How do you stop the St. Louis Rams? You don’t, unless you’re the Tampa Bay Buccaneers or the New Orleans Saints.

The Buccaneers and Saints were the only teams that defeated the Rams this season and they did so by forcing St. Louis to commit a total of 14 turnovers in the two games.

But the Saints lost to the Rams in the teams’ second meetings and continued to self destruct, avoiding the playoffs altogether. The Buccaneers on the other hand, slid into the last NFC playoff spot and slid out of the playoffs altogether with a first-round loss to Philadelphia.

So with this year’s only two world beaters out of the picture, it appears that less conventional means will be necessary to stop St. Louis. The Rams lead the league in scoring this season while ranking only 17th in the number of offensive play runs. That means their offense is not only deadly, but swift.

And unlike last season, the Rams’ defense is also stout. St. Louis allowed the third fewest yards in the NFL this season and gave up an average of just 17 points per game while scoring an average of 31 points per contest.

To conquer such a mighty force as the Rams, we must call upon the football gods. The past three seasons St. Louis has had a powerful winning essence and that threat must be confronted with an equally powerful losing spirit.

The Cincinnati Bengals are perhaps the only team so consistently bad, so utterly pitiful that they can mess with the mojo of the Rams.

If the Rams are to lose, as the Bengals so often do, every Cincinnati fan must root for St. Louis this Sunday. If this can be achieved, we can only hope that the Bengal’s aura (OK, stink) will be strong enough to overpower the mighty Rams.

However, no matter what the Bengals’ team spirit smells like, it may not be repugnant enough to slow down St. Louis. Perhaps if baseball fans in Chicago and Boston can put aside their petty differences and root for the Rams, the tradition of losing will be too mighty, simply too imposing, for the Rams to withstand. It has been almost a century since the Cubs, Red Sox or White Sox have won anything and maybe their fans can rub something off on the Rams.

There may be another source of mojo that can help trip up St. Louis. Quarterback Kurt Warner is a key to the Rams success. His athletic ability and reputation as an all-a-round good guy landed Warner a job advertising Campbell’s Chunky Soup.

Warner started doing the ads featuring him and his pseudo-mom last year. Now this year’s campaign feature’s Kurt with a new pseudo-mom. Maybe somewhere in the cosmos, Kurt’s old TV mom is casting a spell on Warner that will jinx him this week.

On a somewhat bizzarely-related side note, the guy that butts heads with a ram in a Mountain Dew commercial is now doing an ad for Apple computer software and in the commercial, the Mountain Dew guy is a new father.

That probably has nothing to do with football, but it’s pretty hard to make a case for the Rams losing.

There is one more slightly logical possibility. Hugh Douglass, the Philadelphia defensive end who helped the Eagles separate themselves from the pack by separating the shoulder of Bears quarterback Jim Miller last week, will face Warner on Sunday.

Maybe he can take Warner out as well, and take care of the Rams, but then again if Warner comes out St. Louis will probably just put Marshall Faulk in at quarterback and the Rams will have to settle for winning by 20 instead of 30.