Holder takes blame for delay of game penalty

by Jim Thomas

SAN FRANCISCO • Holder Johnny Hekker said he didn’t signal for the ball from long-snapper Jake McQuaide quickly enough in overtime, causing a delay of game that wiped out what would’ve been a game-winning 53-yard field goal by Greg Zuerlein.

“I let the delay happen,” said Hekker, who also is the Rams’ punter. “Greg said he gave me the hand sign with 4 seconds (on the play clock). We’ve never had a snap, a nod to ‘hand flash,’ take more than 4 seconds.

"I’m still kind of puzzled as to how that happened."

The 'hand flash' is Hekker's signal for McQuaide to snap the ball.

The Rams had timeouts available to stop the play clock before it ran out, but coach Jeff Fisher did nothing as the clock ticked down.

Earlier in the game, Hekker kept the Rams’ offense on the field with two successful passes on fake punts, completing a 21-yarder to Rodney McLeod late in the first half, and tossing a 19-yard pass to Lance Kendricks. The pass to Kendricks kept alive a drive that set up the Rams’ final touchdown in regulation.

But Hekker also shanked a punt that traveled 13 yards in the second quarter.

'Terrible' Rams are royally beaten

LONDON • As Rams cornerback Cortland Finnegan so aptly put it: "Sometimes you're the bug, and sometimes you're the windshield."

It wasn't difficult to tell which was which Sunday night in Wembley Stadium.

The Rams got some sightseeing in during their weeklong stay in the England. Among other things, they saw the Tower of London, and the crown jewels, and Trafalgar Square. What they didn't see was that red, white, and blue truck — complete with windshield — otherwise known as the New England Patriots.

After a promising start, the Rams were outscored, outplayed and humiliated by the Patriots in a 45-7 loss before a sellout crowd of 84,004

It was a long way to go to play so poorly. The Rams, now losers of three in a row, fell to 3-5 and have an extra week to stew about it as they enter their bye before returning to action Nov. 11 at San Francisco.

"There's just days where you're going" to stink, defensive end Chris Long said. "And ... we were terrible. We were also playing a Hall of Famer. So it was a bad day to come out and be below average."

The Patriots, who pulled the future Hall of Famer — quarterback Tom Brady — with 8 minutes, 20 seconds to go in the fourth quarter, improved to 5-3. Adding insult to injury, they topped 350 yards of offense for the 17th consecutive game, breaking a record they had shared with the Greatest Show on Turf - more precisely, the 2001 Rams team they defeated in Super Bowl XXXVI.

"They got off to a good start" with the early touchdown, Brady said. "We countered and never looked back."

Things started promisingly enough for the Rams, who came out in the no-huddle after taking the opening kickoff. Just five plays into the game, quarterback Sam Bradford found wide receiver Chris Givens deep for a 50-yard touchdown pass. It marked the fifth consecutive game Givens had caught a pass of 50 yards or more, setting an NFL rookie record.

"First time we touch the ball, we go down and score -- exactly what we planned to do," Bradford said. "And then it just all felt apart from there."

The lead lasted as long as fish and chips do at lunchtime around here. Before you could say "Spygate," it was 28-7 Patriots at halftime.

"I don't know what happened," linebacker James Laurinaitis said. "A lot of things steamrolled against us. We had plays where we just dropped coverages, missed communications. At the end of the day, we're a better defense than this - than what showed."

En route to a 473-yard day on offense, Brady, tight end Rob Gronkowski and the Patriots' underrated running game couldn't be stopped, or even slowed. The Patriots scored TDs on their first five possessions, including all four series in the first half.

The Rams forgot to pack their pass rush for this trip, going sackless for the first time all season. When they rushed four, Brady had plenty of time. When they blitzed, Brady carved them up like a Thanksgiving turkey, frequently throwing to the area vacated by the blitzer.

Former Ram Brandon Lloyd caught only two passes Sunday, but both went for touchdowns as he gave rookie cornerback Janoris Jenkins fits.

Two more Brady TD tosses went to Gronkowski, who gave Rams safeties and anyone else in his path fits with eight catches for 146 yards. Gronkowski looked like a rugby player out there, bouncing off would-be tacklers for extra yardage with his 6-6, 265-pound frame.

"He's a good player," safety Quintin Mikell said. "I think him and Tom have a rapport together, and he creates certain matchup problems with his size and all that stuff. At the end of the day, if we're all doing what we're supposed to do, we can minimize that."

About the only thing that got minimized Sunday was the effectiveness of the Rams' offense. The Rams got some cheap rushing yards near the end of the game, after the Patriots had sent out their JV defense, but Thunder (Steven Jackson) & Lightning (Daryl Richardson) never really got going.

And after the big strike to Givens early, the Rams never did much to exploit one of the league's worst pass defenses.

"You look at their defense and I think they were 30th defending the pass, so we came into this game really expecting to move the ball," Bradford said. "We got beat in every phase of the game. Got dominated. I don't think there is any other way to put it."

After the Rams' opening score, they didn't make it into New England territory again until their fourth possession late in the first half, and that ended in a mini-disaster. On the first play following the 2-minute warning, Greg Zuerlein lined up for a 53-yard field goal but never got "The Leg" on the ball. Holder Johnny Hekker bobbled the snap and was forced to scramble for his life.

Hekker was tackled for a 9-yard loss with New England taking over at its 45, giving Brady a short a field for the Patriots' fourth TD drive of the day just before the half. It wasn't until the end of the third quarter, by which time the Rams were down by 31 points, that New England was forced to punt.

Just before the start of the second half, coach Jeff Fisher gathered the entire Rams team around him on the field and gave an animated speech trying to stir up the squad. So much for the impassioned plea: The Patriots needed only six plays to reach the end zone again after taking the second half kickoff.

At 35-7 and only 2½ minutes into the second half, it was only a matter of how big the shellacking would be. It turned out to be the Rams' worst defeat since a 47-7 setback late in 2009, Steve Spagnuolo's inaugural season in St. Louis, to Fisher's Tennessee Titans.

"What is required to beat a Patriot team that's playing that well on both sides of the ball is a near-perfect game, and obviously, we were unable to do that," Fisher said. "Tom got a hot hand, and had a good sense, and those guys made a lot of plays for him.

"So this will be a real test for our young football team going into the bye week coming off a disappointing loss like this. We'll find out a lot about ourselves."

Fisher Dissects the Miami Loss

by Jim Thomas

Even after watching game film Monday, the Rams' 17-14 defeat in Miami had to be one of those deals in which the head coach scratches his head and wonders out loud: How did we lose this one?

And that kind of loss is tough to take.

"Yeah, it is," Jeff Fisher said. "The numbers — the statistics — reflect a well-played game on both sides of the ball. But you have to be very careful to walk down the hall thinking that things are OK because the statistics were so skewed in our favor."

Boy, were they skewed. The Rams' 462 yards of offense marked their highest single-game output since a 37-31 overtime victory over Washington on Christmas Eve 2006. The Rams piled up 579 yards in that contest.

The Rams' 294 yards in the first half against the Dolphins was the ninth-highest first-half total in the franchise's 75-year history.

On the defensive side of the ball, the Rams allowed only 19 yards rushing to the Dolphins, the lowest total since the move to St. Louis in 1995. Additionally, the 192 total yards allowed tied for eighth-lowest in the franchise's 18 seasons here.

On Monday, Fisher had a distinct idea of how and where things went awry in south Florida.

"When you lose a close game — by a field goal — there's little things that contribute," Fisher said. "And there were some little things. But to me there was also a big thing that contributed to this loss — and that was the second quarter.

"In the second quarter, we had seven penalties, missed two field goals and turned the ball (over) inside our opponent's territory on the 25-yard line."

Plus there was a busted coverage by rookie cornerback Janoris Jenkins that resulted in Miami's first touchdown.

"At the end of the day we let things slip in the second quarter, and then we just couldn't make the plays in the second half to regain it," Fisher said. "When you're playing a close game, you don't guess on a route, and that's what happened with 'Jenks.' Sometimes he guesses right, but he thought he saw something, and the guy ran right by him."

The result was a 29-yard touchdown catch by Marlon Moore, giving Miami a 7-6 lead — a lead the Dolphins never relinquished.

"When you put together a great defensive effort you say: How could we have done better?" Fisher said. "Well, that's certainly how you do better. You don't give up a long ball like that. I'm not singling him out per se, but in close games you can't allow those things to happen."

Fisher provided another example on offense — wide receiver Brandon Gibson played one of his best games as a Ram.

"It's hard to find a better catch than that catch in that last drive, and a couple of the other catches that he made," Fisher said. "But he double-catches one and he should get his feet (in bounds), in (Miami) territory. So he's had a great game, but what if we would've made that catch? Would things be different down there?"

Gibson's bobble came inside the Miami 20 and would've given the Rams a first down on their first drive of the game. Instead, they settled for a Greg Zuerlein field goal.

"So there's your definition of how you lose close games," Fisher said. "You have a lot of little things add up."

Even with the Rams' dominance on offense and defense, the loss to Miami also illustrates the importance of special teams play.

That unit had been very consistent in the first five games but was a big liability against Miami. Besides the three missed field goals by Zuerlein, the Rams committed the day's only turnover — on a fumbled kickoff return by Brit Miller.

"You get up in the traffic, put both hands on it and go down," Fisher said. "You see it (happen) that way too often, guys that aren't used to handling balls need to get down."

Jenkins, taking over on punt returns for the injured Danny Amendola, fumbled his first return out of bounds, costing the Rams field position by pinning them back at their 8.

"We got outplayed on special teams," long snapper Jake McQuaide said. "I think that's gonna be pretty evident."

To start the second half, Marcus Thigpen got loose for a 44-yard kickoff return, giving Miami good field position on its second TD drive.

"We had a guy in the wrong position," Fisher said.

And there was one more glaring special teams problem late in the game. On a fourth-and-1 play from the Miami 40 with 3½ minutes to play, the Dolphins lined up in punt formation. But up-back Chris Clemons took the snap and ran 3 yards for a first down.

The Rams eventually got the ball back, but the successful fake allowed the Dolphins to chew up 1½ minutes of time and forced the Rams to burn their second timeout.

"That's on me," Fisher said. "I didn't think that they would do that, or I would've left the defense out there."

Instead of keeping the starting defense on the field, the Rams had their punt return unit on the field for what turned out to be the fake on a successful gamble by Dolphins head coach Joe Philbin.