Anthony Dilweg

Lowlights, dark nights and weird sights of football, 1990, as culled from the Dead Season Scrolls: HIGH SCHOOLS A 5-foot-8 member of the girls' cheerleading team at Coronado High (Colo.), whose "great legs" drew admiring comments from one player on the football team, turned out to be a 26-year-old man.

Return with us to a time when holdouts, sore hamstrings and other injuries had not dampened the early-season hopes of two offensive powerhouses. . . . Back to less than a year ago, when Green Bay had quarterback Don Majkowski revved up and ready to pass the ball, and the Rams had sound people to defend against him when he did.

Everybody--yes, even the Dallas Cowboys--can win when the sun is shining, the breaks are rolling true and all is right with your football world. The Packers did, and the happy city of Green Bay is probably still sleeping off the aftereffects. The trick, Ram Coach John Robinson explained Monday, is to win when the sky darkens, the ball starts jumping loose from normally able hands and a second-string quarterback cuts up your defense as if he were Bart Starr.

Clemson is a team on the take. The 12th-ranked Tigers forced 5 turnovers, including Doug Brewster's 68-yard pass interception for a back-breaking touchdown, in a 30-13 Atlantic Coast Conference victory Saturday over Georgia Tech at Atlanta. "Brewster's interception turned the game around for us, there's no doubt about that," Clemson Coach Danny Ford said. "At that time, the game was still in the balance."

Home, sweet Los Angeles Coliseum home. . . . Why leave home when you've won seven consecutive games there as the Raiders have since Art Shell replaced Mike Shanahan as head coach last Oct. 3? . . . The silver and black couldn't have asked for much better support than the 54,206 fans gave them on a sweltering Sunday afternoon that would have been spent more wisely at the beach or pool side . . .

Pay no mind to the flood of magazines, newspapers, newsletters, pamphlets, flyers, skywriters and men on the street trying to tell you who's going to do what in the National Football League this fall. That's easy. We are here to offer more. We are here to tell you what won't happen. . . . The Rams won't catch the 49ers but it won't be because of their September problems.

The Rams might be bad, but you can't say they're listless . . . Top Five Suggested Names for the New Ram Defense: 1. Eagle. 2. Beagle. 3. All Fall Down Now. 4. Look, Ma, No Hands. 5. Poor Fritz. Top Five Cliches Heard in the Ram Locker Room: 1. "We have to reach down and dig deep." 2. "We've hit rock bottom." 3. "We've been through bad times before." 4. "Now we're going to see what we're made of." 5. "Now I'll never get a raise."

Anthony Dilweg, the fluke from Duke, passes for three touchdowns on opening day, turning the Rams green by the bay, and it can get no worse, right? Boomer Esiason goes deep, short, right, left, up the middle and over the top for 471 yards, the most by a Ram opponent, and it can get no worse, right?

The caller to the Chicago radio sports talk show Sunday was adamant: The Bears were never going to be a serious Super Bowl contender with Jim Harbaugh at quarterback. "If they can't trade for a competent quarterback, they should just turn the ball over to (rookie Peter Tom) Willis and let him learn the ropes. Neither Harbaugh or (backup Mike) Tomczak have good enough arms to take us to the Super Bowl. No way."

And the hamstring's connected to the . . . hand bone? All this time we thought Henry Ellard's problem was in his leg. In the thigh of the beholder. His hamstring was strung out through most of the past month, which has been known to impair the running capacity of a wide receiver but, according to recent medical findings, has little to do with hand-eye coordination.