Rams’ nightmare could become uglier later on
October 8th, 2007 | by Kevin Morris |
By
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
As the Rams continue on this cruel and inevitable march toward the pole
position in the ‘08 NFL draft, nothing much seems to change from Sunday to
Sunday. On this unsightly journey the scenery never alters. Wretched misfortune
looms over the horizon, excruciating depression is gaining in their rear-view
mirror, and buzzard’s luck is constantly riding shotgun.
“I’ve never been a part of anything like this on any level,” said an
understandably frustrated Dante Hall after Sunday’s 34-31 loss to the Arizona
Cardinals at the Edward Jones Dome.
If you think you’re suffering through this winless disaster, imagine the view
from inside the Rams’ nightmare.
“It’s unbelievable what’s happening to this team,” Hall said. “We come into
this season with all the cards stacked right, and it just seems like week in,
week out, it just falls apart.”
What must it feel like to be a Ram right now?
What does it feel like to prepare all week for a breakthrough that will snap
you out of this calamity? What does it feel like when, for a few intoxicating
moments, you capture a flicker of good fortune yet ultimately find yourself
standing in front of a room full of microphones, minicams and notepads trying
to explain how it still ended up going wrong?
What does it feel like when
the entire world is seriously pondering the depths of your demise? What does
it feel like to have to listen to everyone considering the prospects of whether
or not you can actually go 0-16, and in the deepest recesses of your mind, you
might be fighting the urge to participate in that miserable debate?
“This is our lives,” said Richie Incognito. “There’s nothing good about this.”
“I know the rest of the world doesn’t give us a chance in hell,” said Randy
McMichael, “but we have to keep fighting.”
You think you’re mad? You think your guts are twisted in knots? Look into Scott
Linehan’s haunted eyes, or Dante Hall’s, or Richie Incognito’s, or Randy
McMichael’s. They’re dying a thousand deaths every minute of every hour of
every day.
“Everything hurts today,” McMichael said. “Penalties, wrong calls, dropped
balls. Whenever you lose, all the negative things get magnified that much more.
It just seems like when something good happens for us and we’re moving the
ball, something bad happens to us and takes the wind out of our sails.”
Winning teams fall into a briar patch and suddenly there are no thorns.
Losing teams?
Well, weird things happen to losing teams.
Injuries pile up like dirty laundry. Bizarre referee calls that follow
absolutely no logical course wreck any faint hope of victory. Ill-timed
penalties spring up like weeds in a drought. The redundancy of this season from
hell makes watching the Rams a thorny prospect.
Now try living through this nightmare the way the players and coaches do.
I can empathize with how frustrating life has become for the Rams, but I also
realize that this franchise is on the verge of some dangerous ground.
All this losing is making the Rams irrelevant.
This was the first television blackout of the season, but it promises not to be
the last if this losing continues. The Rams have played three home games, and
none of them was a real sellout. Magnanimous businessmen bailed the Rams out
and bought up the tickets for the first two games, but by game time on Sunday
the Dome was more than 3,000 seats under a sellout. And if you looked around at
all the empty seats midway through the first half, then saw that barely 20,000
were still in the building at game’s end, you have to realize from a pure
business standpoint how big a problem this could become.
Empty seats and blackouts are evil words in the National Football League
empire.
It will get even more embarrassing as the season progresses when visiting teams
start buying up every available seat in the house and the Rams become the
visiting team in their own building.
There are five more home games in the Dome against Cleveland, Seattle, Atlanta,
Green Bay and Pittsburgh. Packers and Steelers fans have already infiltrated
the Rams ticket office, and those games are sellouts. Apparently the next home
game, Oct. 28 with Cleveland, could be half-filled with Browns fans, too.
So maybe the scenery around here is about to change, but I don’t think anyone’s
going to enjoy the view.
