The '99 NFC Championship was terribly great
If you take away the Rams game-winning touchdown, the Bucs won.
The Rams are playing the Buccaneers on Monday Night Football tomorrow night so this week’s newsletter will focus on one of the few times the Rams didn’t play Tampa on Monday night.
Because to hell with Monday Night Football, that’s why.
As I stated in my weekly prediction on Friday, Monday Night Football has become the bane of my football fandom. It’s become a hassle to give a damn about MNF no matter how cool they try to make it.
Monday Night Football sucks. Even when it’s good.
On to some Rams History:
The 1999 NFC Championship game was one of the worst games played in the history of forever, but damn it if it wasn’t one of the most exciting.
After being total dog shit for the better part of the decade, the Rams finally had a breakout season in the final year of the ’90s which was a #TotalRamsMove. Of course, the Rams were finally winning on the brink of what many thought would be the end of the world (see: Y2K). Silver-lining with the current crisis of COVID-19? We might see another Rams Super Bowl win.
Meanwhile Tampa Bay, a team that was dog shit for much longer, was continuing to climb under Tony Dungy, who took the Bucs from the basement of the league to a playoff-caliber team and then to a Super Bowl contender. The Tampa Two defense was suffocating everyone and it looked to do the same against the Rams’ Greatest Show on Turf.
And it did, for the most part.
Tampa Bay kept the top offense in the league under six points for the first 30 minutes and intercepted Kurt Warner four times (twice in each half), one of them coming on Warner’s first pass of the game. They’d end the game with four total INTs. It was as if the Rams had replaced Warner with an actual grocery store employee.
Thankfully, the Rams had their special teams and defense pick up the slack. While Tampa Bay took a 3-0 lead, thanks to football weirdo and genuinely good dude Martin Gramatica, the Rams stole the lead with a Jeff Wilkins field goal and a safety from the Rams defense.
The halftime score was 5-3 at halftime. That’s a horrible score in today’s game. But in 1999, we were jacked to our turtleneck sweaters about that score.
Gramatica put the Bucs back in the lead with a field goal in the third quarter. The Rams tried to get a comeback going with then-rookie Torry Holt, who was all over the field for Warner on the opening drive of the second half. He caught three passes of more than 10 yards on the first drive in the third quarter. Unfortunately, Warner was picked off to end that drive.
Warner ended the following drive with an incomplete pass to Holt, too.
With less than five minutes left in the game, the Rams were pulling no punches. Despite Warner’s poor play, they kept going to the air because the ground game wasn’t doing much for them, either. The Bucs kept Marshall Faulk to just 44 yards on 17 carries and seemed to get stronger as the game went on. The Rams only hope of winning still remained with Warner’s arm.
After their second timeout, Warner finally came through for the Rams only because Ricky Proehl came through for Warner.
On 3rd-and-4 from Tampa’s 30 yard-line, Warner chucked a deep ball to the corner of the end-zone and hit Proehl with a contested touchdown pass. Proehl grabbed the ball and the arm of the Bucs’ defender in the process of the catch. As he came down, Proehl got both feet in-bounds and secured the go-ahead touchdown.
It was euphoric. ‘Poetry in motion’ is often overused by fat baseball writers with little creativity or self-control, but that phrase perfectly captures the beauty in that play. The Bucs were great against the deep-ball threat and yet that’s what ended up defeating them.
The Rams defense held off a Shaun King-led comeback and gave the Rams their first NFC Championship win since 1979.
Warner was 26-of-43 for 258 yards and Proehl finished with more than 100 yards and six catches.
Rams won, 11-6.
See, a score like that would be expected of a terrible Monday Night Football game in today’s NFL. But that score was on par for a quality football game. Am I saying that 90’s football was better? No. Each decade of football is unique in its own way and cannot be compared to another.
What am I saying is that Monday Night Football should die and they should hurl the Booger Mobile into the ocean with Osama Bin Laden. I hate Monday Night Football so much and I hate that I am forced to watch it tomorrow night in order to get my weekly fix of Rams football.
It was a lousy performance by the Rams offense. But 6 points total ain’t gonna win many NFL games. That’s all TB got.