WEEKLY WHINE

Bowling for bowls

Super Bowl XXXIV was contested in Atlanta last week, and unlike most of the past few Super Bowls, nobody knew who was going to win it. Super Bowls XX and onward were all relatively easy outcomes to predict, even though many misinformed people expected Green Bay to win Super Bowl XXXII. But for the previous week, debates raged over the Tennessee Titans and the St Louis Rams. Finally, a Super Bowl with evenly matched teams!

Perhaps it should have been called the Moving Van Bowl. Five years ago, the Rams were the Los Angeles Rams. Four years ago, the Titans were the Houston Oilers. The Rams escaped an aging Anaheim Stadium by having a dome built in St Louis, MO. One corporate sponsor later, Missouri again had two football teams. The Kansas City Chiefs won Super Bowl IV, so Missouri had some experience in football championships. The Oilers escaped an aging Astrodome by having a stadium built on a Nashville river bank, but as it was going up, the team still needed to play somewhere. So the Tennessee Oilers played in the Liberty Bowl in Memphis, TN in 1997 and in Vanderbilt Stadium in Nashville, TN in 1998. For that time, the team's front office was a trailer park. The state of Tennessee had no idea how to react to a professional football team. Indeed, a year of poor attendance at the Liberty Bowl moved the team to Nashville a year earlier than anticipated, even though their new home still was not ready.

In 1999, neither team began on Super Bowl watch. Indeed, St Louis barely blipped the radar screen of football fans going into the season. But a twenty eight point win over defending NFC champion Atlanta made the league take notice in Week 3. By Week 8, the Rams had won their first six games heading into a showdown with none other than the Titans.

Tennessee, a team that had trouble living up to expectations for years, had middling expectations for 1999. Many pundits called them a playoff team, possibly a second round team. But in Week 3, they handed the Jacksonville Jaguars, the consensus Super Bowl favorite, a one point loss in Florida. A Week 7 bye saw them at 5-1 heading into their meeting at home with the 6-0 Rams.

Talk on game day, which just happened to be Halloween, was of the Super Bowl. Would these two teams meet in Atlanta? For some, the idea of seeing the Rams in the Super Bowl was laughable. After the first quarter, maybe it was. Tennessee raced out to a 21-0 lead with two touchdown passes from Steve McNair and a rushing touchdown from McNair. The second quarter was scoreless, but on just the second play of the second half, St Louis was on the board with a 57 yard touchdown pass from Kurt Warner to Marshall Faulk.

Tennessee still had a lead, 24-14, in the fourth quarter. But a Warner touchdown pass to Amp Lee made it a three point game with 02:14 left to play. Lorenzo Styles recovered the onside kick, and St Louis had the ball again. The offense advanced to the Tennessee 20 yard line, where Jeff Wilkins missed a 38 yard field goal. Good news for the Titans was not just their 24-21 win, but the attendance as well. 66,415 people, a club record, showed up to support the suddenly dominant Titans, and attendance was high throughout the year.

But the next week Tennessee was shut out 17-0 by Miami. St Louis lost to Detroit. Were the new superpowers of the NFL slipping? No. Tennessee won its next three games, and St Louis went on a seven game winning streak, scoring an average of 33 points in each game. The 21 points that the Rams scored in the loss to the Titans was their lowest scoring output of the year. The team scored more than 40 points in three different games. At the same time, Tennessee was making observers take notice. They defeated Jacksonville again in Week 16, this time by a comfy 41-14 margin.

At the end of the regular season, each team was 13-3, but the implications were just about as different as they could possibly have been. The Rams' 13-3 record was the best in the NFC, earning them a first round bye and the assurance that all of their postseason games would be indoors. On the other hand, the Titans' 13-3 record wasn't even the best in their division. The Jaguars lost two games to the Titans but won all their others, so they earned the division title at 14-2. That relegated Tennessee to the fourth seed in the AFC. It did not get a week off before the playoffs.

On SAT 08 JAN 2000, I woke up and looked in on the Buffalo-Tennessee score on the web. It was 13-12 in Buffalo's favor at the two minute warning, but the Titans were driving. Soon, Al Del Greco, the longtime Oiler/Titan, converted a 36 yard field goal to give his club a two point advantage. But in 92 seconds, the Bills drove 38 yards and got a 41 yard field goal from Steve Christie with sixteen seconds left. Buffalo had sixteen points, Tennessee fifteen. Then, something funky happened. The web scoreboard showed the same score for some time and finally changed to Buffalo 16, Tennessee 21, 00:03 left in 4th quarter. Eventually, it changed again, to Buffalo 16, Tennessee 22, Final. I then went grocery shopping thinking that a funky thing had happened; in reality it was a completely inexplicable thing. On the kickoff after Christie's field goal, Frank Wycheck heaved the football laterally across the field's entire width. Dyson caught it at the 25 yard line, carefully ensuring that the pass was legal, and followed his blockers all the way to the end zone. Result, a 75 yard kickoff return for a touchdown. Curiously, it was Dyson's first kickoff return of any sort.

The Titans would win two more playoff games, in Indianapolis and in Jacksonville, to qualify for Super Bowl XXXIV. A week after Tennessee's astounding win over Buffalo, the Rams played their first playoff game. It was a 49-37 win over the Vikings, unusual in that the Rams scored more points than in any of their regular season games. The next week, they defeated the Buccaneers 11-6, unusual in that the Rams scored fewer points than in any of their regular season games.

They met in Atlanta to determine the football championship of 1999, even though the game itself was played in 2000. The game seemed to begin slowly, but that was probably because we had grown accustomed to the Rams' offense, normally so quick out of the gates. The Rams started with the ball and advanced as deep as the Tennessee 17 yard line only to turn it over on downs. Then, the Titans moved to the St Louis 29, but Del Greco's 47 yard field goal attempt was off. Wilkins made three out of four field goals in the first half, and it was 9-0 in the Rams' favor at the E-Something-Dot-Com Halftime Show.

In the second half, the Titans started with a 43 yard drive, but Del Greco's 47 yard attempt was blocked. The Rams then advanced 68 yards in only four minutes, and Warner completed a nine yard TD pass to Torry Holt for a 16-0 lead. But the Titans' next drive led to a touchdown in the last minute of the third quarter. They missed a two point conversion, leaving the deficit at 16-6. Another drive, another touchdown. Each was a rushing touchdown by Eddie George from just outside the end zone. By then, it was 16-13, and just over seven minutes remained. St Louis went three-n-out and punted, and the Titans had the ball just short of midfield. They moved 28 yards in four minutes to set up Del Greco's 43 yard field goal. It was now a 16-16 game.

St Louis started at its own 27. On the first play, Warner threw long to Isaac Bruce. He caught the pass at the Tennessee 38 yard line and proceeded to the end zone. The Rams regained the lead by a 23-16 count, with 01:54 remaining. The Titans still had more to come. McNair scrambled 12 yards and drew a 15 yard face mask penalty on the defense. Then, he completed a 16 yard pass to Dyson with 00:05 left and ten yards still to go. The Titans expended their final timeout and drew up their play. On a slant, Dyson caught McNair's pass at the 5 yard line and headed for the end zone, but Mike Jones was there to tackle him. Dyson tried to break free and stretched his arm toward the goal line as much as he could. Even so, he knew he was short.

So for the Rams, the day was saved not by Kurt Warner, although his MVP performance highlighted by a Super Bowl record 414 passing yards didn't hurt. The day was saved by Mike Jones, a name so ordinary that he wasn't even the only Mike Jones around; the Titans have their own Mike Jones, but he missed out on the game. What is one to conclude from all this? First, the Super Bowl is making a recovery. Second, next year you could be watching the portHOLE[tm] by GoobNet Halftime Show.