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Also against Chicago, they did not adjust to how defenses are playing them now. Defenses are subtracting the intermediate “chunk” passes they thrived on earlier, and then also both (1) attacking the OL and (2) gameplanning Donald out of the picture which means fewer dramatic defensive plays limiting the score.
One answer to the defensive strategy of taking away the 11-25 yard chunk plays is to develop a patient short passing game. They WERE doing that against the Eagles but then getting behind meant they had to junk that approach.
And when they junked the short passing game in desperation late in the game, they nearly came back.
1 Oline (but what exactly is the problem? Age? Nagging Injuries? Somethin else?)
Speculation time. Just jumpin in with summ thotz. I don’t have the benefit of watchin the 22, but I do happen to have 2 cents, which means I qualify as a guy with some opinions.
I would say it’s a combo of things. One is age (Sullivan, Whit).
Another is that they have been scheming around players who are not really standard template starters, like Blythe and Hav. Blythe has physical limitations but he makes up for it, they say, with technique and some wrestler’s skills. He’s a system guard.
I would say the same is true of Hav at tackle. These guys are more like Nutten and Gruttadauria and Miller, and obviously not like Pace and Timmerman. In fact I think that in a lot of ways, it’s more like the GSOT line than not. (That includes the fact that both OLs had/have an absolutely top notch OL coach.) That is, the GSOT OL was very well suited to execute what they did on offense, but line them up against a top DL that can exploit their limitations and they came up short in a couple of areas.
The difference is, that OL had Pace and Timmerman. This one has Saffold. On the “could play OL for any team in the league” scale, Saffold really is it.
Anyway this OL was set up to play outside and inside zone, and if they go against a couple of top DLs that can control that (like Chi and Phil), the run is compromised a bit. They also can’t beat those DLs by just lining up and dominating.
Pass blocking? They all have limitations if attacked by a good to very good DL. I read where Chicago got pressure on 52% of Rams passes while blitzing only 18% of the time. Well. That’s gonna work against this offense.
Another part of it, seems to be that McV was slow to build in an offensive attack built around short quick ball control passing. He DID do that against the Eagles, not against the Bears though (leading one guy in a popular vid on the Bears game, which you post here, to exclaim that Goff refused to throw short, not that they didn’t have a short game built in). And in fact against the Eagles that worked. Until they got behind in the third quarter and had to drop it.
So the other factor in this is that the OL, under seige, had to gut it out in a game where the Rams defense was not getting the kinds of big plays we’re used to seeing from Donald. That’s obviously not on Donald…the Bears and Eagles deliberately set out to control him, and on some of the replays where commentators were showing this, I saw triple team blocking on AD. Sacks subtract points because as it turns out, percentage wise, it is very rare for offenses to convert third downs in a series where the qb gets sacked.
So cause of that the offense had to play uphill a bit more.
You know what we were seeing then. It was the 2016 offense. Gurley less effective because he’s dinged a bit, the OL more out of sync than you would like, and the qb under so much pressure it was affecting his game. (My take on 2016 was that something was wrong with Gurley all year, he was not himself.) (In fact McGinnis came right out and said he was playing hurt all year.)
The differences between the last 2 games and 2016 are that the OL was younger (Hav struggled in 2016) & they had GR instead of AW; they have receivers now; Goff for all his struggles the last 3 games is just not a rookie; and the 2016 offense looked like that against every defense whereas in 2018 it was against 2 TOP defenses. So in fact they had all those disadvantages against the Bears and Eagles and still managed a point differential of 14.5 to 22.5, which is not ideal but is also not 2 blowouts.
Just a footnote. A minor aside really. Some will say the offensive coaching was massively different between 2016 and 2018, which is mostly true except for this–the offensive coordinator for the Eagles, Mike Groh, was the Rams passing game coordinator in 2016. So people IMO get a tad hyperbolic about how miserable the coaching was in 2016. But on the other side of that coin, while McV is certainly superior to any Rams offensive coach since Martz (and since before Martz going back to Zampese), he’s still young and relatively inexperienced and was going against 3 savvy veteran defensive coordinators in a row (Patricia, Fangio, Schwartz). Those 3 guys are going to have the advantage if McV does not have a full deck of cards, which he didn’t.
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