL receivers could stand to be a lot more like Drew Bennett.
Too bad he was so awful on the field here. When he could even suit up.
...relative to the rest of the league, at least. The league took a step to improve player safety in the offseason by outlawing the wedge on kickoff returns. That move eliminates some of the most violent collisions in the game, and indirectly, helps the Rams out on special teams.
That's because the Rams here in St. Louis have rarely, if ever, utilized the wedge effectively on returns or attacked it well on coverage. You can blame that on several things. The Rams have preferred smaller, faster players at the LB and DB positions, which populate a lot of kickoff units. The only big guy on Rams special teams I ever saw as a decent blocker (very good, actually), was Jeff Zgonina during the GSOE heyday. Otherwise, no slugger in the middle for the Rams to spearpoint a return. And if we saw a small DB try to run around the wedge only to give up a great big lane for a long return once, we saw it a thousand times. Mike Martz supposedly wouldn't allow certain players to be used on special teams, further cutting down the talent level, and after the late Frank Gansz, the Rams have had mediocre special teams coaching at best. Usually worse.
Despite the carousel of head and special teams coaches in and out of Rams Park the last decade, the Rams have always been a finesse team on kickoff returns. The NFL rule change favors the Rams' longtime approach.
The Rams may not improve a lot on kickoff returns in the near future, but the rest of the league is going to start coming back to them.
