Rams' Year In Coastal

In the Chinese calendar and the Coastal Division of the National Football League, 1967 is the year of the Ram. By all portents, the year of the Ram will be a more salubrious time for the Los Angeles Rams than it will be for the Chinese.

Although the Rams are in one of the two toughest divisions of the new NFL four-division setup, they stand a far better chance of finishing the fall of 1967 as big winners than they have in recent memory.

George Allen, the young coach who came to Los Angeles last year from the Chicago Bears, did a major reshuffling job in 1966 and still managed to lead the club to the best season it has had since 1958. The shuffling is almost over now and the team is set and solid, especially on defense, where last week the Rams added huge Roger Brown from the Detroit Lions to replace injured Rosie Grier in the front four. On offense, given a reasonably productive year from injury-prone Tommy Mason (see cover), the Rams could be vastly improved.

The stumbling block for Allen, if there is one, is the division itself. San Francisco and Baltimore are formidable foes. The 49ers, deep at quarterback and loaded with large, Packer-type running backs and a respectable complement of talent everywhere else, would be favored in another division. The Baltimore Colts have only one major worry—what to do if John Unitas should be hurt. Atlanta, of course, will not be a factor, but the Falcons are surprisingly sound for a team in its second year of existence. No team in the league will be able to take the Falcons lightly.

When George Allen, a small man with bright blue eyes and a strikingly gung-ho attitude, took over the Rams in 1966, he listed six objectives for making Los Angeles a winner.

"First, I wanted to bring in some players who knew how to win," he said the other day at the plush Ram training camp in Fullerton, Calif. "The Rams had been losers for a long time, so I had to trade for players with a winning attitude. We got some and they helped.

"Second, we had to get over the idea we were building for the future," he said. "The Rams were always building. I said this is the year we win, not build. I kept veterans who could help immediately, not rookies who would be a help in the years to come. Third, the Rams were not a tough club mentally and I wanted to instill a feeling of toughness in them. Fourth, the Rams were losers on the road, and I wanted to change that, too. When we beat Baltimore in Baltimore last year, I think we turned a corner. After that the club began to believe it could win away from home."

Fresh from the hard-bitten Halas regime of the Chicago Bears, Allen also made a serious effort to destroy the Ram Hollywood image, something that had afflicted the team for years. One Ram coach of past days had said that the trouble with the club was too many cars with the top down and too many girls. A rigid curfew and strict discipline got rid of both, thus accomplishing Allen's fifth objective.

"As for the sixth," Allen said, "I wanted to put in a basic, simple offense to tie in with an improved defense. We didn't want any errors on offense. If you can bring the defense up and make no mistakes on offense, you can win."

Allen improved the defense enormously. The Rams moved from last to third in the league in pass interceptions and from last to third in percentage of passes completed against them. They moved from ninth to second in total points scored against them, allowing only 212, the best record by a Ram team since 1945. Only the Green Bay Packers were ahead of them.