Columnist Dean Juipe: Collapse ruins Rams’ record, aura

Dean Juipe

Monday, Oct. 29, 2001 | 10:53 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or 259-4084.

Fans and bettors alike are well aware of how dramatically things can change in the National Football League from week to week.

One week Minnesota is unexpectedly roughing up Green Bay while Pittsburgh is surprising Tampa Bay, as happened Oct. 21, and seven days later the Vikings get steamrolled by the Bucs and start fighting among themselves on the sideline, as they did Sunday.

But even within the parameters of the NFL, where the unexpected is so routine and commonplace that it is a significant factor in the league's unbridled popularity, it's difficult to fathom the reversal of fortunes suffered by the St. Louis Rams -- within a single game.

Football's most exciting team also showed that it lives a little too dangerously for its own good. Its devil-may-care attitude led directly to a ghastly seven turnovers as it turned a comfortable 24-6 halftime advantage into a 34-31 loss to the New Orleans Saints that ruined many a Rams fan's Halloween.

The surviving members of the 1972 Miami Dolphins can go ahead and celebrate, as they do every year when the last undefeated NFL team goes down. No team has had a perfect season since those 17-0 Dolphins, and no team will this season now that previously undefeated St. Louis choked on an 18-point lead and lost a game it clearly should have won.

It's almost funny in retrospect, but at halftime those bettors who had the Rams at minus 12 had to be counting their money and wondering only if the game would reach the over/under total of 49. There couldn't have been a person in Las Vegas who thought the Saints would rise from the dead.

But, by the same token, no one knew the teams were going to switch uniforms during the intermission. No one knew that New Orleans would pick up where St. Louis left off, and that the Saints -- and not the Rams -- would threaten to short-circuit the scoreboard during a stunning second half that concluded with John Carney's chip shot field goal and a New Orleans victory.

It was stunning, to an extreme.

Watching the game here in the office, I spent the first half marveling -- as I frequently have in the past -- at the Rams' offensive "Star Wars" weaponry and examining their remaining schedule. With lots of lightweights left to play, the reasonable assumption at the time was that St. Louis was crossing a major hurdle and that it might well get through the regular season without a loss.

But that's why pencils have erasers and keyboards have a delete key, as the Rams were so horrid and sloppy in the second half that anything frivolously written, considered or speculated about their remaining fortunes was rendered all but meaningless.

They turned in a major-league collapse.

The outgrowth, beyond seeing the "Greatest Show on Earth" reduced to a county fair of mistakes, is a renewed sense of overall optimism within the league. Whereas the Rams had been widely feared for their razzle-dazzle play calling and finesse, an updated evaluation would have to include the possibility that they can self-destruct at any time.

Contenders everywhere have to rejoice. The physical, let alone psychological, hold the Rams had on the league through the first six weeks of the season has been broken.

Now they're the ones who need to mend.