Hammond: Rams must confront some uncomfortable truths

Dismantled in Dallas, the Rams must confront some uncomfortable truths

Rich Hammond

https://theathletic.com/1462910/2019/12/15/dismantled-in-dallas-the-rams-must-confront-some-uncomfortable-truths/?=twittered

ARLINGTON, Texas — The Dallas Cowboys ultimately did the Rams a favor on Sunday.

The Rams won’t agree, given that they’re almost certain to ring in the new year as one of the NFL’s 20 non-playoff teams. They would have preferred to win 10 or 11 games, backdoor their way into the postseason and claim that they built some momentum this year and that things weren’t as bad as they looked.

Let’s face facts, though. These Rams deserve to miss the playoffs. This season ultimately is going to end as it should, and if the Rams are honest with themselves, they’ll use the failure as an opportunity to re-evaluate, from the top, what went wrong and what significant changes must be made.

“It’s one of those games,” running back Todd Gurley said after the 44-21 loss to the Cowboys at AT&T Stadium. “Those guys came out and they played better than we did and wanted it more than we did. It’s just tough. Tough. Tough loss.”

The game provided a tidy to-do list for the Rams in 2020. In no particular order, they must:

Determine why their defense, so stout at times, is prone to total meltdowns. For the third time this season, the Rams allowed 40-plus points. They looked unprepared for the physicality of an experienced Dallas offensive line, and their missed-tackle total reached double digits before halftime.

Get some help for head coach Sean McVay, who came up with excellent game plans in recent games against Chicago and Seattle but looked lost against the Cowboys. McVay’s inability to adapt during games as an offensive play-caller, when faced with unexpected looks from opposing defenses, is continually troubling.

Decide how they can best help Jared Goff. They’ve already committed to him for four more seasons and $134 million, so there’s no choice in this matter. Goff, who too often this season has been either excellent or awful, wilted again Sunday, particularly with a devastating interception late in the second quarter.

Figure out how to walk a salary-cap tightrope. The Rams have committed a massive amount of money to their (presumed) top players and two of them, Gurley and Brandin Cooks, combined for a total of 41 yards through three quarters Sunday before the Rams padded their stats with two touchdown drives. The Rams potentially will have some major holes in 2020, and they’ll have to be very smart with their money.

So that’s why Sunday’s game helped. Sure, there’s still a tiny chance that the Rams could win their last two games — Saturday at San Francisco and Dec. 29 against Arizona — and the Minnesota Vikings could lose their last two games (home against Green Bay and Chicago), which would send the then-10-6 Rams to the postseason as the No. 6 seed in the NFC.

But really, what’s the point? All that would be doing now is masking some deficiencies that the Rams have displayed all season. Something has just been off about this team since the start of the season, even since that too-close season-opening victory against the Carolina Panthers.

It’s not always quantifiable by stats, but there’s just been a dark cloud over these Rams, with the talent not matching the results. That’s what happened against Dallas.

“It wasn’t good from start to finish,” Goff said. “Hats off to them. They came out and played better than us in all facets of the game, from start to finish, and we have to be a lot better. We know we can be a lot better. We have been a lot better. We will be a lot better moving forward.”

The Rams have teased at times this season. They won just enough — and did just enough positive things — to make people believe. Maybe if they got it all together they could make a late-season push. Last week’s victory over Seattle only furthered that narrative. And, after all, these were the Rams, the defending NFC champions. They couldn’t be this bad, could they? They couldn’t really miss the playoffs, right?

Yes, they can and they should. The Cowboys came into this game with a 6-7 record, with three consecutive losses and without a victory this season over an opponent with more than three wins. They still sat atop the NFC East because it’s terrible, and, before Sunday afternoon, they looked lost.

Dallas came out desperate. The Cowboys haven’t been able to tackle with any consistency in recent weeks, but they bottled Gurley and played with confidence even as coordinator Rod Marinelli mixed up his fronts and coverages and threw everything he had at the Rams.

The Rams looked absolutely lost on offense, with no identity and poor execution. McVay had found success in recent weeks with two-tight-ends sets, but they completely vanished Sunday. Instead, the Rams went back to their standard 11 personnel look. There were no jet sweeps and very few of the play-action rollouts that allowed Goff to gain confidence in recent games.

And, as too often happens, when the Rams’ offense experienced some early adversity, McVay all but abandoned the run. At halftime, Goff had more rushing yards than Gurley by a margin of 2 to 1. No, that’s not a ratio. Goff had two rushing yards while Gurley had one (on six carries).

Instead, McVay put the game in Goff’s hands, and that’s been an iffy proposition this season. Sunday was another example. Goff wasn’t terrible in the first half — although many of his passes were off-target — and the Rams were still in the game late in the second quarter, trailing 21-7.

A touchdown drive would have sent the Rams into the break with some momentum, and they also thought they were getting the ball to start the second half (they didn’t after a coin-toss mixup was resolved by some halftime intervention from the league office). Instead, with the ball at his own 20 and less than two minutes left in the quarter, Goff threw an awful interception that Sean Lee returned to the Rams’ 9-yard line. Two plays later, Ezekiel Elliott scored on a 4-yard run. The Rams, now down 28-7, were done.

“Really it’s another one that gets out of hand so early,” Goff said, “and you really have no chance to even reconcile it. It’s tough. It’s always tough, and you want to stay on the opposite side of that, but we’ve had a couple of those this year and we need to be better.”

Even when the Rams tried to dictate the game a bit by going with their hurry-up offense, it looked disjointed. And certainly the Cowboys contributed to this. They made the Rams uncomfortable with some stuff they didn’t show on film, and that comes back to McVay and a potential need for some assistance. It seems increasingly clear that McVay might benefit from having some input from a veteran set of coaching eyes upstairs during games.

That’s big-picture stuff. The Cowboys’ successful scheme was one thing, but they also just flat-out pushed the Rams around. That was the most shocking aspect of Sunday’s game. The Rams’ run defense had been stout for most of this season, but Dallas averaged 5.8 yards per rushing attempt. Tony Pollard rushed for 131 yards and Elliott ran for 117.

“When you don’t play good in this league, you’re going to lose, and we lost really bad today,” defensive tackle Aaron Donald said. “I think we played horrible. When you play horrible, you get beat pretty bad and we got embarrassed today.”

From the game’s first drive, Elliott was breaking tackles and turning two-or-three-yard gains into five-or-seven-yard gains. That adds up. The Cowboys played like a desperate team. Why didn’t the Rams? Dallas actually entered Sunday with a playoff spot. The Rams didn’t, and they looked like a team that expected to complete a quick business trip with an easy victory.

Rams fans are angry, and rightfully so. The team seemed ordained for success this season, and perhaps that was part of the problem. Things aren’t supposed to be easy in the NFL, and it’s a lesson being reinforced for everyone who plays for the Rams, coaches them, manages them or cheers for them.

All is not lost. This is still a very young, very talented roster that will be forced to show that this season was an outlier and that 2017 and 2018 remain the standard. Now, though, the Rams will be forced to deal with that head-on, with no sugar coating, and that’s a good thing.