'I screwed up'

Martz blames himself for Rams' heartbreaking loss to Skins

LANDOVER, Md. -- It wasn't the particular second guess that Mike Martz had braced himself for all week. But if his St. Louis Rams come up one win short of the playoffs -- one win from digging their way out of the historic hole that they put themselves in at the start of this season -- Sunday's game-turning choice will spawn the kind of self-doubt that he'll carry with him for the longest time.

Martz and his Rams were so close they could taste that sixth victory. First and goal at the Redskins’ 6. Seventeen seconds remaining. No timeouts. Trailing by three, they'd take a shot -- one shot only -- at the end zone, then kick the chippie field goal and take their chances in overtime.

And who would bet against the Rams, winners of five straight and having already overcome a 10-point fourth-quarter deficit? This was a team on a mission, and the worst of Sunday's hurdles seemed already cleared. No Marshall Faulk? No problem. Just plug in rookie Lamar Gordon and watch him produce 108 total yards. No Marc Bulger? Relax. Kurt Warner was back, and in 301-yard, two-touchdown form.

All the Rams had to do was take care of one more piece of business -- one more snap -- and their improbable season would take another huge step toward an unprecedented reversal of fortune.

There were only six yards between them and a winning record for the first time all year. Six yards separated them from honest-to-goodness life in the NFC playoff race. But it was six yards farther than the Rams could manage. And that, as his workday at FedEx Field drew to a close, drove Martz mad.

"It's a bad call. I just made a bad call at the end," said the Rams head coach, repeatedly flogging himself for Warner's fumble at the Washington 13 with 11 seconds to go that resulted from Redskins linebacker LaVar Arrington storming in and stripping him of the ball. "We lost this one on a coaching error at the end. That's what I told the players. You played well enough to win.

"Instead of a [pass play with a] five-step [drop], I should have called a three-step. Just thrown the ball out of there real fast. And I know better than that. That's what I'm upset about. I know better than that. Then we could have kicked the field goal and put it into overtime. But I didn't do that. Bad call. Bad call."

Martz wasn't done. After his first round of postgame introspection, he wanted to bleed a little more for us. After a week in which everyone second-guessed his call with regard to a starting quarterback, he couldn't stop second-guessing himself for ordering a slow-developing play that left Warner vulnerable to the pass rush.

"There was another call I wanted to make," Martz said, without elaborating. "I should have made it. I just didn't call it. I screwed up. I really felt like I knew what they were going to be in, and I guessed wrong. That's the way it goes. I wore this [loss].

"I wanted a safe play. Something that was benign. If he doesn't have it, he could throw it out of the back of the end zone. But it just wasn't safe enough. It just didn't work."

It didn't work. And because of that, the Rams are in desperate shape. But while Martz can take his share of the blame for St. Louis' 20-17 loss, which snapped the Rams' five-game winning streak, he shouldn't take too much. It wasn't Martz who allowed the 26th-ranked, Danny Wuerffel-led Redskins offense to run up and down the field for 362 total yards, scoring touchdowns on three of Washington's four second- and third-quarter drives.

"We played solidly in the fourth quarter, but we gave them entirely too much in the first three quarters," Rams cornerback Dre' Bly said. "They were kind of doing whatever they wanted to do, running the ball and throwing the ball. It was just tough."

And it wasn't Martz who was responsible for Warner putting together a solid but streaky starting performance in shaking off eight weeks worth of rust. How streaky? Warner completed his first 15 passes to eight different receivers for 128 yards and a touchdown -- his 100th in 50 career NFL games. That perfect start led the Rams to a 10-0 second-quarter lead that looked like it was about to increase.

Quarterback controversy? What quarterback controversy?

But then Warner and the Rams offense went cold. From late in the first half -- just before he threw a drive-killing interception to Redskins linebacker Jeremiah Trotter deep in Washington territory -- until early in the fourth quarter, Warner was just 4-of-13 for 42 yards. By then, Warner was under constant pressure in the pocket, St. Louis trailed 20-10, and both looked in danger of being trounced.

But mirroring their up-and-down season, back came the Rams, with Warner completing 15 of his last 21 passes for 131 yards and a touchdown -- all in St. Louis' final two possessions. He was a crisp 9-of-10 for 74 yards on the touchdown drive, marching the Rams into position for the win or tie at the Washington 6 after getting the ball back at the St. Louis 20 with 3:28 to go.

You know the rest.

"You can say what you want about one call," said Warner, who finished 34-of-49, with three sacks, one interception and the lost fumble. "If it works, great; if it doesn't ... you still have to execute, and we still have to make plays. And we didn't play well enough for 60 minutes today to win this football game, and that's the bottom line.

"We were doing a lot of good things early and a lot of good things late. It was just that middle stretch there where we weren't quite finishing things the way we had been. We just came up one play short."

At 5-6, the Rams are on the verge of coming up short this season. They now need their second five-game winning streak of the season to even have a shot at becoming the first team in NFL history to start 0-5 and make the playoffs. Though things look bleak -- they're currently the NFC's ninth-seeded team, two games and a tiebreaker behind No. 6 New Orleans (7-4) with five games remaining -- the Rams had company in terms of missed opportunities in the NFC.

By the time Monday night's Philadelphia at San Francisco game is finished, four of the eight teams ahead of the Rams in the NFC pecking order will have lost this weekend, including Green Bay, New Orleans, the Giants and the Eagles-49ers loser. That's slim hope, but the Rams are still clinging to it as they prepare to travel to Philadelphia next week.

"There is no other 'rest of the season,'" Martz said. "The season ends next week. It's our last game of the season. Each game we play is our last game of the season. That's the dilemma that we have right now. That's the position we're in. We created it. We've got to climb our way out of this hole again. That's all there is to it."

Do the Rams have one more comeback in them? On the Sunday that may define their underachieving season, they pushed the rock almost to the top of the hill before slipping and having it roll over them once more. Now they're running out of time to climb.

"We've got to go for everything we can get right now," Warner said. "We've got to go for 10 wins and see how things go from there. Nobody knows how the rest of the league is going to play out. We were shooting for 11 [wins]. Now we can't get that, but we can get 10. It's difficult, but we have to look at it that way."

Looking ahead is all the Rams have left. Besides, looking back is too painful. Just ask Mike Martz.

Don Banks covers pro football for CNNSI.com.

 

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