assessing the Rams after 4 games

LMU93

thoughts at the season’s 1/4 point

In baseball I always say give it 60 games. In the NFL it’s 6. Both about 3/8 through the season and I think it’s hard to have a clear indicator of how good or not teams are (with some exceptions) before that. Opinions change week to week fast in the NFL. Opinions are shifting this Monday morning about the Texans, Chiefs, Cowboys, Saints, Bills, Rams, Bucs, you name it…. and they will again next Monday.

But, here goes an early attempt anyway. Where are the Rams at the 1/4 point of the season. My own opinions:

– They’re a top 8 team. They are. As much as turnovers and OL play is an issue they are, talent- and coaching-wise, an upper tier team. They can and will compete with anyone. But they’re probably only going to really bury a few really bad teams. Most games will be close throughout.

– Rams opponents might be better than we think. CAR, NO, CLEV and TB are 8-4 combined in their other games and it would be 9-3 if TB’s kicker hadn’t blown the Giants game last Sunday. Right now Pro-Football-Reference has the rams as having played the6th hardest schedule.

– Scoring just 1.5 PPG in the 1st quarter (31st in the NFL) just won’t cut it. At all. Even if they are scoring 27.8 PPG in quarters 2 through 4… They averaged 6.3 1st quarter PPG over 2017 and 2018.

– Goff is a tough kid. He’s facing heavy rushes on the majority of dropbacks. I think it was like 3/4 yesterday. he’s learning to step up in the pocket more to avoid them which is good but heavy pressure is heavy pressure. The ridiculously clean pockets he had for 2017 and 2018 just aren’t there.

– Goff makes only 2 or 3 bad decisions per game but they tend to be killers…. And he’s also missing wide open guys at least twice per game. The missed TD deep to a wide open Cooks in the 2nd half that ended up with an INT a couple plays later was the biggest swing of the game in my opinion.

– The inconsistencies/ineffectiveness of OL play contributing to them not getting the chunk plays downfield they had been getting. Goff’s YPA are a full yard less (7.25 vs. 8.2) than the previous two seasons. His INT percentage is double (3.5% vs. 1.8%).

– The youth and inexperience of the two new starting OL was supposed to, in part, be offset by having one of the top OT tandems in the league. But Whitworth and Havenstein are playing ‘pretty well’ vs. at an elite level…

– The answer to a struggling OL cannot be just not running the ball. The Rams came out throwing 13 times in their first 14 plays yesterday with the only run to Kupp. Even if it means 2nd and 8 or 9 you have to keep defenses honest. The league is too good to become deliberately one-dimensional.

– The Rams have the best WR trio in the NFL.

– 9 turnovers in 4 games (t-2nd most in the NFL) is killing them.They’re also the 9th most penalized team in the league (33) after having the 8th fewest penalties in the NFL over the past two years. False starts at home are inexcusable….

– Peters showed Sunday why I think the Rams have to let him go in 2020. The pick-six was great but he’s just so hot and cold, so unpredictable, that I just don’t think you can pay him as a cornerstone player for the next 4-5 seasons. Let Trumaine Johnson be a lesson to us. Let good CBs get paid great $$ elsewhere.

– Their best defensive players, besides Donald, are Johnson and Littleton. So pay them.