COMMENTARY : As if 49ers Needed a Reason to Hate Rams

SAN FRANCISCO â€”  Perfect season?

Gone.

Longest winning streak in the history of pro football winning streaks?

Gone.

Monday night Armageddon, 11-0 San Francisco vs. 11-0 New York, East vs. West, Left vs. Right, Right vs. Wrong, ABC vs. the rest of the world as we know it?

Gone.

And what was that the 49ers were saying about the Rams, the best thing they could muster in the wake of Sunday’s mind-numbing 28-17 loss to San Francisco’s archrivals from the south part of the state and standings?

They’re gone.

Those good-for-nothing Rams could have been good for something--setting the stage, knowing their place, clearing out of the way--but, no, they even loused that up and now the 49ers have another reason to hate them to the caps of their teeth.

Not that Ronnie Lott needed one.

“I have always hated the Rams and I will go to my grave feeling that way,� Lott said, his eyes narrowing with every word. “I’ve never liked them--not as a kid, not in college, not now.

“The only reason I can think of, the only possible reason for me to like them, is that John Robinson is a friend. Other than that, I want nothing to do with them.

“I never was a Ram fan and I was living in the heart of it. I grew up in Southern California and I went to USC. Part of it was that I used to watch them, when they had Jack Snow and Roman Gabriel and all these great players, and they could never win the big one.�

Lott looked as if he were about to spit.

That’s always been the Rams’ M.O.: They can’t win the big one, but they’re always a pain because they can ruin your own big one before you even get there. That was Sunday’s theme. The Rams entered a miserable 3-7, their season all but done. The 49ers entered came into Sunday 10-0--18-0 over two seasons--and were one victory shy of a) clinching the NFC West championship; b) becoming the first NFL team to win 19 games in a row; and c) setting up the league’s first-ever meeting of 11-0 teams next Monday night, for all the Nielsen points.

If you’ve seen the Rams play a quarter’s worth of defense this year, you knew how this one was going to turn out.

But early on, the 49ers got a very bad feeling.

There were omens.

Like when they looked at the scoreboard during pregame warm-ups and saw that the Giants were going down to defeat against Philadelphia, automatically turning one of the 11-0s into 10-1.

“Maybe it was a mistake that we saw the score of the Giants’ game,� offensive tackle Harris Burton said. “I think that hurt us. When we looked up there and saw they had lost, too, maybe it brought us down.�

Or when they looked at the sky and saw rain and then looked at the ground and saw mud.

“It turned it into an old-style football game,� said tight end Jamie Williams, “and that’s the first one we’ve had like that this year. It was muddy, it was hard to hold on to the football, but what can you do? We have no control over the elements.�

But deep down, 49er linebacker Matt Millen feared the worst, he said, when the Rams scored. Not in the fourth quarter. In the first.

That was when Ram quarterback Jim Everett pitched the ball to fullback Buford McGee, who pitched it to tailback Cleveland Gary. It was a fluke of a play, a fluke of a touchdown, but to Millen, the biggest fluke of all was the aftermath:

Rams 7, 49ers 0.

It was the weirdness before the ultimate weirdness.

“You could tell that the football gods were going to be with them today,� Millen said. “And when that happens, there’s not much you can do about it.�

Initially, Millen also argued that the referees were with the Rams. “We were yelling, ‘Forward lateral! Forward lateral!’ but the referees wouldn’t listen to us,� Millen said.

Someone informed Millen that the play was officially scored a forward pass, McGee to Gary, good for a 22-yard touchdown.

Millen thought about it.

“Good point,� he noted. “I didn’t even think about that. No wonder (the referee) told me to shut up.�

The crushing blow came in the fourth quarter when Gary fumbled his way to glory. A week ago, Gary fumbled near the goal line at about the same time and he blew the game to the Cowboys. Sunday, Gary fumbles near the goal line and he blows into the end zone for the game-breaking touchdown.

“That was a nice little dribble drive,� Millen said. “He dribbled the ball right into the end zone. I was surprised he didn’t wrap it behind his back and slam it.�

Unlike Lott, however, Millen could view the situation unemotionally. Millen doesn’t hate the Rams. He almost became one last season. As a free agent, he had the choice, Anaheim or San Francisco, and opted for the team that put more numbers on his contract.

The way Millen sees it, the Rams are so familiar with the 49ers after a minimum of two meetings per season, every season, “that familiarity doesn’t breed contempt--it breeds confidence. The Rams know how to play us. They were very confident today.�

With or without their 3-7 albatross.

“The Rams may have a bad record,� Millen said, “but they’re not a bad football team. For whatever reasons, they have more talent than their record shows.

“Don’t ask me why. I’ve been playing 11 years and I still can’t figure out why teams go bad. I still don’t know why (the Raiders) were terrible in ’81 and ’82 when I thought we had the best team in football.�

Lott put it this way: “On film, they don’t look like a 3-7 team, not on offense. On offense, what you see are dropped passes and mental mistakes but talent-wise, they’re not 3-7.

“They’ve never played like a 3-7 team against us.�

He hates them for that.