As Rams assess an offensive implosion, it’s time for soul-searching: The Pile
Jourdan Rodrigue
https://theathletic.com/2173539/2020/11/01/rams-offense-jared-goff-dolphins/?source=twittered
I don’t know where to start, and maybe that’s fitting because on Sunday in Miami, the Rams’ offense didn’t either.
They suffered a good old-fashioned tail-whipping at the hands of Dolphins head coach Brian Flores and his defensive front seven, a group that completely blew open the game and baffled … no, stunned … no, embarrassed quarterback Jared Goff, head coach Sean McVay and an offense that, usually a darling, is teetering into discombobulation and disarray.
Flores sent his defensive line, and a crowd of a supporting cast, on more zero-pressures than the Rams expected or had seen before. Goff started the game 2-for-8, and was so off — and the pressure plan was working so well — that Flores stopped putting players back deep because there was no fear the Rams would make it to the second level in the air.
“They just brought as many as they could,” said Michael Brockers, who graciously assessed the situation for media through the eyes of a defensive tackle. “They brought more than we could block. That’s how it felt, like they had 11 guys on the line of scrimmage. We had all our wide receivers one-on-one and once you snapped the ball, everybody was coming.
“To be honest with you, I had never seen that before that many times. That was zero-pressure, man-to-man and (Goff) has to get the ball out fast because there is an unblocked player (coming off the edge).”
The Dolphins pressured Goff on 33 percent of his dropbacks on Sunday, the highest pressure he’s faced this season. They do that to quarterbacks every week at the highest rate of any team in the NFL. So the Rams knew it was coming.
But as Brockers noted, they put a little twist on things this week, including more all-out blitzes than usual. And against their zero-pressure, time and again, the Rams came up “empty” — literally.
For some reason, the Rams kept lining up in empty sets (no running back in the backfield, with everybody on the line of scrimmage) deep into the third quarter, to disastrous effect. They even did it on a second-and-2, showing an obvious passing situation (on second-and-2!) and plating it up all too tantalizingly for a hungry, talented defensive line. The ball was intercepted.
Goff went on to throw a second interception and also had the ball stripped on two sacks, losing it twice, for four turnovers. Two of his turnovers were out of empty sets. He also nearly threw a pick out of an empty set in the third quarter. Two of those turnovers led to touchdowns. The Dolphins stacked a third score on a punt return.
What is supposed to happen on those plays?
“You pick up the blitz,” receiver Robert Woods said, “Goff avoids the free-rusher, you dump it off to the open receiver — should have a lot of space the way they were playing it — and make one guy miss and have a lot of running space.”
But part of the issue on those sets was Goff not getting the ball out quick enough. Sometimes they did not have a route matched for the situation available because a receiver or running back stayed blocked (if a back is on the line of scrimmage and not in the backfield he can attract an immediate blocker instead of using lateral space). Batted balls especially were an issue on Sunday. Goff had six passes tapped by opposing players, including two near-interceptions.
“Not even close to good enough on my part, and throughout the whole game,” Goff said. “Just need to be better. Got to be better. I will be. … They did a good job applying some pressure. … We did not respond quickly enough, or well enough.”
Brockers wondered, when I asked him directly about solutions to such pressure, whether screens, draws or running back outlets may have helped. And the Rams finally did go to the shorter game, but not until the fourth quarter.
The failure to adjust to the Dolphins’ pressure was compounded by McVay straying from the run game. Goff threw 61 passes, completing 35, yet the Rams ran the ball only 29 times via their trio of running backs, and only 11 times in the second half.
In part, of course, football logic dictates that a team must pass when facing a deficit, to eat up larger pieces of the field in a shorter amount of time. Lead running back Darrell Henderson also left the game in the second half with a thigh injury and did not return, but in his place, rookie Cam Akers showed promise on the Rams’ second, and ultimately final, scoring drive.
Sure, pass attempts mostly skew larger in a deficit, and maybe the Henderson injury pushed things that way for the Rams, too. But the Dolphins were eating Goff alive via their pass rush, and he even missed throws when he got a clean pocket (including one would-be touchdown to receiver Cooper Kupp in the second half).
The Dolphins also have one of the worst rushing defenses in football, worse than the Buffalo Bills, against whom the Rams mounted a near-miraculous comeback (from a larger deficit!) in Week 3 because McVay staunchly refused to stop running the ball. That specific decision lingers as McVay’s best of the year. But this one, I simply don’t understand.
“This is a sick taste in your mouth,” McVay said. “I’m looking inward. I have got to do a better job. I can’t wait to look at this and work to get it fixed. That’s all I know how to do. We’ve got a lot of football left.”
The Rams are now 5-3 and limping into their bye week. It’s not time for rest, however. It’s time for some real soul-searching.
“Who are we going to be, moving forward? That’s the biggest thing,” Brockers said. “We have to get better, and we know that. … It’s good that we have a bye week so that we can set (focus) on our next opponent, and just come in and get better. We can’t do anything about this loss. It’s over. We just have to look forward.”
Welcome to The Pile. Let’s start poking around.
Jalen Ramsey sits out with an illness
Star cornerback Jalen Ramsey was absent from Sunday’s game with what the Rams described as an “illness.” McVay said Ramsey woke up not feeling well, and that he went through subsequent testing and protocol to ensure that he was able to fly back to Los Angeles with the team.
A source confirmed the illness was not related to COVID-19, which seemed to be McVay’s public indication even though he did not get into detail.
That was a big loss for the Rams, who, as safety John Johnson noted, missed Ramsey’s “raw energy” on a thickly humid day after a long flight. The secondary featured Troy Hill, Darious Williams and David Long, the latter of whom played his first significant minutes of the year.
Long gave up a really tough third-down touchdown to DeVante Parker in the first half, but it was hard to see how he could have done a ton to prevent it, considering the short-distance situation (3 yards) and the perfect throw and catch. The longest catch allowed by the Rams’ secondary went for 15 yards.
The Rams were also missing two of their featured safeties, rookies Terrell Burgess and Jordan Fuller. But even without the three key players, the Rams’ secondary stepped up.
For the second week in a row, a tough, physical hit by Taylor Rapp forced a turnover, and for the second week in a row, Hill was there to recover it.
“He was coming with some heat today,” Johnson said of Rapp’s play. “I’m proud of him, and I’m proud of the way the defense played as well.”
Special teams turns disastrous
The Rams’ special-teams unit was awful. Veteran kicker Kai Forbath, who replaced rookie Samuel Sloman this week, badly missed a 48-yard field goal attempt in the fourth quarter that would have brought the Rams within eight points.
They also gave up a punt return for a touchdown — and it does make me wonder, after seeing Burgess fly around and make stops on special teams before his injury last week, how much they miss him on that coverage unit.
Bottom of The Pile
Kupp finished with a whopping 21 targets, and caught 11 for 110 yards. His targets were a career high, with his previous high of 17 targets set last October against San Francisco. Kupp appeared to hurt his wrist on a tackle in the second half, but returned a few plays later.
It’s odd to say this about a McVay-coached team, but the defense is not the problem while the offense is seeming to regress. The defense had two takeaways while not allowing a single play of over 15 yards, and zero second-half points. Fourteen of the Dolphins’ 28 points came off a pick-six and a punt return; another seven came off a sack-fumble recovered by the Dolphins and downed at the 1-yard line, which McVay referred to as basically a defensive touchdown. In fact, the Dolphins’ offense didn’t top 100 yards until the fourth quarter, and scored its first 21 points off a total of 49 yards.
Tight end Gerald Everett had a crucial third-down drop on one of the few promising Rams drives late in the game. It set up the field goal that Forbath missed.
There was a pretty stunning graphic presented by the FOX broadcast team of the two sideline thermometers. The Dolphins’ shaded sideline appeared to be about 60 degrees cooler than the Rams’ sideline, which was exposed to full sunlight until the fourth quarter. That reading is unlikely to be totally accurate — it was not 140 degrees on the Rams’ sideline — but it was notably hot and humid. Yet McVay said it wasn’t the heat that wore his players out. “We were drained because of the type of situations that we put ourselves in, as a result of our execution,” he said.
.
