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Lovie does it Rams defensive coordinator changed team's mindsetPosted: Thursday January 31, 2002 6:11 PM
NEW ORLEANS -- The Rams were revolutionary on defense this season. They decided to try harder. To put it another way, in Lovie Smith's no-slack world, a half a loaf is definitely never better than none. Smith, the St. Louis's first-year defensive coordinator, keeps a "loaf" chart for every Rams defender, grading every play of every game for full speed effort. Execution is important in Smith's system. Effort is mandatory. At all times. Imagine that. I say, leave it to the ever-revving Rams to run the hurry-up defense. "We just think that's something you can control," says Smith, the former Tampa Bay linebackers coach, who arrived in St. Louis last offseason preaching the gospel of all-out pursuit. "We may get there at a different pace, but we can all do it at 100 percent. That's the first thing we look at. Sometimes we don't look at technique, but we always grade pursuit. We just won't put up with anything but that. "We know how fast all of our players are. We've seen them run. So we expect them to run that fast until the whistle blows. If we see a player change speeds, and he speeds up, he's loafing. He should have been running that fast right away."
With that kind of mindset, is it any wonder that one of the biggest stories in the NFL this season was how the Rams defense got better in a hurry? I mean, they seem to do everything on double time in St. Louis. To hear tell it, the Rams don't even hold Friday walk-throughs any more. Takes too long. All that maximum effort has paid off in no time for St. Louis, whose defensive collapse in 2000 has been well-chronicled. With the infusion of Smith and eight new starters -- a reconstruction almost worthy of the post-Civil War era -- the Rams defense enters Sunday's Super Bowl XXXVI within spitting distance of being equal partners with St. Louis's vaunted, MVP-strewn offense. "Last year, the only reason we weren't in the Super Bowl was because of our defense," says Rams defensive end Grant Wistrom. "This year, we wanted to be part of the solution and not the cause of the problem." In 2000, the Rams came close to being the first NFL team in history to score more than 500 points while giving up at least 500. As it was, St. Louis' 471 points allowed were the seventh most in league history, and ranked 31st and dead last among its peers. And those numbers don't even reflect the Rams' hideous 31-28 playoff loss at New Orleans in the wild-card round, a game in which St. Louis trailed 31-7 before rallying with three late touchdowns. "You turned on the film and you just got sick from the lack of effort," says Wistrom, recalling the dark days of last season. "You had some guys here that couldn't be coached last year, and they're not here now." Ah, but Lovie is. And in large part because of it, the Rams this season skyrocketed to the league's No. 3 ranked defense in terms of yards allowed, and No. 1 in the NFC. St. Louis' 273 points surrendered ranked seventh in the NFL, and meant that the Rams defense allowed 12.3 points per game fewer than it did in 2000. That startling improvement, from 29.4 ppg to 17.1, has been bettered by only six teams in NFL history. "Everybody on our team plays hard now, and it's a lot of fun," says Wistrom, one of the Rams three holdover starters on defense, along with middle linebacker London Fletcher and cornerback Dexter McCleon. "You don't have to worry about who's going to show up on Sunday. You don't have to worry about who's going to go out there and give 100 percent, because everybody does. That's why we're so successful. "Now you can turn on the video and you'll see five or six guys around the ball. Sometimes you'll see eight, nine, 10 guys around the ball. Last year you saw maybe two or three guys around the football. It's a race now, to get to the football." Don't get us wrong. Upgrading the defensive personnel played a significant role in St. Louis's Super Bowl season. If hustle alone got it done, every coach in the country would crack the whip like you wouldn't believe in order to win games. But more than anything, the Rams' success is traceable to Smith's system and approach. In the Cover 2 defensive scheme that Smith brought with him from Tampa Bay - where the safeties stay deep and split the field, trying to keep the play in front of them -- players are rewarded for getting up field and swarming to the football. Speed and quickness are prioritized, and size is less essential. Above all else, desire and attitude are the Alpha and the Omega of the Rams defense. Describing how St. Louis's new defense works isn't tough, says DeMarco Farr, who spent the past seven seasons as a Rams defensive tackle, but was one of the replaced eight former starters: "See ball. Get ball. It's that simple." Things didn't look too simple when Smith arrived. All Rams head coach Mike Martz asked of him was one thing: Make the St. Louis defense the equal of its offense. Oh, is that all? "He told me, 'Lovie, hey, we're not where we need to be,'" says Smith. "We're going to start over from scratch. He had just blind faith to let me go with it. I just trusted him that he'd get the right personnel to totally revamp it. Initially he talked about us having the best defense and the best offense in the league. "Of course, you raise your eyes at that right now, and that's the first thing everybody thinks. But we were new, the players and the coaches, and we didn't know any different. It was what we were brought in here to do." The Rams also brought in busloads of new talent. Veterans like cornerback Aeneas Williams, free safety Kim Herring, defensive end Chidi Ahanotu, linebacker Don Davis and defensive tackle Tyoka Jackson were mixed successfully with rookies like safety Adam Archuleta (who has a great name to be playing in the city called the Gateway to the West) and linebacker Tommy Polley. "We brought in good players, why should we be bad?" says Smith. "We never understood that. We had the mindset that we were supposed to be good right away." Yeah, but this good? This quick? "You may dream about turning it around as quickly as we did, but you wouldn't expect it to become reality," says Fletcher. "But we jelled quickly and got it done. We're a whole new defense compared to last year." One on which loafing is no longer optional. Don Banks covers pro football for CNNSI.com.
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