If you are a Rams fan of a certain age, it wouldn’t be surprising if the prospect of an NFC wild-card matchup with the Minnesota Vikings has you shuddering.
Or at least shivering.
Yes, it’s been five decades or so, but if you’ve survived long enough on this earth you probably remember those four postseason meetings between Los Angeles and Minnesota from 1969 through 1977. Three of them were played outdoors in the winter chill of Bloomington, Minn., and the fourth happened to be the day the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum became a mud bog.
All were won by the Vikings. And while Minnesota has dealt with its own “can’t win the big one” reputation – the team still has never won a Lombardi Trophy and last got to Super Bowl XI some 48 seasons ago – the Rams’ inability to get past the Vikings all of those years helped create their own ledger of postseason misery.
Yeah, it’s overly harsh. One team wins the championship each year, which means 31 others are considered underachievers to various degrees. But getting close and having the same team break your heart year after year … that hurts more.
Some background: The Rams were a downtrodden team for a decade, with one winning season from 1956 through ’65, and only after George Allen arrived to coach the team in 1966 did that change. They reached the postseason twice under Allen and 14 of 17 seasons under Chuck Knox, Ray Malavasi and John Robinson from 1973 through ’89, getting to the Super Bowl once – and being greeted by thousands of Terrible Towels in their own backyard, when the Pittsburgh Steelers beat them in Super Bowl XIV at the Rose Bowl 31-19 on Jan. 20, 1980.
At the beginning of that run, their second playoff appearance under Allen – and last, before he was fired by owner Dan Reeves and subsequently hired in Washington – was a divisional playoff game at Bloomington’s Metropolitan Stadium, and maybe it was a harbinger of the future.
On Dec. 27, 1969, the Vikings won 23-20, with quarterback Joe Kapp leading a second-half rally after Roman Gabriel and the Rams had led 17-7 at halftime in front of, according to the Long Beach Independent Press-Telegram’s Al Larson, “47,900 fans of questionable sanity sitting in 17-degree weather.” Three hotly debated penalties against the Rams, plus what the L.A. Times’ Bob Oates described as a “judgment call” when Carl Eller tackled Gabriel for a fourth-quarter safety, helped prop up that second-half comeback.
“That shouldn’t have been a safety,” Gabriel told Larson afterward. “They slid me into the end zone.”
It would be five seasons before the teams would play again in the playoffs, but officiating would be a hot-button issue again. On Dec. 29, 1974, the Rams and Vikings would play for the NFC championship and a berth in the Super Bowl, in a comparably balmy 30 degrees in Bloomington. And the Vikings’ eventual 14-10 victory may have hinged on one play, and one call, in the third quarter.
Trailing 7-3, the Rams had the ball inside the Vikings’ 1-yard line. The call was for James Harris on a quarterback sneak, but the Rams never got the play off because Hall of Fame guard Tom Mack was called for illegal procedure, the interpretation being that he flinched and drew Vikings’ pass rusher Alan Page offside. Two plays later, Harris threw an interception in the end zone.
As these adolescent eyes saw it at the time, Mack never moved – and still hasn’t – but you be the judge. After the game, Mack told the Press-Telegram’s Rich Roberts, “I think Alan just took a calculated shot and fired into us. It worked. He started pointing at me and this guy (official) came running in and said, ‘I think it was one of their guys inside that moved.’ … I’ll bet the film check will show I didn’t move, and Charlie (Cowan, left tackle) didn’t move either.”
Page’s version, as reported by Press-Telegram correspondent C. William Lapworth: “What did I have to lose, half the distrance? That was 1½ inches. I figured I didn’t have anything to lose. … It looked to me like both Tom Mack and Charlie Cowan ‘flinched.’ That was enough for me. I charged.”
It wasn’t the only controversial call in that game. An offside penalty on Fred Dryer on third-and-4 wiped out a fourth-quarter sack of Fran Tarkenton and gave the Vikings a first down at the 7, and Dave Osborn’s 1-yard run gave Minnesota a 14-3 lead.
If insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result … well, two years later the teams played at Bloomington again in the NFC championship game, and the Vikings won again 24-13 in 19-degree weather. This one was as close as it was only because the Rams scored twice in the third quarter after falling behind 17-0, and the trend probably was set late in the first quarter, when, with the Rams on the Vikings’ 6-inch line – sound familiar? – coach Chuck Knox opted for a field goal.
Yep, you guessed it. The kick was blocked, Bobby Bryant returned it 90 yards for a touchdown, and as the late Jim Murray described it in the L.A. Times, “The Rams looked like a guy chasing a bus the rest of the day.”
After all of that misery in Minnesota – look, in those days the Green Bay Packers weren’t the only team playing on what NFL Films’ John Facenda called “the frozen tundra” – imagine the glee in Southern California one year later, when a Rams-Vikings divisional showdown would be contested in L.A. for a change.
Um, well …
The box score listed the conditions for that 6 p.m. Monday night kickoff as “60 degrees, relative humidity 91%.” As the Press-Telegram’s headline over Gary Rausch’s sidebar put it: “That wasn’t rain, it was Minnesota sunshine.” Vikings coach Bud Grant said he was “tickled to death” when it started raining, and – again – the team accustomed to inclement weather had the advantage.
Minnesota quarterback Bob Lee threw only 10 passes and completed five for 57 yards, all on a first possession that ended with Chuck Foreman’s 1-yard touchdown run.
As the field got sloppier, the Vikings eschewed the pass altogether. Rams quarterback Pat Haden, forced to play catch-up, completed 14 of 32 for 130 yards but threw three interceptions. That negated a 267-189 edge in total offense, and after the Vikings’ 14-7 victory, Minnesota linebacker Fred McNeill told Rausch, “That’s the way football should be played – in the rain and mud.”
McNeill, by the way, played his college ball at UCLA.
Yes, it’s ancient history and has nothing to do with Monday’s matchup. Both teams now play under roofs, and there will be no inclement conditions in SoFi Stadium.
And the Rams aren’t a total zero against the Vikings in the postseason. They’re 2-5 all told; they won a divisional game at the Coliseum 34-10 in January 1979, lost to Minnesota in a wild-card game 28-17 in 1988, and as the St. Louis Rams defeated the Vikings 49-37 in 1999 en route to the franchise’s first Super Bowl championship.
L.A. fans, I’ll leave it to you to decide if you should care about those St. Louis triumphs.
jalexander@scng.com