-
Search Results
-
How Chiefs, 49ers, Lions and Ravens exorcised demons to reach conference title games
By Ted Nguyen
https://theathletic.com/5218460/2024/01/23/chiefs-49ers-lions-ravens-playoffs-film-breakdown/
The 2023 NFL playoffs have been about exorcising demons that have plagued each team playing in the conference championship round. Heading into the postseason, the narrative was Lamar Jackson struggles against the blitz, Kyle Shanahan’s teams can’t come from behind to win a game in the fourth quarter, Andy Reid is unwilling to run the ball, Jared Goff can’t make big-time throws in the clutch.
It took a half, but Jackson figured out the Texans defense and the Ravens put up 24 second-half points to seal the win.
Shanahan can get notoriously conservative and he cost the 49ers points near the end of the first half, but he kept putting the ball in Brock Purdy’s hands and the quarterback found a way to complete the comeback on the final drive.
Patrick Mahomes was magnificent against the Bills but it was the Chiefs’ heavy personnel groupings and run game that made the difference.
Baker Mayfield and the Buccaneers made the game interesting in the fourth quarter, but Goff answered every time he was called upon.
Lamar figures out the Texans’ blitz
One of the most infamous games of Jackson’s career was when he was blitzed into oblivion by then-Dolphins head coach Brian Flores on Thursday Night Football. It was shocking watching one of the most electric players in the league struggle so mightily. Jackson was sacked four times in that game and the Ravens only managed to score 10 points.
“It was cover 0 a majority of the whole game,” Jackson said after the game. “They just got hot each and every time I’m dropping back … just couldn’t do anything about that.”
What Jackson likely was saying he was “hot,” meaning the defense sent one or more rushers than the offense could block so he had to throw the ball hot. When he did throw hot, the Dolphins were right on top of his receivers and tackled them for short gains — he averaged only 5.5 yards per pass attempt. Professing that he couldn’t do anything about it shows how desperate he was for answers.
In his career, the blitz has reduced Jackson to a below-average quarterback. Among qualifying passers (played in at least 40 games), from 2018-2023, Jackson ranks 20th in EPA per dropback against the blitz. It’s a way for defenses to get the ball out of his hands and keep him in the pocket. Theoretically, there are fewer running lanes when there are more pass rushers.
In the divisional round, Texans head coach DeMeco Ryans took this approach to the next level. He blitzed Jackson at the highest rate he’s ever been blitzed in his career. According to Next Gen Stats, Jackson was blitzed on 75 percent of dropbacks. He struggled with it in the first half but he rose to the occasion in the second half. Jackson finished with 120 yards passing, two touchdowns and completed 13 of 18 passes against the blitz.
Jackson held the ball for an average of 3.51 seconds against the blitz in the first half. He adjusted in the second half and got rid of the ball more than a second faster (2.25 seconds). Throwing the ball faster isn’t simply a decision to do so, you must have quick answers and know where to throw against the different types of blitzes. Offensive coordinator Todd Monken gave Jackson answers that he didn’t have against Miami in 2021.
In that 2021 game, the offense was too static and Jackson kept throwing bubble screens and rub routes that didn’t have enough time to develop. Against the Texans, Monken effectively used motion to force the defense to adjust pre-snap and to create space for Jackson to quickly throw into.
7:53 remaining in the fourth quarter, third-and-7
On third-and-7, the Texans had two linebackers mugged up in the A-gaps. After Jackson motioned running back Justice Hill to the other side, he saw the nickel move inside, which was a tell that he was going to blitz. The offense had a snag concept called with Hill running to the flats. This meant that, despite the frequent blitzing, Monken trusted Jackson enough to call a five-man pass pro.
The edge defender, Jonathan Greenard, to Jackson’s right dropped but the defense still rushed six, meaning they had one more than the offense could block. Jackson had to throw hot but he remained calm and let the route concept develop.
Greenard ran with Hill, which left Zay Flowers wide open on the spot route.
Though there is never a great answer against a quarterback of Jackson’s quality, but blitzing at a high rate was usually the best strategy against him. But based on his play lately, that may not be relevant anymore. It’s not simply a scheme that is helping Jackson. This season, he just has a better understanding of defenses and a noticeable calm about him no matter what the defense tries.
49ers end fourth-quarter funk
I knew the 49ers were going to struggle when I saw how hard the rain started to come down in Santa Clara. Brock Purdy has struggled to throw in the rain and against the Packers, he was off target on 25.6 percent of his passes, the worst rate of his career. The second-worst was when the 49ers played Cleveland in Week 6 in which he also struggled to control the ball in the rain.
Everyone has seen the stat by now, before the divisional round, Shanahan was 0-30 when his teams trailed by five or more points when entering the fourth quarter. It’s hard to come back from those kinds of deficits in general, but it’s still jarring to see that one of the best offensive coaches of all time has never come back from a five-plus-point lead in the fourth quarter.
How did he finally get over the hump? By continually trusting Purdy to throw the ball despite his struggles.
The Packers defense took the correct approach and dared the 49ers to throw. The 49ers have dominated teams that play base defense (some combination of seven defensive linemen and linebackers with four defensive backs) through the air. In the regular season, they led the league in net yards per pass attempt (10.7) and overall yards per game (129.1) against base personnel. But with Purdy struggling, Packers defensive coordinator Joe Barry, who seems to have a newfound respect for the run in recent weeks, was more concerned with stopping Christian McCaffrey. The 49ers struggled to run against the Packers’ base and instead of bashing their heads against the wall, Shanahan kept putting the ball in Purdy’s hands — the QB dropped back a season-high 41 times.
It wasn’t always pretty. His inability to control the ball seemed to be getting into his head. He was missing reads and looked erratic throughout the game. After Packers kicker Anders Carlson missed a 41-yard field goal, the 49ers found themselves down by four points with the ball and 6:41 remaining in the game. On that drive, Purdy was 6 of 7 (George Kittle dropped a pass) for 47 yards and had a nine-yard scramble to set up McCaffrey for the game-winning touchdown run.
3:07 remaining in the fourth quarter, first-and-10
After crossing the midfield line, the 49ers had a mirrored concept with two deep out-breaking routes. Brandon Aiyuk was lined up to the left and backup receiver Chris Conley was lined up to the right. The Packers seemed to be daring the 49ers to throw outside all game. Their corners were cheating inside for most of the game. Why would they think Purdy could throw an out-breaking route with how much he was struggling throughout the game?
As he got to the top of his drop, Purdy kept his front shoulder pointed to the middle of the field and didn’t telegraph the pass. Packers defensive back Jonathan Owens was the flat defender. He was responsible for getting underneath Conley but he seemed to be influenced by Purdy’s body position, as he angled his hips inside and never dropped with any width.
Still, this was a difficult throw. Purdy had to layer the ball over Owens to Conley and he did it perfectly for a 17-yard gain. The clock wasn’t a problem at this point, so they didn’t necessarily have to throw the ball to the sideline but the opportunity was there because of how the Packers were playing the 49ers receivers. Shanahan trusted his young quarterback to make a hard throw and he executed.
Purdy eventually found a way to control the ball and regain his poise when the game was on the line. Shanahan made a terrible game-management error before halftime, playing for a long field goal in the rain instead of trying to get into the red zone or set up for a closer field goal. But he deserves credit for letting Purdy figure things out. The 49ers never trailed by double-digits, so he didn’t have to keep letting Purdy drop back, but he did and Purdy rewarded his trust.
Chiefs’ offensive evolution in the playoffs
Reid has been criticized throughout his career for his clock management and his unwillingness to run the ball. He’s figured out clock management in the last few years but he’s still not a big fan of letting all-world quarterback Patrick Mahomes hand the ball off too many times. And why would he? Most times, taking the ball out of Mahomes’ hands is a win for the defense, but this has been a different kind of season. The Chiefs’ receivers have let them down frequently throughout the season and Kansas City has one of the league’s best defenses. Running the ball more and trusting the defense just makes sense.
The Chiefs also have one of the NFL’s best interiors with Joe Thuney, Creed Humphrey and Trey Smith. Also, the Bills were inordinately banged up at linebacker. According to Next Gen Stats, the Chiefs lined up in 13 personnel (one back, three tight ends, one receiver) on 23.4 percent of plays. On those plays, the Chiefs gained 95 rushing yards with a success rate of 63.6 percent. Against the Bills, they had their fifth-lowest Cook rate game of the season. The “Cook Index” is measured by “how frequently teams pass the ball on first and second downs in the first 28 minutes of regulation, before time remaining and score differential influence run-pass tendencies.”
The Chiefs also created passing opportunities for Mahomes out of their multiple-tight end sets. In multiple-tight end personnel groupings, Mahomes was 8 of 12 for 112 yards (9.2 yards per attempt) and two touchdowns. This multiple-tight ends, physical approach is the latest iteration of Reid’s offense with Mahomes. They’ve evolved from a spread-it-out, deep-passing team to a quick, short-passing attack to this version. This latest iteration may hurt Reid’s pass-happy core the most but it might win him another Super Bowl. He now just has to stop giving the ball to receivers behind the line of scrimmage.
Goff’s fourth-quarter dimes
Dan Campbell isn’t afraid of anything, especially criticism. He will call fake punts in his own territory, he’ll keep taking fourth-down chances, and he’s going to let his often-slandered quarterback throw the ball to ice games. Last week, up by one point, the Lions passed the ball twice in a four-minute drill to ensure they could end the game on kneel-downs with Goff throwing two 11-yard passes for first downs.
Lions are winning playoff games and changing perceptions of what they can accomplish
Against the Buccaneers, the Lions had a seven-point lead and faced third-and-15 with the ball on their 44-yard line. Most teams would call a draw or screen to set themselves up for a punt rather than risk a negative play. Only the teams with mutant quarterbacks like Mahomes or Josh Allen routinely try to throw the ball past the sticks in these situations. Goff doesn’t have the physical traits of those guys, but Campbell and offensive coordinator Ben Johnson trusted him like he’s of that ilk.
9:32 remaining in the fourth quarter, third-and-15
This image gives you an idea about the depth that the receivers have to get to on third-and-very-long. They have to run past the first-down marker, especially on a curl route like Amon-Ra St. Brown ran.
Starting corner Jamel Dean was hurt so the Lions went after his replacement, Zyon McCollum. McCollum’s coverage wasn’t bad. He was breaking right as St. Brown was breaking.
However, Goff led St. Brown back toward him, away from the coverage. The pass needed to be right on the money and it was. The offensive line also deserves a ton of credit for giving Goff a clean pocket on the shotgun equivalent of a seven-step drop.
A few plays later, he threw another dime to St. Brown for the game-sealing touchdown.
Belief and trust in Goff were scarce when he was traded to the Lions. He probably even doubted himself. But if it’s one superpower that Campbell has, it’s making people believe. And it’s not just through cheap words and rah-rah speeches. He makes you believe through his actions. He’s proven that he has absolute trust in Goff by putting the ball in his hands in critical situations — ones in which most coaches would get conservative — and Goff has delivered time after time. This season, Goff has blossomed under the pressure of Campbell’s “gambles” and now, Campbell has the entire city of Detroit believing in Goff and this team.
Only to find out he’s a degenerate gambler.
Okay, degenerate maybe.
But not a gambler.
Kyren Williams is going to score a TD today.
And just to make you guys super jealous…here’s the view outside my hotel window.
Rodrigue: Unpacking the Rams’ trade of Robert Woods to the Titans, an emotionally loaded move driven by finances
The Rams traded receiver Robert Woods to the Titans on Saturday afternoon in exchange for a 2023 sixth-round pick, multiple sources told The Athletic. While the reason for the trade was simple — largely financial, I was told — the ripple effects from it won’t be.
There’s a lot to unpack in a transaction as emotionally loaded as this one is. Woods is a perennial team captain and has been a core leader in the locker room since the Rams signed him in 2017. He helped build the culture that ultimately became so crucial to the Rams’ Super Bowl win. He’s also a Los Angeles native and former USC Trojan who heartbreakingly could not participate on the field through the backstretch of last season’s championship run because he tore his ACL during practice in November (he’s expected to return to full form before training camp).
This trade requires us to hold many things in our minds at once as truths, even as fans and teammates are reeling from it:
• The Rams were not going to pay three receivers $12 million-plus annually. Their acquisition of high-profile receiver Allen Robinson on Thursday was the first in a series of moves that foreshadowed major changes coming to a talent-crowded receivers room. Robinson’s own contract averages about $15 million per year, and I expect the Rams to also restructure triple crown receiver Cooper Kupp’s deal in the coming months to reflect the higher pay of a player of his caliber.
They also want to re-sign Odell Beckham Jr., but it’s important to note that trading Woods wasn’t an either/or situation as far as Beckham is concerned. Beckham’s offer from the Rams isn’t likely to be a high one in its first year at least (or front-loaded if it’s a multiyear deal), because he will play only half a season at best when he returns from his own ACL injury suffered in the Super Bowl.
The Rams will incur a dead-money hit of $8.6 million because they didn’t wait until after June 1 to trade Woods. But, a source directly familiar with the transaction said, the team will save about $10 million between cash, bonus and cap considerations previously owed to Woods in 2022.
They are currently trying to restructure star defensive tackle Aaron Donald’s contract, and it’s likely to be very expensive. They’re also trying to remain aggressive in free agency through the spring and summer to add at important positions (they need another pass rusher and a cornerback, though one of the two can’t affect their compensatory-pick formula).
• Why did the Rams acquire Robinson in the first place if they knew it would mean parting with Woods? Free agency isn’t always linear. Multiple action plans are required, and the Rams pivoted when they didn’t retain outside linebacker Von Miller. They believed as late as Wednesday morning that they would get him back, before the Bills’ quiet push and higher offer (six years, $120 million with $45 million guaranteed) persuaded him away.
As they waited for Miller to explore free agency fully for the first time and make his decision, the other top available pass rushers were signed by other teams. A source said the Rams even internally discussed trade possibilities with Minnesota, who midweek was still figuring out what to do with pass-rusher Danielle Hunter.
When it became clear their top pass-rush options were not viable, they signed Robinson, who was arguably the best free agent still available (and a top-10 player in this free-agent class overall) and fits what specifically Matthew Stafford and McVay want to do with their passing game. Moving Woods then seemed like an inevitability because of Robinson’s salary and Woods’ own.
That’s not to say that the Rams wouldn’t have tried to trade Woods if Miller had stayed, considering his contract. They still could have done so after June 1, and incurred far less dead money in 2022. But, if Miller had stayed, they probably wouldn’t have also been able to afford Robinson. If they couldn’t afford Robinson, they wouldn’t have had an overcrowded and financially disproportionate receivers room (again, Beckham Jr.’s expected offer does not factor into this). Football’s calculus can be cruel.
It was not ideal for the Rams to miss out on pass rushers in free agency’s initial wave (although there were mixed feelings internally about the size of the offer to Miller) On the other hand, a team can’t sit on its heels if its first plan goes awry and another elite player is available. The savings from not retaining Miller, extending Stafford and creating more cap space in 2022, and the extra savings from trading Woods will fold into more moves beyond the acquisition of Robinson.
• Why couldn’t the Rams get more in return? A source said the team got a few calls and offers on Woods over the last two days, especially after they added Robinson. But they also wanted to find a good spot for Woods, and the Titans’ offense certainly is that — his blocking will unlock even more in their already-dangerous run game, and he thrives in play-action-heavy offenses. The Titans still use a ton of play-action, while the Rams dramatically moved away from their usage of it after trading for Stafford.
Between offloading Woods’ salary and the fit, the Rams seemed prepared for the inevitable (and fair) criticism of receiving only a 2023 sixth-rounder for a player of Woods’ caliber.
• To me, this move signals even more of schematic shift in 2022. We saw pieces of this last season, including the movement away from sweeps and play-action passes and the increased usage of pure dropback concepts and empty sets. Adding Stafford, then figuring out what he was truly capable of as a passer, then understanding how defenses were rapidly changing to contain the offense McVay ran from 2017 to 2020 forced the coach to adapt. Schematic changes often mean personnel changes.
The move also signals a dramatic changing-of-the-guard in locker-room leadership, too — or at least, it will have to if the Rams want to keep their team culture cohesive. Stalwart left tackle Andrew Whitworth retired, and veteran punter Johnny Hekker was released. Like those players, Woods’ contributions to the Rams’ ethos were invaluable.
His departure will require younger or newer players to emerge as stability points. The Rams have gambled in many phases of their team-build, and it has worked out for them. But the emotional implications of this move might be among their riskiest bets yet.
Yes, there’s a lot to unpack from a move such as this.
In physics, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Each reaction is in itself a new action, and the cycle continues. Time will tell what this move’s ultimate result is. We currently see only about half of the picture.
The difficult part is that, in losing a player as meaningful as Woods has been to this franchise, to his teammates, coaches, fans and to media, we feel all of it
Stafford not playing at Super Bowl level
The Rams aren’t getting the Matthew Stafford they need to win the Super Bowl
To this point, the NFL has shown it isn’t like the NBA, where a super team can join forces and produce championships. Much of that, of course, is simple numbers: There are only five players per team at a time on a basketball court and they play offense and defense.
This year’s Los Angeles Rams are trying to show it can be done in the NFL, adding Matthew Stafford, Von Miller and Odell Beckham Jr. to a roster that already included Aaron Donald, Jalen Ramsey and MVP candidate Cooper Kupp. The Rams are all in, having used nearly all of their 2022 draft picks in trades to assemble their roster; Los Angeles hasn’t made a pick in the first round since 2016 and, at the moment, won’t until 2024.
When the Rams traded for Stafford earlier this year, the general reaction was an overreaction. Stafford’s career mediocrity was attributed solely to his being a Detroit Lion for 11 years. Being paired with Sean McVay was supposed to be the magic elixir that showed everyone Stafford was a hidden All-Pro all this time, despite being a Pro Bowler just once with Detroit and sharing the field with Hall of Fame receiver Calvin Johnson for his first seven seasons in the league.
Three games in, with the Rams undefeated and coming off a win against the Buccaneers, Stafford was being discussed as an MVP candidate.
Since then, he’s largely been the quarterback he was in Detroit: statistically stellar against bad teams, meh against winning ones. The Rams’ road win over the Arizona Cardinals earlier this month was the first time in his career that Stafford had posted a win over a team that was five games over .500 at kickoff, and just his 11th against a team with a winning record. He’s 0-3 in the postseason.
On Sunday, against a Minnesota Vikings team that was 7-7 when the day began, Stafford had to make Rams fans very nervous. He was 21 for 37 (56.8 percent) for 197 yards with one touchdown, a season-high three interceptions and season-low 5.3 yards per attempt.
He threw picks on back-to-back possessions in the third quarter and was 4-for-9 passing in the red zone, with the Rams scoring only two touchdowns on five trips inside the 20. And that was while Sony Michel rushed for 131 yards, providing the run support we’ve been told ad nauseam Stafford never had with the Lions.
Los Angeles won — in spite of Stafford, not because of him.
That’s a risky proposition in the playoffs.
Yes, yes, Los Angeles is 11-4 and clinched a playoff berth with the win over the Vikings, and it must be noted Stafford lost No. 2 receiver Robert Woods to a season-ending injury. But look at how Stafford has played since completing 70.2 percent of his passes with nine touchdowns, one pick and 10.0 YPA during that 3-0 start, especially since November began. The Rams were winless in three games that month against the Titans, 49ers and Packers, losing by a combined 41 points with Stafford going 78 for 127 (6.6 YPA) with five TDs and five INTs.
And analytically speaking, specifically expected points added (EPA) per play vs. pass blocking grade, Stafford is giving Los Angeles almost exactly the same production it got from Jared Goff in 2018. That’s the year the Rams reached the Super Bowl. Something tells us McVay and general manager Les Snead were hoping for a little more when they gave up two first-round picks to get Stafford ain exchange for Goff. They were expecting elite.
Los Angeles travels to Baltimore this week and finishes at home with San Francisco, both of whom are 8-7 and in the playoff field as of Monday. The Cardinals, at 10-5 and still in the running for the NFC West title, close at Dallas and home with Seattle.
There aren’t many quarterbacks playing who you’re confident can consistently put their team on their back and carry it to a win. Tom Brady, of course; Aaron Rodgers, Patrick Mahomes. Not long ago Russell Wilson belonged in that category, too. Does Stafford?
Great quarterbacks make everyone around them better and lift their games when the stakes are highest. To use McVay’s own words, when a game or a play is “not right, they can make it right.” That’s a big reason the Rams acquired Stafford.
They need him to become that quarterback quickly, or their big gamble for this season will be a big bust.
Matthew Stafford: Big arm meets big opportunity
Jay Busbee
https://sports.yahoo.com/matthew-stafford-big-arm-meets-big-opportunity-160805817.html
There aren’t a whole lot of Matthew Stafford highlights.
For a guy who’s been around the NFL for more than a decade, once briefly ranked as its highest-paid player in history, and already stands inside the all-time top 20 in most major passing categories, that’s a little odd, right?
Sure, there’s the wild-card playoff game back in 2012 when he threw for 380 yards and three touchdowns, which is a nice little stat line but not nearly enough to compensate when your own defense gives up 45 points.
There’s the game in 2009, Stafford’s rookie season with the Lions, when he threw for 422 yards and five touchdowns, heaving the final game-winner with a separated shoulder, to defeat Cleveland. To be fair, that’s a pretty great highlight, and it might be remembered even more fondly had it not been only one of two games Detroit won that year.
There’s … hang on, there have to be some more here. How about the 2015 Pro Bowl, where he won MVP? That do anything for you? No? Maybe the fact that Stafford’s in your home every Thanksgiving, throwing passes high enough to knock satellites out of orbit while helping football fans avoid setting the table?
[It’s winning season: Create or join a Yahoo Fantasy Football league today]
We’re reaching now, and that’s the whole point. For such a statistically accomplished resume — he ranks 16th in both career passes and touchdowns, for instance — Stafford has been a phantom on the national stage. Every active player with numbers in his range — Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, Ben Roethlisberger, Matt Ryan, Russell Wilson, even Joe Flacco — has rings or, at the very least, Super Bowl appearances and multiple playoff wins. Stafford’s postseason record: three appearances, three losses.
Stafford’s a walking example of the absurdity of relying on wins as any kind of definitive quarterback metric. During his tenure in Detroit, the Lions churned through three head coaches and four offensive coordinators. The team’s foundation is so dysfunctional that Calvin Johnson — an all-time wide receiver GOAT who should’ve teamed with Stafford for a decade of highlights — retired rather than suffer in Detroit any longer. Even when they won, the Lions lost; Detroit fell in its three Stafford-era playoff games by an average of nearly two touchdowns.
He led the league in game-winning drives in 2014, 2016 and 2017, and fourth-quarter comebacks in 2014 and 2016. His eight 2016 come-from-behind wins were the most in any season in the NFL since 1960, an impressive stat even without considering the fact that you’ve got to be losing to mount a fourth-quarter comeback at all. (Detroit went 9-7 that season. Draw your own conclusions from there.)
No matter what he did in Detroit, Matthew Stafford always heard footsteps. (Amy Lemus/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
No matter what he did in Detroit, Matthew Stafford always heard footsteps. (Amy Lemus/NurPhoto via Getty Images)So yes, Matthew Stafford had plenty of valid excuses for why his accolades and highlights don’t match his paycheck. Those days are over. His move to the Los Angeles Rams is the equivalent of getting off a rusting tractor and sliding behind the wheel of a Formula One ground rocket. He’s got everything he needs around him — offensive weapons, innovative schemers on the sideline, a defense that won’t wilt in a gentle breeze. The highway stretches wide in front of Stafford now, and all he has to do is step on the gas.
The Rams are betting big on the idea that Stafford is a generational talent whose wings were bound in the Motor City, and the fact that Detroit went 16 games under .500 in the 165 games he started there is because they’re, well … the Lions. It’s a serious gamble, and at the moment, the oddsmakers are in on the gambit; at +1200, the Rams are the second-best bet in the NFC, and the fourth-best overall, to win the Super Bowl, per BetMGM.
For those odds, Los Angeles dealt away two first-round draft picks, a 2021 third-rounder, and Jared Goff, the quarterback who had gotten them to the Super Bowl just two years before. That’s a heavy price for a 33-year-old quarterback with a career 89.9 quarterback rating, right between Chad Pennington and Teddy Bridgewater … and below Goff.
Rams head coach Sean McVay, who rode hard for Stafford prior to the trade, knows his rep, if not yet his legacy, is on the line here. Not surprisingly, McVay is hyping Stafford like he’s a new album set to drop on Sept. 12.
“This dude’s a bad MF-er,” McVay told Sports Illustrated’s Albert Breer back in June. “Whatever people say about him, as good as it can be, he’s even better than advertised. It makes sense to him. The guy’s ability to see the game, his ability to draw on his experiences, the feel that he has, it’s pretty special and unique. And man, his feel for people, his authentic way of connecting with his teammates, his coaches, this guy, it’s great being around him.” Makes you wonder why Stafford wasn’t running wind sprints across Lake Michigan while he was in Detroit, doesn’t it?
Stafford’s winning over his teammates, too. “He’s playing lights out,” Aaron Donald said in July. “I’m excited that he’s on our side, helping us to win. Just watching him and the way he works, the balls he’s been throwing, getting them to the wide receivers? You know, I ain’t never seen nothing like it. So to be able to see it first hand is just pretty cool.”
Cooper Kupp, one of Stafford’s key targets, has noticed something more subtle: the way Stafford can control entire defenses with just his eyes.
One subtle thing Cooper Kupp has noticed about Matthew Stafford in competitive camp reps is how Stafford moves defenses w/ his eyes. Pointed to a no-look pass across the middle to Robert Woods in which Stafford held the safety w/ his eyes.
“It was just disgusting,” Kupp said.
— Stu Jackson (@StuJRams) July 30, 2021
Never the most quotable of quarterbacks, Stafford is saying the right things, if not quite stoking expectations to bonfire levels. “Across the league when guys change spots,” he said at a recent podium appearance, “there’s some really highs, there’s some lows, there’s some things we’re going to have to just battle through and keep working.”
For now, these tidbits are all anyone outside Rams camp has to go on. Stafford didn’t play in any of the Rams’ three preseason games, which means he’ll be leaping untested into a season that starts hot. After the opener against Chicago, the Rams face four straight potential playoff teams — Indianapolis, Tampa Bay, Arizona and Seattle — before a three-game breather of the Giants, a Detroit reunion and Houston. The Rams have the 12th-toughest schedule in the NFL, most difficult of any NFC West team, with Tennessee, Green Bay and Baltimore lurking in the second half.
There’s a whole lot of ground to cover in the next 17 games. But if Stafford can deliver on the expectations the Rams have — and if he can prove he’s out from under Detroit’s shadow — he’ll have a whole lot more highlights on his resume come 2022.
https://outsidevoices.substack.com/p/author-of-the-mega-viral-thread-on
Author of the Mega-Viral Thread on MAGA Voters, Darryl Cooper, Explains His Thinking
Tucker Carlson devoted seven minutes of airtime to reading it. Donald Trump heaped praise on it. Why did this Twitter analysis resonate so widely on the right?Darryl Cooper
NOTE FROM GLENN GREENWALD: On Friday, a relatively obscure Twitter user with fewer than 7,000 followers — posting under the pseudonym MartyrMade — posted one of the most mega-viral threads of the year. Over the course of thirty-five tweets, the writer, a podcast host whose real name is Darryl Cooper, set out to explain the mindset that has led so many Trump supporters to believe that the 2020 election was fraudulent and, more generally, to lose faith and trust in most U.S. institutions of authority.
Numerous journalists, including me, promoted the thread as one of the most insightful analyses yet published explaining the animating convictions underlying the MAGA movement. That night, Fox News host Tucker Carlson devoted a seven-minute segment to doing nothing more than reading Cooper’s thread. At the CPAC conference on Sunday, former President Donald Trump explicitly recommended the thread using Cooper’s name. In the last four days, Cooper’s Twitter account has gained more than 70,000 followers. Clearly, this thread resonated strongly with that political faction as a true and important explanation of how many MAGA voters have come to understand the world.
For our Outside Voices freelance section, we asked Cooper to elaborate on his influential thread, with a focus on what led him to these observations about prevailing MAGA sentiments and why he believes they are important for people to understand. As Cooper notes, he does not share all of the perceptions and beliefs he is conveying, although he shares many of them. Instead, based on the recognition that most media outlets are incapable of understanding let alone accurately describing the views of a group of people they view with little more than unmitigated contempt, condescension and scorn, he believes it is imperative that people understand the actual reality of what is motivating so many Trump voters in their views, perceptions and beliefs — regardless of whether each particular belief is accurate or not.
We also believe this understanding is vital, which is why we are happy to publish Cooper’s essay. It should go without saying that, as it true of all of our articles published on Outside Voices — which we treat as an op-ed page — our publishing of this article does not signify agreement with all of its claims, but only our belief that it is a viewpoint worth airing.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump addresses the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held in the Hyatt Regency on February 28, 2021 in Orlando, Florida (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images).
By Darryl CooperI quit Twitter last August. Quit for good. Other than posting links to two new episodes of my podcast, I stayed away for eight months and didn’t regret a thing. Around mid-June I let myself be persuaded that social media engagement was part of having a podcast, so I dipped back in, promising myself I’d avoid being pulled into politics. Things haven’t gone as planned.
The temptation was disguised cleverly as a conversation with a friend’s mother. She was visiting from upstate New York and we got to talking while my buddy was in the house tending to my goddaughter. She’s a hardcore Trumper from a less cynical generation that believes what she hears from sources she trusts. She’d been hounding her son about the stolen election all week, and he’d been trying to disabuse her of various theories involving trucked-in ballots and hacked counting machines. Now she had me cornered and put the question to me: “Do YOU think the election was legit?” So I told her the truth: I don’t know.
By the time my friend had put the baby to bed and rejoined us, we were waist-deep in a discussion about what happened last year, and she was satisfied that I was on her side. “See?!? He (she meant me) knows what’s going on! I’m not crazy. He’s smart, and HE knows!” My friend pulled the Captain Picard facepalm, and said, “Darryl, what the f*ck are you telling her?”
What I told her was some version of the Twitter thread Tucker Carlson read on air Friday night and which President Trump, using my name, then explicitly promoted in his speech to CPAC on Sunday, which has blown my inbox, and my promise to stay away from politics, to smithereens.
I told her I didn’t know much about the ballots, or the voting machines, or some company that she’d heard had ties to Venezuela. I didn’t follow Sidney Powell, or Lin Wood, or the details of the cases proceeding through the system. I think it was around the time Rudy Giuliani chose a landscape and gardening emporium as the location for a press conference on what would have been the greatest political scandal in American history that I made the conscious decision to stop paying attention. Or maybe it was the dripping hair dye, or something about a kraken — it’s all sort of blended together these days.
But I felt for her. She wasn’t the first person with whom I’d had the discussion, and I felt for all of them. I’ve had the discussion often enough that I feel comfortable extracting a general theory about where these people are coming from.
RUSSIAGATE: THE ORIGINAL SIN
Like my friend’s mother, most of them believe some or all of the theories involving fraudulent ballots, voting machines, and the rest. Scratch the surface and you’ll find that they’re not particularly attached to any one of them. The specific theories were almost a kind of synecdoche, a concrete symbol representing a deeply felt, but difficult to describe, sense that whatever happened in 2020, it was not a meaningfully democratic presidential election. The counting delays, the last-minute changes to election procedures, the unprecedented coordinated censorship campaign by Big Tech in defense of Biden were all understood as the culmination of the pan-institutional anti-Trump campaign they’d watched unfold for over four years.Many of them deny it now, but a lot of 2016 Trump voters were worried during the early stages of the Russia collusion investigation. True, the evidence seemed thin, and the very idea that the US and allied security apparatus would allow Trump to take office if they really thought he might be under Russian blackmail seemed a bit preposterous on its face. But to many conservatives in 2016 and early 2017, it seemed equally preposterous that the institutions they trusted, and even the ones they didn’t, would go all-in on a story if there wasn’t at least something to it. Imagine the consequences for these institutions if it turned out there was nothing to it.
We now know that the FBI and other intelligence agencies conducted covert surveillance against members of the Trump campaign based on evidence manufactured by political operatives working for the Clinton campaign, both before and after the election. We know that those involved with the investigation knew the accusations of collusion were part of a campaign “approved by Hillary Clinton… to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.” They might have expected such behavior from the Clintons — politics is a violent game and Hillary’s got a lot of scalps on her wall. But many of the people watching this happen were Tea Party types, in spirit if not in actual fact. They give their kids a pocket Constitution for their birthday. They have Yellow Ribbon bumper stickers, and fly the POW/MIA flag under the front-porch Stars and Stripes, and curl their lip at people who talk during the National Anthem at ballgames. They’re the people who believed their institutions when they were told Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. To them, the intel community using fake evidence (including falsified documents) to spy on a presidential campaign is a big deal.
It may surprise many liberals, but most conservative normies actually know the Russia collusion case front and back. A whole ecosystem sprouted up to pore over every new development, and conservatives followed the details as avidly as any follower of liberal conspiracy theorists Seth Abramson or Marcy Wheeler. When the world learned of the infamous meeting between Trump campaign officials and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, it seemed like a problem and many Trump supporters took it seriously. Deep down, even those who rejected the possibility of open collusion worried that one of Trump’s inexperienced family members, or else a sketchy operative glomming onto the campaign, might have done something that, whatever its real gravity, could be successfully framed in a manner to sway a dozen of John McCain’s friends in the Senate.
Then, Trump supporters learned that Veselnitskaya was working with Fusion GPS, the political research and PR firm used by the Clinton campaign to formulate and spread the collusion accusations. They learned that the anti-Clinton information that was supposed to be the subject of the notorious meeting was provided by the same firm. They learned that she’d had dinner with Glenn Simpson, the owner of Fusion GPS, both the day before, and the day after the meeting. Needless to say, Trump supporters were skeptical of Simpson’s claim that Veselnitskaya’s meeting with Trump campaign officials never came up during either of their dinner dates, given that the content of the meeting was alleged to be the very treasonous, impeachable crime his firm was being paid to investigate and publicize.
There’s no need to relive all the details of the Russia collusion scam. The point is that conservatives were following it all very closely, in real time, and they noticed when things didn’t add up. After James Comey told Fox News’ Bret Baier that, even at the time of their interview in April 2018, he didn’t know who had funded the Steele dossier, conservatives noticed when the December 2019 DOJ Inspector General’s report showed that he had been informed of the dossier’s provenance in October 2016. And they asked themselves: Why would he lie? Lying to investigators about one’s knowledge of or involvement in a potentially criminal act is often taken as consciousness of guilt.
This was the bone that stuck in conservatives’ craw throughout the two years of hysteria over Russia. Why would Comey lie about knowing where the dossier came from? Why would the people involved claim to have seen evidence that never seemed to materialize? If the point of the Special Counsel is to take the investigation out of the hands of line investigators to avoid the appearance of political influence, why staff the office with known partisans and the same FBI personnel who originated and oversaw the case? Why was the relationship between Russian lawyer Veselnitskaya and Fusion GPS being dismissed as irrelevant? Why were people who must know better continuing to insist that the Steele dossier was originally funded by Republicans long after the claim had been debunked? Why wasn’t the media asking even these most obvious questions? And why were they giving themselves awards for refusing to ask those questions, and viciously attacking journalists who did ask them? These journalists are intelligent people — at least they present that way on television. Is it possible that these questions simply had not occurred to them? It seemed unlikely.
Many Trump supporters reasoned that it was simply not possible to carry on this campaign without some degree of coordination. That coordination perhaps did not take place in smoke-filled rooms (though they weren’t ruling it out), but at least through incentives, pressure, and vague but certain threats all well-understood by people who moved about in the same professional and social class, and who complained that they could “smell the Trump support” when they were unfortunate enough to have to patronize a Wal-Mart.
If there was a time when Trump supporters feared Robert Mueller’s goon squad, that time had passed by the 2018 midterm elections. Conservatives knew by then the whole case was bunk, and they were salivating at the prospect of watching him get chopped up by the likes of Jim Jordan and Devin Nunes. And he did.
The collusion case wasn’t only used to damage Trump in the polls or distract from his political agenda. It was used as an open threat to keep people from working in the administration. Taking a job in the Trump administration meant having one’s entire life investigated for anything that could fill CNN’s anti-Trump content requirement for another few days, whether or not it held up to scrutiny. Many administration employees quit because they were being bankrupted by legal fees due to an investigation that was known by its progenitors to be a political operation. The Department of Justice, press, and government used falsehoods to destroy lives and actively subvert an elected administration almost from the start. Perhaps worst of all, some portion of the American population was driven to the edge of madness by two years of being told that American politics had become a real-life version of The Manchurian Candidate. And not by Alex Jones, but by intelligence chiefs and politicians, amplified by media organizations which threw every ounce of their accumulated credibility behind the insanity.
Twitter avatar for @ColumbiaBugle
The Columbia Bugle 🇺🇸
@ColumbiaBugle
President Trump Gives A Shoutout To @martyrmade’s Viral Thread That @TuckerCarlson Read On His Show This Week. #CPACTexas Image
The Columbia Bugle 🇺🇸 @ColumbiaBugleTucker Carlson Reading @martyrmade’s Viral Thread On Why So Many Trump Supporters Have Questions About The 2020 Election & Their Distrust Of The Mainstream Media https://t.co/HY6MECgd3s
July 11th 2021For two years, Trump supporters had been called traitors and Russian bots for casting ballots for “Vladimir Putin’s c*ck holster.” They’d been subjected to a two-year gaslighting campaign by politicians, government agencies, and elite media. It took real fortitude to stand up to the unanimous mockery and scorn of these powerful institutions. But those institutions had gambled their power and credibility, and they’d lost, and now Trump supporters expected a reckoning. When no reckoning was forthcoming – when the Greenwalds, and Taibbis, and Matés of the world were not handed the New York Times’ revoked Pulitzers for correctly and courageously standing against the tsunami on the biggest political story in years – these people shed many illusions about how power really operates in their country.
Trump supporters know – I think everyone knows – that Donald Trump would have been impeached and probably indicted if Robert Mueller had proven that he’d paid a foreign spy to gather damaging information on Hillary Clinton from sources connected to Russian intelligence and disseminate that information in the press. Many of Trump’s own supporters wouldn’t have objected to his removal if that had happened. Of course that is exactly what the Clinton campaign actually did, yet there were no consequences for it. Indeed, there has been almost no criticism of it.
Trump supporters had gone from worrying the collusion might be real, to suspecting it might be fake, to seeing proof that it was all a scam. Then they watched as every institution – government agencies, the press, Congressional committees, academia – blew right past it and gaslit them for another year. To this day, something like half the country still believes that Trump was caught red-handed engaging in treason with Russia, and only escaped a public hanging because of a DOJ technicality regarding the indictment of sitting presidents. Most galling, conservatives suspect that within a few decades liberals will use their command over the culture to ensure that virtually everyone believes it. This is where people whose political identities have for decades been largely defined by a naive belief in what they learned in civics class began to see the outline of a Regime that crossed not only partisan, but all institutional boundaries. They’d been taught that America didn’t have Regimes, but what else was this thing they’d seen step out from the shadows to unite against their interloper president?
THE ESTABLISHMENT UNITES
GOP propaganda still has many conservatives thinking in terms of partisan binaries. Even the dreaded RINO (Republican-In-Name-Only) slur serves the purposes of the party, because it implies that the Democrats represent an irreconcilable opposition. But many Trump supporters see clearly that the Regime is not partisan. They know that the same institutions would have taken opposite sides if it had been a Tulsi Gabbard vs. Jeb Bush election. It’s hard to describe to people on the Left, who are used to thinking of American government as a conspiracy and are weaned on stories about Watergate, COINTELPRO, and Saddam’s WMD, how shocking and disillusioning this was for people who encouraged their sons and daughters to go fight for their country when George W. Bush declared war on Iraq.They could have managed the shock if it only involved the government. But the behavior of the press is what radicalized them. Trump supporters have more contempt for journalists than they have for any politician or government official, because they feel most betrayed by them. The idea that the corporate press is driven by ratings and sensationalism has become untenable over the last several years. If that were true, there’d be a microphone in the face of every executive branch official demanding to know what the former Secretary of Labor meant when he said that Jeffrey Epstein “belonged to intelligence.” The corporate press is the propaganda arm of the Regime these people are now seeing in outline. Nothing anyone says will ever make them unsee that, period.
This is profoundly disorienting. Again, we’re not talking about pre-2016 Greenwald readers or even Ron Paul libertarians, who swallowed half a bottle of red pills long ago. These are people who attacked Edward Snowden for “betraying his country,” and who only now are beginning to see that they might have been wrong. It’s not because the parties have been reversed, and it’s not because they’re bitter over losing. They just didn’t know. If any country is going to function over the long-term, not everyone can be a revolutionary. Most people have to believe what they’re told and go with the flow most of the time. These were those people. I’m pretty conservative by temperament, but most of my political friends are on the Left. I spend a good deal of our conversations simply trying to convince them that these people are not demons, and that this political moment is pregnant with opportunity.
Many Trump supporters don’t know for certain whether ballots were faked in November 2020, but they know with apodictic certainty that the press, the FBI, and even the courts would lie to them if they were. They have every reason to believe that, and it’s probably true. They watched the corporate press behave like animals for four years. Tens of millions of people will always see Brett Kavanaugh as a gang rapist, based on an unproven accusation, because of CNN. And CNN seems proud of that. They helped lead a lynch mob against a high school kid. They cheered on the most deadly and destructive riots in decades.
Conservatives have always complained that the media had a liberal bias. Fine, whatever: they still thought the press would admit the truth if they were cornered. They don’t believe that anymore. What they’ve witnessed in recent years has shown them that the corporate press will say anything, do anything, to achieve a political objective, or simply to ruin someone they perceive as an opponent. Since my casual Twitter thread ended up in the mouths of Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump, I’ve received hundreds of messages from people saying that I should prepare to be targeted. Others don’t think that will happen, but even most of them don’t think it’s an irrational concern. We’ve seen an elderly lady receive physical threats after a CNN reporter accosted her at home to accuse her of aiding Kremlin disinformation ops. We’ve seen them threaten to dox someone for making a humorous meme.
Throughout 2020, the corporate press used its platform to excuse and encourage political violence. Time Magazine told us that during the 2020 riots, there were weekly conference calls involving – among others – leaders of the protests, local officials responsible for managing them, and members of the media charged with reporting on the events. They worked together with Silicon Valley to control the messaging about the ongoing crisis for maximum political effect. In case of a Trump victory, the same organization had protesters ready to be activated by text message in 400 cities the day after the election. Every town with a population over 50,000 would have been in for some pre-planned, centrally-controlled mayhem. In other countries we call that a color revolution.
Throughout the summer, establishment governors took advantage of COVID to change voting procedures, often over the protests of the state legislatures. It wasn’t only the mass mailing of live ballots: they also lowered signature matching standards, axed existing voter ID and notarization requirements, and more. Many people reading this might think those were necessary changes, either due to the virus or to prevent potential voter suppression. I won’t argue the point, but the fact is that the US Constitution states plainly that “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections… shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.” As far as conservatives were concerned, state governors used COVID to unconstitutionally usurp their legislatures’ authority to unilaterally alter voting procedures just months before an election in order to help Biden make up for a massive enthusiasm gap by gaming the mail-in ballot system. Lawyers can argue over the legitimacy of the procedural modifications; the point is that conservatives believe in their bones – and I think they’re probably right – that the cases would have been treated differently, in both the media and in court, if the parties were reversed.
And then came the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. Liberals dismiss the incident because, after four years of obsessing over the activities of the Trump children, they insist they’re not interested in the behavior of the candidate’s family members. But this misses the point entirely. Big Tech ran a coordinated censorship campaign against a major American newspaper while the rest of the media spread base propaganda to protect a political candidate. And once again, the campaign crossed institutional boundaries, with dozens of former intelligence officials throwing their weight behind the baseless and now-discredited claim that the laptop was part of a Russian disinformation campaign. That lie was promoted by Big Tech companies, while the true information being reported by The New York Post about the laptop’s contents was suppressed. That is what happened.
Even the tech companies themselves now admit it was a “mistake” – Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said it was an error and apologized – but the election is over, Joe Biden has appointed Facebook’s government regulations executive as his ethics arbiter, so who cares, right? It hardly needs saying that if The New York Times had Donald Trump Jr.’s laptop, full of pictures of him smoking crack and engaging in group sex, lots of lurid family drama, and emails with pretty direct discussions of political corruption, the Paper of Record would not have had its accounts suspended for reporting on it. Let’s remember that stories of Trump being pissed on by Russian prostitutes and blackmailed by Putin were promoted as fact across the media spectrum and used as the basis for a multi-year criminal investigation, when the only evidence was a document paid for by his opposition and disavowed by its primary source.
The reaction of Trump supporters to all this was not, “no fair!” That was how they felt about Romney’s “binders of women” in 2012 or Harry Reid’s lie that Romney paid no federal taxes. This is different. Now they were beginning to see, accurately, that the institutions of their country — all of them — had been captured by people prepared to use any means to exclude them from the political process. And yet they showed up in record numbers to vote. Trump got 13 million more votes than in 2016 – 10 million more than Hillary Clinton had gotten.
As election day became election night and the tallies rolled in, Trump supporters allowed themselves some hope. But when the four critical swing states (and only those states) went dark around midnight, they knew.
Over the following weeks, they were shuffled around between honest critics, online grifters, and media scam artists selling them conspiracy theories. They latched onto one then another increasingly outlandish theory as they tried to put a concrete name on something very real, of which election day was only the culmination. Media and Big Tech did all they could to make things worse. Everything about the election was strange, confusing, and unprecedented – the changes to procedure, unprecedented mail-in voting, counting delays, etc – but rather than admit that and bring everything into the open, they banned discussion of it (even in private messages!), and launched an absurd propaganda campaign telling us that it was – I’m not making this up – the most well-run and secure election in American history.
Conservatives know – again, I think probably everyone knows – that just as Don Jr.’s laptop would have been the story of the century, if everything about the election dispute was the same, except the parties were reversed, suspicions about the outcome would have been taken very seriously. See 2016 for proof.
Even the judiciary had forfeited its credibility with these voters because of the opposition’s embrace of political violence. Trump supporters say, with good reason: What judge will stick his neck out for Trump knowing he’ll be destroyed in the media as a violent mob burns down his house? Maybe most judges would do their jobs, but given the events of the last four years it’s not an unreasonable concern, and the concern itself is enough to cast the whole system in doubt. Again, we know, thanks to Time Magazine, that riots were planned in cities across the country if Trump had won. Sure, they were “protests”, but they were planned by the same people as during the summer, and everyone knows what it would have meant. The Chamber of Commerce took the threat of a second round of destruction of its members’ property seriously enough to offer its assistance to the “well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information” – Time’s words, not mine.
Trump voters were adamant that the governors’ changes to election procedures were unconstitutional. Everything in law is open to interpretation, but it doesn’t require a Harvard Law degree to read Article 1, Section 4 (quoted above) and come to that conclusion. But they also knew the cases wouldn’t see a courtroom until after the election, and what judge was going to make a ruling that would be framed as a judicial coup d’etat just because some governors didn’t go through the proper channels? Even a judge willing to accept the personal risk would have also to be willing to inflict the chaos that would follow on the country. Even a well-intentioned judge could convince himself that, whatever happened or didn’t happen, as a public servant he had no right to impose an opinion guaranteed to lead to mass violence – because the threat was not implied, it was direct. Some Trump supporters, unfortunately, thought the license for political violence applied to everyone; the hundreds of them now sitting in federal jails learned the hard way that it wasn’t true.
From the perspective of Trump’s supporters, the entrenched bureaucracy and security state subverted their populist president from day one. The natural guardrails of the Fourth Estate were removed because the press was part of the operation. Election rules were changed in an unconstitutional manner that could only be challenged after the deed was done, when judges and officials would be playing chicken with a direct threat of burning cities. Political violence was legitimized and encouraged. Major newspapers and sitting presidents were banned from social media, while the opposition enjoyed free rein to promote stories that were discredited once it was too late to matter. Conservatives put these things together and concluded that, whatever happened on November 3, 2020, it was not a free and fair democratic election in any sense that would have had meaning before Donald J. Trump was a candidate.
Trump supporters were led down some rabbit holes. But they are absolutely right that the institutions and power centers of this country have been monopolized by a Regime that believes they are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to prevent them getting it. I encourage people on the Left to recognize the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in front of them. You’re not going to agree with the conservatives on everything. But if in 2004 I had told you that the majority of the GOP voter base would soon be seeing the folly of the Iraq War, becoming skeptical of state surveillance, and beginning to see the need for action to help the poor and working classes, you’d have told me such a thing would transform the country. Take the opportunity. These people are not demons, and they are ready to listen in a way they haven’t in a long, long time.
Darryl Cooper is the host of The MartyrMade Podcast, Co-host of The Unraveling w/Jocko Willink, and author of “that” Twitter thread.
Recent Forum Topics
-
WR contracts
by
-
Snead
by
-
Rams tweets … 5/9 – 5/10
by
-
CBS: QB Power Rankings
by
-
Rams tweets etc. … 5/2 – 5/7
by
-
around the league (+ other sports) starting 5/2
by
-
how Rams draft
by
-
developments on defense?
by
-
Stafford wants more guaranteed money
by
-
our own takes on this draft
by
-
Rams tweets etc. … 4/28 – 4/30
by
-
2024 UDFAs
by
-
round 7, pick 254 … Rams take G KT Leveston
by
-
round 6, pick 217… Rams take C Beaux Limmer
by
-
round 6, pick 213… Rams take WR Jordan Whittington
by
-
round 6, pick 209 … Rams take K Joshua Karty
by
-
round 6, pick 196 … Rams take DT Tyler Davis
by
-
Other Teams Drafts
by
-
round 5, pick 154 — edge Brennan Jackson
by
-
call to braden fiske
by
-
remaining picks, day 3
by
-
draft assessments, grades, and analysis
by
-
guide to 2024 draft threads
by
-
Canada Ram
by
-
round 3, pick 99: safety Kamren Kinchens
by
-
round 3, pick 83, Rams take RB Blake Corum
by
-
round 2: Rams trade up for DT Braden Fiske
by
-
BT checked in, wish him well
by
-
Ram tweets etc. … 4/26
by
-
Rams 1st pick (19) is Jared Verse
by