Jourdan Rodrigue@JourdanRodrigue
Micah Kiser will be on injured reserve for at least the next three weeks with a knee injury. The good news for Kiser is that he won’t need surgery and the Rams are expecting a minimum stay. With the roster spot, the Rams will stay in-house and likely promote a guy off the practice squad, and will count on Justin Hollins as emergency depth.
Troy Reeder will step into Kiser’s spot, and Kenny Young will continue to work in complement. If the Rams scheme up a similar plan to the last time Reeder started a game (against Washington in Week 5), they’ll get Reeder closer to the line of scrimmage and their defensive line locking their blockers. That would open opportunities for Reeder in a “green dog” blitzer role, in which he potentially can get through the gap and sack the quarterback (he had three sacks against Washington). But I become extremely concerned when the 49ers try to stretch the defensive line and linebackers horizontally, before penetrating downfield. That was a huge issue last time, and while Reeder is great in the aforementioned situations and can help against the run, expecting him to run sideline to sideline is not aligned with his skill set. I asked defensive coordinator Brandon Staley about it this week.
“I felt like our edges in that game weren’t to our standard and it forced our linebackers to kind of have to get to places that they don’t normally have to get to,” Staley said. “I thought our tackling was just a little off in that first half and they have a lot to do with that. They have runners with real speed and their skill players, (receiver) Deebo Samuel in that game in particular, he’s like a running back, has a lot of running back traits. They ran hard and we needed to play better at the beginning of that game. I thought once we got settled, we were fine. But certainly, this team and the way they play, you have to have your stuff ready at the beginning, or else they’ll expose you.”
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The Rams are tracking the lack of holding calls on Aaron Donald this season, and get this: He has drawn a holding call on one play out of 577 this season, and it was a run play. Is that not wild?
The Rams absolutely sent the non-calls in — and it seems they are collecting a larger body of evidence to bring into league meetings this spring — and also sent in the defensive pass interference calls against Jalen Ramsey from last Monday.
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The Rams are No. 6 in the NFL with 32 explosive passes (15-plus yards) and 36 explosive rushes (10-plus yards) as tracked by Sharp Football. That’s a pretty good balance, and the Rams clearly believe that stretching the field vertically is about a lot more than doing so solely by air yards. n the coming years, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them take a chance on a true “burner” type, but a lot of times those players don’t have the blocking skills necessary to operate in the Rams’ offense. And you can’t invest in a guy just to execute the lowest-probability play in football, even if it’s exciting when it connects. He’s got to be able to do more in a McVay offense.
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If an offer comes, will Staley believe he has unfinished business with the Rams? Another item in consideration is the fact that complete intentionality is part of Staley’s ethos. He’s not going to leave a great space where he has a ton of autonomy to go somewhere that might have a toxic culture, or where he doesn’t feel he’ll get autonomy on the football side from a general manager. There have been so many one-and-done coaches who have been set up to fail by terrible front offices and owners that it’s got to be the right fit, because it might be the only time such a job comes around.
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