Most observers, myself included, figured the Rams would be one of the worst teams in the NFL this year.
They mortgaged their future for a Super Bowl, got one in 2021, and then fell off a cliff in 2022.
During and after the 2022 season, head coach Sean McVay flirted with making the move to commentary and they traded or cut a number of key pieces like Jalen Ramsay, Allen Robinson, Leonard Floyd, and Bobby Wagner. The Rams seemed to be tearing it down to the studs and starting all over again.
But nobody told McVay or GM Les Snead who have combined forces yet again to put together one of the best, most interesting, stars and scrubs rosters in recent memory.
Sean McVay is like a real-life Ethan Hunt from 20 years ago. There doesn’t seem to be anything he’s bad at. He’s jacked, has hair that was cool in 2013 and will probably come back into fashion like low waisted pants and looking heroin chic, his wife is a Ukrainian model, he was one of the first in a wave of offensive playcalling head coaches, and he can coach teams full of stars and teams full of rookies to relative success.
The comparison with Ethan Hunt doesn’t stop there. He’s also shorter than you think!
Soon enough I bet he’s riding a motorbike over a mountain in the Swiss alps.
But before getting to McVay’s various innovations, the place to start is the roster and GM Les Snead. Between 2016 and 2023, Les Snead traded away every single one of his first-round picks. They traded their 2016 and 2017 picks in the trade up to go and get Jared Goff, they traded their 2018 pick for Brandin Cooks, they traded down in 2019 to pick up later draft capital, they traded 2020 and 2021 for Jalen Ramsey and they traded 2022 and 2023 for Matthew Stafford. The last first round pick they used was on Todd Gurley, who is out of the league.
They also came into the season carrying the second most dead money in the league, with $74.2m counting against the cap for players not currently playing on the Rams. That number is driven by $19m or more in dead cap hits for Allen Robinson, Jalen Ramsay and Leonard Floyd.
The above paragraphs appear to be a written representation of mortgaging the future. But this year the Rams are in the thick of the NFC playoff race.
How? While the Rams traded premium draft capital over the years, they did manage to consistently stockpile non-premium picks and trusted their ability to find value in the third round and later.
And they’ve proven themselves right.
Earlier in this piece I described them as a stars and scrubs rosters. That might be both too lenient and too harsh all at once. The Rams are what Australia is becoming. There is no middle class.
They have three players who make over $17m against the cap (Aaron Donald, Matt Stafford and Cooper Kupp. Nobody on the roster makes between $17m and $10m against the cap. Then they have a further three players who make over $5m against the cap. Other than those 6 players who all count for more than $5m against the cap, nobody on the roster is making more than $3.05m.
How does that work? As I mentioned, they have drafted in non-premium positions lately and done it well. They currently have 24, basically half of an active roster, players who were drafted or signed as undrafted free agents by the Rams in 2021 or later, in the third round or later. Steve Avila and Tutu Atwell, both largely disappointing, were the highest picks on the roster of the players making less than $3.1m against the cap and they were taken in the second round.
Some of those players have turned into genuine stars, notably Kyren Williams (2022 5th rounder) and Puka Nakua (2023 5th rounder), but most have turned into valuable role players who are able to benefit from and complement the three superstars around whom the roster is constructed.
But it’s not just the superstars, it’s the coaching. Sean McVay has done a truly exceptional job this season. After a year where it didn’t work in 2022, McVay has changed everything to try and fit his gamestyle to the players on his offence.
As a Shanahan disciple, the first version of McVay was a wide zone sort of scheme with boots and screens to make life easy on the quarterback and he took the league by storm.
Then the league worked it out so he went and got Matt Stafford and built an explosive passing game out of empty formations.
Then he changed again as the talent started to dissipate and went more to max protection looks and trying to generate explosive plays out of that, while sprinkling in option routes for Cooper Kupp to abuse defensive backs.
And this year, McVay has innovated again. He abandoned his wide-zone roots and has moved to downhill, gap run scheme, building his offence out of a “duo” run. Duo is a downhill run where you’re trying to get double teams across the line of scrimmage and get your offensive linemen pushing defensive linemen. The idea is that the back gets downhill, exploits the double teams, and is able to get to the second level quickly.
The reason this run works so well now because teams generally have lighter boxes, in large part as a reaction to Sean McVay’s offensive success. McVay is the Tim Robinson hot dog meme.
Against the Ravens in one of the games of the year, the Rams were able to run the ball extremely effectively utilising the duo concept to the point where they lived in third and manageable, with 9 of their 16 third downs needing 6 yards or less. As a result, they were able to put up 31 points against the extremely miserly Ravens defence, the second most they’ve given up all year.
This a week after putting up 36 against the Browns, also their second most points against for the year.
By making themselves into one of the league’s most efficient run games, they’ve also breathed new life into Matt Stafford’s career. After an offseason where it seemed like retirement was a real option, Stafford is once again a weapon showing off his extraordinary arm talent again and again.
The game against the Ravens was like the fight with the brute in The Killer. Their different styles in trying to get to the same point complimented each other perfectly.
The other comparison might just be a good old-fashioned dick measuring contest. But instead of measuring the size of dicks, they were measuring the angles and strength of their arms.
A midseason, likely to be forgotten, classic.
The Rams are only a game out of the playoffs as it currently stands and play the Commanders this week. I hope they make it, so we get to see this motley crew of three stars and a million kids give some more established, more expensive team fits.
Comments