Paulie Pigskin’s Sideline Notebook: Cards beat Rams

As I flip thru my Paulie Pigskin Official Sideline
Reporter Notebook, here’s a Sawed Off Shotgun of
Scribblings…

When you hear Adrian Wilson shout on the sideline: “…He
got his five, he got his five…” AW is reacting to a
Patrick Peterson punt return.

As for “P-Twice,” when he says “gimme five,” like he did
in a special teams meeting before the Baltimore game, he’s
not talking about a handshake. The rookie is talking
about giving him some room. As in, five yards of
space on a punt return. Ding.

Like Peterson repeated during our live on-field interview:
“give me five yards and I’ll meet you in the end zone.”
My next question: “When did you know that you had a real
shot?” Answer: “Once I got past the first surge, that’s
all I needed. I knew that nobody else was going to catch
me…”

Quoting Andre Roberts from our postgame interview when I
asked him about Patrick Peterson: “They’re calling him
special, but he’s something else. I don’t know what it
is, but it’s something more than special.”

As for the locker room scene, let’s just say it was
entirely different from the past month and a half. In
fact, Ken Whisenhunt cited the postgame vibe when I asked
him what the OT win does for confidence: “There’s no
question that we got some confidence, if you could see the
locker room after the game – you could feel it. Success
always helps that. I think our team now has more belief
now that we can make a play at the end of a game to win
it, where we saw 4 or 5 games this year where we didn’t do
that.”

Arguably, the most telling single play of the game was the
blocked field goal. Why? As Coach W said during our
postgame radio interview: “If you want to judge a
football team, you put on the (film of) PAT/FG block and
you see the effort by those guys…” (By the way, Calais
told me after the game that blocking a FG is not
like blocking a shot in basketball. Sometimes you just
have to throw your arm up and pray. As Calais said –
“That one, I got lucky…” )

Although the running game may have been lacking against
the Rams, there was no lack of yelling about the
running game. By my count, a half-dozen Cards coaches &
players took turns airing/chewing out the offense during
the first half, including captain Lyle Sendlein and Beanie
Wells himself. After the game, Coach W said about his
halftime message: “Wasn’t pretty. I said we were getting
beat up front. It was a shame, it was embarrassing, and
we had to change it.”

Can you make a play and still blow the assignment? Sure.
O’Brien Schofield told us on the Big Red Rage radio show
that he did exactly that in Baltimore. On his sack and
strip of Joe Flacco, he said he actually made a mistake:
“I was supposed to stunt the B-gap.” Therein lies the
challenge for Cards coaches – can you count on young guys
to make plays, when they may not know the plays?!

Holy Cannoli Stat: So far this season, the team
winning the coin toss in overtime is 1-5.
#SoYou’reTellingMeThere’sAChance?Yeah!

Is it worth pointing out that the original “P-
Twice” happens to be “Paulie Pigskin?” Uh, didn’t think
so.

And, finally, could the win against the Rams prove to be a
turning point of sorts? Well, listen to the point that
Coach W made during our postgame radio interview about
winning close games: “You have to learn that lesson
somehow. I go back to our first year in ’07, when we had a
bunch of games that were close games. At the end of the
year, we won a game against Atlanta where we made a play
at the end of the game to win it and we were pretty good
from that point on. Hopefully, that’s the way we’re going
right now.”

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