George Allen's six keys to winning

http://www.si.com/vault/1967/09/18/612990/rams-year-in-coastal
see link…..First, I wanted to bring in some players who knew how to win,” he said the other day at the plush Ram training camp in Fullerton, Calif. “The Rams had been losers for a long time, so I had to trade for players with a winning attitude. We got some and they helped.

“Second, we had to get over the idea we were building for the future,” he said. “The Rams were always building. I said this is the year we win, not build. I kept veterans who could help immediately, not rookies who would be a help in the years to come.

Third, the Rams were not a tough club mentally and I wanted to instill a feeling of toughness in them.

Fourth, the Rams were losers on the road, and I wanted to change that, too. When we beat Baltimore in Baltimore last year, I think we turned a corner. After that the club began to believe it could win away from home.”

Fresh from the hard-bitten Halas regime of the Chicago Bears, Allen also made a serious effort to destroy the Ram Hollywood image, something that had afflicted the team for years. One Ram coach of past days had said that the trouble with the club was too many cars with the top down and too many girls. A rigid curfew and strict discipline got rid of both, thus accomplishing Allen’s fifth objective.

“As for the sixth,” Allen said, “I wanted to put in a basic, simple offense to tie in with an improved defense. We didn’t want any errors on offense. If you can bring the defense up and make no mistakes on offense, you can win.”

Allen improved the defense enormously. The Rams moved from last to third in the league in pass interceptions and from last to third in percentage of passes completed against them. They moved from ninth to second in total points scored against them, allowing only 212, the best record by a Ram team since 1945. Only the Green Bay Packers were ahead of them.

But the Rams’ simple offense, hampered by the lack of a good running back to supplement the all but heroic efforts of Dick Bass, managed very little. This year, bent on improving the running, Allen traded with the Minnesota Vikings for two good veterans—Mason, who is, when healthy, one of the two or three best runners in the NFL, and Hal Bedsole, a big, tough tight end from USC, who last year could have given the Ram offensive line the extra blocking punch it needed. Bedsole, unfortunately, has not recovered from an operation and is out for at least half the year.

“Our two principal objectives for 1967 have to do with offense,” Allen said. “We must pick up short yardage on third down; that’s one reason we went for Mason, to take the pressure off Bass. Last year, in 19 third-and-one situations, we made the yardage only six times. We gave up the ball 13 times and you cannot do that against good offensive teams. Second, we must protect the quarterback better.”

The Ram quarterbacks were caught attempting to pass 54 times in 1966. “Our objective in 1967,” said Allen, who is a precise man, “is no more than 31 times.”

On defense, Allen has told his charges that he wants them to limit opponents to fewer than 200 points, or about two touchdowns per club per game. Once before in his coaching career, when he was the defensive coach for the Chicago Bears, Allen realized this objective. In 1963, when the offense-poor Bears won the NFL cham… see link…