| |  Faulk felt out of 'touch' with Rams' plan
By Len Pasquarelli
ESPN.com
NEW ORLEANS -- The old adage insists that numbers, cold and hard and absolute, don't lie.
That wasn't the case for Super Bowl XXXVI, however, and more specifically for St. Louis Rams tailback Marshall Faulk, the league's premier offensive
playmaker.
Look at the stat sheet and it shows that Faulk got 21 "touches," 17 rushes
and four receptions in St. Louis' stunning 20-17 loss to the New England
Patriots. The "touches" were just 3½ less than Faulk averaged in his 14
regular-season appearances and only 1.4 less than the mean for his three
seasons with the Rams.
But when Rams head coach and resident offensive guru Mike Martz reviews the
videotape of the galling defeat, he is apt to conclude that Faulk didn't get
the ball nearly enough.
And, unlike his game plan for attacking the Patriots' defensive scheme,
Martz will be right.
"I don't want to get into it," said Faulk, his shield quickly going up,
minutes after the loss. "You do what they tell you to do. You run the plays
they call. That's how it is and that's how it will be. I don't want to get
into second-guessing now."
True enough, revisiting the Rams' approach will do nothing now to mollify
the hard feelings they will carry for at least six months, until training
camp commences in July at Macomb, Ill., and the quest begins again. But the
fact Martz got the ball so infrequently to Faulk, particularly with the
running game, only serves to fuel the contentions of the critics who suggest
the Rams head coach too often outthinks himself.
In a brilliant but potentially volatile game plan, New England coach Bill
Belichick dared Martz to run the ball, with the Patriots using "nickel" or
"dime" personnel on 54 of 69 snaps. The scheme cried out for the Rams to run
at the smallish Patriots' front, to muscle up and pound the football inside
the tackles, to take another step toward expunging their "finesse"
reputation. But the Rams never tried hard enough to run at the Patriots and,
in essence, made New England's job easier in covering explosive wide
receivers Isaac Bruce and Torry Holt.
The New England defense never really had to commit strong safety Lawyer Milloy to stopping the run and he and free safety Tebucky Jones were able to
roam the deep zones and make big hits on the St. Louis receivers as they ran
across the hashes or up the seams.
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“ |
This is a line who loves it when (Mike Martz) runs it. We
like to show people we aren't just (pass) protection guys, you know? We kind of blew it in that regard. ” |
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— Upset Rams player |
Said cornerback Otis Smith who, along with partner Ty Law, played a
brilliant cover game: "We like to think we support the run pretty good, but
they never made us come up and play it, because they didn't run all that
much."
Only twice, in fact, did the Rams run the ball on more than two successive
plays. The initial time was late in the first quarter, when Faulk carried
for seven, two and six yards. But on the next play quarterback Kurt Warner
was sacked by defensive end Bobby Hamilton for a five-yard loss and the
negative play killed the promising drive.
Halfway through the third period, Faulk carried on four straight plays -- for
12, six, 12 and zero yards -- but two plays later, Smith intercepted Warner
and the Patriots converted the takeaway into a 37-yard field goal by Adam
Vinatieri.
The abandonment of the running game came only a week after Martz went to the
ground at the outset of the second half of last week's NFC championship
game. In that contest, he called seven straight rushing plays for Faulk, and
the Rams' offensive line responded by dominating the Philadelphia
Eagles' defensive front. There was no such commitment on Sunday night, and
there were several St. Louis players privately puzzled by the absence of a
running game.
"This is a line," said one player, "who loves it when (Martz) runs it. We
like to show people we aren't just (pass) protection guys, you know? We kind
of blew it in that regard."
Len Pasquarelli is a senior writer for ESPN.com.
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SB XXXVI Over/Under
