With time to scan the crowd, Kurt Warner saw the hand-held sign that was both prophetic and defiant.
“It said, `We still haven’t played anybody,'” Warner said with a smile.
It’s beginning to look like the St. Louis Rams haven’t played anybody because they are turning everybody into nobody.
The score of their 49-37 win Sunday in the NFC divisional playoffs gives the Minnesota Vikings too much credit. It suggests a shootout instead of a massacre.
This was barely a game even when the Vikings led 17-14 at the half.
“We were scoring too fast,” Rams coach Dick Vermeil explained. “We had only stopped ourselves.”
Tony Horne corrected part of the problem by returning the second-half kickoff 95 yards for a touchdown and the Rams started looking ahead to Sunday’s NFC championship game here against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
By the time it was 49-17, the Rams sat back with the TWA Dome crowd and enjoyed the first NFL playoff game ever in St. Louis.
Horne is one of the lesser-known weapons in a Rams arsenal so vast and so fast it made the explosive Vikings look like a team from the 20th Century.
Warner, the unlikeliest NFL hero since Johnny Unitas, threw five touchdown passes to five different receivers, only a couple of whom you might know–Isaac Bruce and Marshall Faulk. The others–Jeff Robinson, Ryan Tucker and Roland Williams–were among the 10 targets Warner hit with astonishing accuracy.
Only six of his 33 passes were incomplete, three of them drops and one an interception. His passer rating of 142.9 was close to a perfect 158.3.
“So much for not having any playoff experience,” Vermeil said. “Talent is more important than experience.”
In winning 13 games, the Rams had not beaten a team that finished with a winning record, but they beat everybody they played at home by an average rout of 35-10. The Vikings were supposed to be the only team capable of staying with the league’s No. 1 offense. Now, it’s up to the NFC’s No. 1 defense of the Buccaneers, which appears to be an even more daunting task.
“I haven’t seen a defense stop us yet,” Warner said.
Vermeil estimated that offensive coordinator Mike Martz, the league’s newest passing guru, used only a fraction of his playbook in racking up 405 yards in only 52 plays. After Horne’s return, the Rams had run only 16 plays from scrimmage to 46 for the Vikings.
“We couldn’t call everything we had in our game plan if we played three weeks in a row,” Vermeil said.
Warner hit Bruce for a 77-yard touchdown on the first play of a game that started out copying Saturday’s 62-7 AFC divisional blowout by Jacksonville against Miami.
Faulk scored on a 41-yard screen pass on the Rams’ fifth play. On the eighth, Az-Zahir Hakim dropped a third-down pass that might have gone the distance. On the ninth, Faulk fumbled.
To his credit, Minnesota quarterback Jeff George took some shots on blitzes and still guided a 96-yard scoring drive to temporarily quiet the crowd. But his 424 yards passing barely kept it close. Three of his four touchdown passes came in the last five minutes when Vermeil apologized for “delaying cocktail hour.”
Vermeil said: “I don’t think we’ve played our best game.” But he allowed: “The third quarter is about as good as we can play.”
This should comfort Tampa Bay coach Tony Dungy.
“We went in thinking we could take advantage of their secondary if we pass protected,” Vermeil said.
Down at the half, Vermeil told his team: “We’ve taken their best shot.”
Horne tripped and nearly fell early on his return.
“Once I regained my balance, I knew it was going to the house because I had two blockers,” Horne said.
Said Vermeil: “I didn’t expect that, but I sure appreciated it.”
“We really believed we were going to win the game,” George said. “We thought the crowd was out of it. The whole momentum changed.”
Warner then hit 11 of 12 passes for 141 yards in the third quarter. By early in the fourth, it was 42-17. The Rams were even trying to slow things down and run time off the clock, inserting fullback Robert Holcombe to block for Faulk. The Rams ended up with only 31 yards rushing. They simply didn’t need to run.
Vikings coach Dennis Green analyzed it this way: “Anytime you go into the fourth quarter and a team hasn’t gotten more than 50 yards rushing and you’ve got the kind of points they had, that means there were just too many times guys were on the ground slipping, falling, or too many plays that they made off their athletic ability.”
Explained Faulk: “They played a lot of eight-man front. They wanted to see how good we really are in passing.”
Warner exploited the Vikings’ zones with short crossing routes and was sacked only twice.
“We thought we could score every time if we didn’t turn the ball over,” Warner said.
Martz noticed that Tampa Bay has “a similar defense in structure to what we’ve seen today.” He managed to keep from smiling.
Said Bruce: “I think we played somebody today. They were a tough team. I think we finally smashed that question of us not playing anybody.”
“Hopefully,” Vermeil said, “we painted a glaring picture that we don’t have any obvious weakness.”
