A moment in the color commentary in the 1st game in '99. (It might have been the 2nd, but I think it was the first.) The color guy--whoever--said something that really clicked with me, not just about that Ram team. He said (paraphrase 18 years after the fact) ...
Quote
'99 Color Guy
You know, the talent ... it's there.
The talent was there. That defense had a lot of talent. And we had Ike and Orlando and some TEs BEFORE we drafted Torry and acquired Marshall. (Was Ricky P already there? I think Kurt was there the year before?)
But no one took us seriously because the talent had not previously asserted itself. We were a bad team with a lot of talent.
Then, Trent went down, Kurt came on, and Martz went to work. Suddenly, it coalesced into a wondrous thing. But what the color guy was responding to was the fact that talent that had been there all along shrugged off the shrouds of mediocrity and emerged to be seen. When the culture train leaves the station hidden talent announces itself. That color guy was trying to make sense of a startling emergence, but what he saw was not the miracle of a talentless team suddenly becoming gifted, but an already talented team stepping into its potential.
I think all teams that step up and announce themselves do what the '99 Rams did, albeit on lesser scales.
And, of course, it can go the other way as well, and that is usually just as abrupt!
