us on the Tampa game

wv wrote:

And what was McVay doing throwing it 50 times? Has he been consulting with Martz, lately?

Tampa is the absolute top ranked NFL defense against the run. They’re 2nd in rushing yards allowed per game but 1st in yards allowed per attempt.

Passing against them was also dangerous because they are also 2nd in pressure percentage. But the Rams could make the pass work while they could not make the run work.

That meant Goff had to carry the offense…and basically, he did. Yes with some mistakes mixed in but it was a win against the league’s 3rd ranked defense.

LMU93

I came into the game thinking this was a top 5 (Bucs) vs. top 10 (Rams) matchup. I was pretty confident the Rams could do what they did defensively and hold Tampa to 24 or less. It was the Rams’ offense I wasn’t sure about.

Not a stellar game, but on the road vs. clearly a top 3-4 defense (and THE best run defense in the league) the Rams showed up and traded punches all night. To put up 27 points (could have been 30…) and 413 yards, control the ball for 33 minutes and convert 8/15 3rd downs on a night when the running game was going nowhere is a nice showing, period. Also credit McVay for at least continuing to attempt to run periodically throughout. And they game planned well against that zone defense.

So where are these Rams? I’d go from calling them a top-10 team to top-8 now. Maybe they will become more, we’ll see. But they are firmly in the NFC playoff mix, may have ended up locking in the 5th seed with last night’s win, and now at least a shot to win the division. Statistically they now have 90%+ odds of making the playoffs and about 45% chance to take the West.

Long way to go. They can’t let the opportunity they just gave themselves slip by losing to SF this Sunday. Division winners take care of division business. At least set themselves up for a showdown with Seattle in week 16 by keeping more Ws coming.

And yeah, that was absolutely a fumble by Brady on that hit in the 2nd half. No question in my mind….

Last, not a bad special teams night either. They missed another FG but overall no terrible errors.

wv wrote:

Was that the right call on the batted-completed-pass by Brady? I thought the ball would be spotted as if it were an Incomplete Pass. But they spotted it like it was a completed pass. That was not the spot, i was expecting.

w
v

Rams declined the penalty. They declined it because there was no loss of down on that call. It was a third down play. So they could have had them in 3rd and long with the penalty yardage (and repeating the down) or they could have them in 4th down. By declining the penalty the Rams made it a completion but elected to put them in 4th down.

wv wrote:

Yeah, and McVay knows exactly what Goff does best. And Goff has done a fine job of running this offense. Martz would have gotten Goff killed a long time ago. McVay is the opposite. He protects Goff with this offense, and he plays to Goffs’ strengths.

For me, whats been most impressive about this years version of Goff is those rollout-throws. That kid can throw darts on the run, off-balance. I trust him completely out of the pocket.

w
v

First I don’t want to sound like I am questioning the safe run for a FG strategy at that point of the game. I don’t really have a problem with it.

But…I’m not sure McVay does know Goff, or at least I am not sure he always sets Goff to come through in different situations. Not entirely anyway. Why were they running so many empty sets against Miami’s zero blitz when the team clearly had issues with it? Yet they could run on Miami’s weak run defense any time they wanted. (And Miami was just 2 games before Tampa.) In that game McVay wasn’t over-reacting to the “Goff is and always has been and always will be a strip sack nightmare” narrative, he was helping to cause that narrative.

Meanwhile it was just the opposite with Tampa. They could throw at will against Tampa, and the Bux are a high pressure defense (2nd in the league).

And not only did the OL hold up against Tampa but so did the play calling and so did Goff. If you go through Goff highlights from that game, there are several plays where he escapes the rush to make first-rate throws. I am thinking for example of the plays here at 20 seconds in, 1 minute and fifty in, and at three minutes and seven in.

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InvaderRam wrote:

i wouldn’t say it’s just the playcalling though.

right before the bucs scored to tie the game, the rams just had a terrible sequence. there was the missnap, and then goff just throws a brainfart of an interception.

Yes. There was one bad INT and then one where I think it was on the receiver (Henderson). Though even the INT intended for Woods looked like Woods was held up…that can happen with timing plays where the qb throws to a spot. In fact that’s why Martz did not worry about turnovers in 2001–trusting the system and throwing to the spot was more important to him than worrying about turnovers. I don’t go that far, but I also think that when you go on the road against a top defense and can’t run but win passing, that outweighs any miscues.

Of course part of this is Goff. Not sure why people keep prodding other people to say that, as if it weren’t obvious. The way I see it, though, he had one bad quarter of a season in 2020 and so far is bouncing back from it. You do not have a win in Tampa unless he plays as well as he did.

My point about the OL, and the play calling, is that they ALSO contributed to the 2nd quarter of the season problems. Those things are being fixed too.

I’m just trying to speak for some general all-around perspective. If your qb and OL are struggling, as they were in Miami, and you keeping dialing up empty sets against a defense you KNOW you can run on…why would I put all of that or even a lot of it on the qb?

But at the same time, knowing that, I still don’t do the “nightmares are more true” thing where I constantly doubt McVay and just sit there waiting for him to screw up every game. Which is the equivalent of believing that Goff is such a strip sack liability that it affects the playcalling—in a game they won because McVay put it on Goff’s shoulders and he came through.

So no I do not think Goff is a constant, game-in and game-out strip-sack hazard, and I don’t think McVay thinks it either. In fact I pointed to plays in the vid I posted where Goff was alert against the rush. Doubt me? Look at the plays I mentioned.

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