RamView, 11/2/2014: Rams 13, 49ers 10 (Long)

RamView, November 2, 2014
From The Couch
(Report and opinions on the game.)
Game #8: Rams 13, 49ers 10

Sack City has officially opened for business, as the Ram defense dominated with EIGHT sacks and carried the sputtering offense to a huge upset over the 49ers. The Rams may finally be who we thought they were.

Position by position:
* QB: Grace under fire wasn’t always a strength for Austin Davis (13-24-105, 44.6 PR) this week. The 49er rush had him running around like a chicken with its head cut off and he also threw like one at times. In the 1st, he rolled out and tried to feather a pass over Antoine Bethea and to Tavon Austin; rookie mistake, the ball was never getting over Bethea. The INT set up a quick 49er TD. Next possession, Davis made up for that with an even worse throw. Running for his life but spotting Kenny Britt breaking deep for what should have been a long TD, he launched a throw well short and picked off easily by Perrish Cox. Davis had to run around like a madman at times just to be able to throw the ball away, though he preserved a FG by doing so in the 1st. When he got overwhelmed and sacked late in the 2nd, the TV announcers actually started calling for Shaun Hill, but Sack City forced a fumble and Davis rallied a little. He beat a blitz with a screen to Benny Cunningham for 17 and got Britt wide open in the flat for a 21-yard TD to tie the game at 10 at halftime. By avoiding disaster in the 2nd half, Davis allowed the Rams to stay in the game. His main job in the 2nd half was to hand off to Tre Mason and make short, quick passes, but that helped keep the Rams ahead in the field position game. We wish he would have thrown a screen pass away that instead lost the Rams 8 yards in the 3rd. On 3rd-and-1 with about 3:00 to go, we wish he could have seen Lance Kendricks cruising all alone downfield, maybe even tossed the ball out there anyway, since the play was designed to go to him and would have put the game away. But he threw the ball away, saving the chance to pin the 49ers deep, and the Rams needed every inch of that long field over those final minutes. And who knows how big this play was – after the 49ers shanked a punt to put the Rams in gift scoring range in the 4th, on 3rd down, Davis avoided a big rush by Aaron Lynch and hit Cunningham up the left flat for 8 yards. Not a first down, but after Greg Zuerlein barely scraped in a 39-yard FG, it felt like that little screen pass saved the Rams 3 points, and maybe the game to boot. It was by no means pretty. Austin Davis has elevated the Ram offense some weeks and this clearly wasn’t one of them. Once the offense put him in game manager mode, though, he hung in there and got them the W.

* RB: After a weird continuity break last week, the Rams are back to Tre Mason (19-65) as their feature back, at the expense of Zac Stacy (0-0). Mason earns this role as the more complete back. There is more power in his speed game than there is speed in Stacy’s power game. Benny Cunningham (4-10) started, but Mason brought the goods on the Rams’ 1st FG drive. He banged out 4- and 5-yard runs behind Greg Robinson, then made a big blitz pickup. Then another 6-yard run he finished by running OVER Michael Wilhoite, and another 4-yarder he finished by taking on 2 49ers downfield. That’s physical play worthy of any RB. Mason opened the 2nd half with a 22-yard burst off the right side, running through another Wilhoite tackle attempt. He then pounded out a 5-yard run and cut back for another 6. The kid shows a lot toward being a complete runner. He goes hard and does not go down on first contact. He builds up speed quickly and can get outside. Good ball security this week. Where Mason did not succeed was as the back who chews up the clock at the end of the game. He got stuffed going up the middle on most of his late carries, and on a 3rd-and-1 to seal the game, the Rams felt better throwing instead of running. Perhaps a fresh Stacy should have played a role in there somewhere? It was Cunningham who made the big play by a RB anyway, back in the 2nd, beating a blitz on a bubble screen for 17 (he was 3-38 as a receiver) to set up the Rams’ lone TD. The final division of labor at RB is still settling into place, but this game looked pretty close to where it’s going to need to be.

* Receivers: Might as well combine all the receivers, almost no one’s doing anything. This week’s possible exception: Kenny Britt (2-32), who scored the Rams’ only TD and missed out on another when Davis badly underthrew him after he broke open deep in the 1st. Both were simple coverage breakdowns – the TD came because the MLB failed to pick him up over the middle – but Britt at least made a couple of plays. Who else did? Jared Cook (2-12) had his second straight quiet week. I don’t think he was even targeted after the 1st quarter. Lance Kendricks (1-7) contributed well as a run-blocker and could have had a long TD at the end of the game had Davis gotten more than a second to throw. Cory Harkey (0-0) missed a couple of run blitz pickups that helped stall out drives. The small WRs contributed next to nothing: Tavon Austin 2-11, Stedman Bailey 1-7, Chris Givens 0-0. That golden moment where Davis has time to throw AND a receiver gets open just isn’t coming in this passing game these days.

* Offensive line: Neither offensive line won on their side of the trenches this week. The Rams just lost by a lot less. Davis was under so much pressure, it’s hard to believe he was sacked only once. His linemen can thank him for his mobility that it wasn’t at least half a dozen. And the funny thing is, after a hiccup by Joseph Barksdale and Davin Joseph on an opening 3-and-out, they did a good job picking up the stunts they had been helpless against in the first game. Both tackles continue to struggle against edge speed, though. Davis had to run for his life on his 2nd INT in the first place because Barksdale got beaten badly outside. Greg Robinson’s struggles with speed at LT may be the line’s biggest issue. He’s getting knocked off-balance by much-smaller DEs; it has to be technique. Though Joseph “officially” gave up the only sack, to Aaron Lynch, that play broke down when Robinson got bull-rushed by the much smaller Ahmad Brooks. Brooks beat him again in the 3rd to force a wild Davis throwaway. The Rams went nowhere on their final FG drive after Scott Wells, wearing the largest arm brace I’ve ever seen, got beaten off the snap on a 2nd down run and Robinson was beaten by Lynch to blow up the 3rd down play. With a chance to seal the game and Kendricks breaking all alone downfield on 3rd-and-1, Robinson again got beaten badly and Davis never really got to see what had developed. The Rams ran well when they ran to the edge. Mason got a couple of good gains behind Robinson on the 1st FG drive and another behind Joseph. Barksdale helped open the hole for Mason’s long run of 22 in the 3rd. Middle runs were more of a problem, between run blitzes not getting picked up and Wells losing off the snap a couple of times. He also killed a drive with a holding penalty. Robinson’s shown he can maul; he absolutely flattened a guy on the edge on the Britt TD, so not only was Britt wide open, Davis had a nice, wide throwing lane. The whole Ram passing game, though, is hanging quite a lot on Robinson’s learning curve.

* Defensive line: A little NFL Films “voice of God” music, if you please. The Rams laid siege to Colin Kaepernick with the fury of eight weeks of frustration. William Hayes sacked him on the 49ers’ 2nd drive, whipping Anthony Davis on the edge while Aaron Donald beat Alex Boone and kept Kaepernick from running. Hayes and a blitz flushed Kaepernick again on 3rd down to polish off that drive. James Laurinaitis (!) blitzed past Frank Gore to drop Kaepernick early in the 2nd. Sack City picked up Davis after his bad INT later in the 2nd. Hayes, completely unblocked, fired in to take down Kaepernick. Then, after the Rams were gypped out of a fumble return TD, Laurinaitis fired up the middle and blew a sack, but Robert Quinn cleaned up on the play. Four sacks before halftime? Sack City wasn’t done, either. With just 3 down linemen, but two LBs blitzing, Eugene Sims pushed Boone into Kaepernick, and Quinn hammered him from behind for a sack/fumble. Sims recovered that, and it set up the Rams’ only TD. And the halftime show could still wait. 0:19 left, on just a 4-man rush, Donald trucked the hapless Boone into Kaepernick, flushing him to Sims for the Rams’ SIXTH sack of the half. The 49ers tried to adjust to this onslaught in the 2nd half but crumbled instead. They made it to FG range in the 3rd before Donald burned the center and tripped Kaepernick up for sack number SEVEN. If that didn’t put the 49ers out of FG range, the dropped shotgun snap between the shaky QB and his shaky backup center surely did, with Michael Brockers getting a tackle-for-loss. (Not a SACK? Darn.) Backed up at their goal line in the 4th and the Rams looming over them like an Imperial Star Destroyer, the 49ers got twitchier than a Wookiee with a bad case of sand fleas. Mike Iupati jumped. Frank Gore jumped. On 3rd down, as he’d been doing all day, Quinn whipped Joe Staley, forcing Kaepernick to step up… into Brockers, who dropped him just past the goal line for the Rams’ EIGHTH sack. That and a shanked punt set up the game-winning FG. The Rams couldn’t quite run out the clock and let the 49ers get down to the 1-yard line with time running out. But Sims, who played out of his mind this week, pressured Kaepernick into throwing a pass away on 2nd-and-goal, and the nervous Niners couldn’t push across on 3rd-and-goal without messing up the snap and losing the ball. This is the pass rush dominance we’ve waited for all season. This is what won the game for the Rams this week almost single-handedly. This is how we do things in Sack City.

* Linebackers: Big bounceback week for all three Rams LBs, though there was an early Gore run where they all stunk – Alec Ogletree got wiped out by the RT Davis, Laurinaitis got cleared aside by fullback Bruce Miller and Jo-Lonn Dunbar made an embarrassing whiff – but that did not last long. The three were blitzing forces unlike anything they’d been all year. Laurinaitis got home for a sack early in the 2nd and just missed on Quinn’s first sack later in the quarter. Pressure by Laurinaitis and Ogletree set the table for Quinn’s sack/fumble after that. The two also combined for a strip (Ogletree) of Gore and a fumble return TD (Laurinaitis) that SHOULD have counted. Ogletree was everywhere, in easily his best game of the year. He stuffed Gore a couple of times, nearly picked off a pass intended for Vernon Davis, and blew up a screen on a blitz in addition to all those other plays he made. Laurinaitis made the play of the game, though. With the 49ers at the 1 with 0:10 left, Kaepernick and his center essentially pulled off Butt Fumble II. Kaepernick completely lost control of the ball trying to lunge across the goal line, and who better to win a game-deciding battle royale than the son of a Road Warrior? Laurinaitis came out of the pile holding the ball high, sealing a hard-earned victory for the Rams in what’s been a hard first half to the season.

* Secondary: The Rams looked determined from the outset to make this game much different from the timid soft zone coverage of the first meeting. On the opening drive, with a 3rd down blitz on the way, Lamarcus Joyner jumped Anquan Boldin’s slant route and broke up the pass. Three weeks ago that would have been a big gain because Joyner would still have been ten yards away. Marcus Roberson jumped Vernon Davis’ 3rd down route the next drive but missed out on a pick-six when Ogletree broke up the pass in front of him. The Rams didn’t let themselves get burned deep. E.J. Gaines nicely broke up a bomb for Michael Crabtree before halftime. Unfortunately, the Rams had already given up a TD to the dreaded Boldin by then, as Roberson got sucked into Kaepernick’s gravitational pull when he scrambled, letting Boldin sneak behind everyone. Boldin’s stats (6-93) were similar to the first game but the Rams made Kaepernick work much harder to find open receivers when they blitzed. The final drive was still a real roller coaster ride. Back after a long injury break, Trumaine Johnson blew a tackle and let Steve Johnson get away for 25. But Joyner blanketed S. Johnson the next play and Rodney McLeod made a big open-field tackle to hold Boldin to 8. But then Joyner got called for holding and McLeod blew a tackle to give S.Johnson another 20. But then Gaines broke up a long pass, saved the game, with a diving play. But then TruJo interfered with Crabtree to set the 49ers up inside the 5, then held him again to set them up at the 3. But the D hung on, and this time around, the Rams won in part because the Ram secondary got aggressive. The attitude looks good on them.

* Special teams: Johnny Hekker (46.8 avg) was very much part of the reason the Rams won. Tavon Austin was not. Hekker pinned the 49ers around their 10 twice in the 4th. The first time it set up the game winning FG (which Greg Zuerlein BARELY squeezed through) after a shanked punt by Andy Lee. The second helped keep the 49ers out of FG position until there was 1:00 left, though I’m probably overblowing that. Austin averaged over 8 yards a return and had what should have been a TD called back, but he’s regressed into way too much of an adventure back there. He’s back to stupidly standing around and waiting for coverage to get to him. When has that EVER worked, Tavon? Pee wee ball? It came within inches of costing the Rams a safety before halftime, as he goofed around in the end zone with a caught field goal for about half an hour and then IDIOTICALLY tried to bring it out, avoiding one of the season’s most boneheaded plays by mere inches. Quit dancing. Quit goofing around. Catch the ball and run FORWARD with it. What Austin’s thinking is as hard to explain as what Daren Bates was thinking when he jumped approximately five yards offsides on the 49ers’ first FG attempt.

* Strategery: Alert the media! Brian Schottenheimer’s adjustments helped save the game for the Rams. And he didn’t wait until halftime, either. With the Rams still in the game but coping poorly with the 49er rush, he called some plays to help Davis get his confidence back. He dialed the passing game back and put a lot of the offensive burden on Mason’s shoulders. He got the ball out of Davis’ hand faster and beat 49er blitzes several times with screens to Cunningham, including one that may have saved the Rams the winning points. Two second-half calls looked very wrong without a second look. 3rd-and-10 in the 3rd, a goofy pitch play to Cunningham loses 4 more, but if he’d followed Robinson around end like he should have, the 49er D looked caught flat-footed. 3rd-and-1 with just over 3:00 to play and a chance to burn the last 49er timeout, the decision to pass just looked foolhardy, especially after Davis killed the clock with a throwaway, but as they showed on TV, the rest of the play worked – Kendricks was all alone downfield for a TD had Davis seen it. Eh, that still should have been a run. Schottenheimer still earns credit for tweaking the offense enough during the game to keep the Rams from going under.

I think I’ve spent every week this season complaining about Gregg Williams’ game plans; he can complain about me this week. I don’t have a great idea what was so different from the game in St. Louis to snap this pass rush to life. John Lynch said on the broadcast that the Rams disguised their blitzes too well for Kaepernick to figure them out. That makes two of us, I guess, so credit to Williams there. It looked like the Rams blitzed DBs off the edge more than they have this season, which had the side benefit of keeping Kaepernick in the pocket, which they did very well this time around. It looked like coverage behind the blitz was much more man instead of soft zones that left Boldin open by 10 yards every time the Rams blitzed the first game. That’s my guess for the key adjustment. Otherwise, Williams still took big blitz gambles on 3rd-and-longs he didn’t need to. But they worked. He still blitzed Laurinaitis. But it worked. He brought the house a couple of times with the 49ers driving at the end of the game and put a DB who hadn’t played since August out on an island. Well, it worked out. I’m not even sure it was Williams this week as much as it was players like Quinn, Hayes, Sims and Laurinaitis just playing better, or the 49ers really struggling to make up for the loss of Daniel Kilgore at center. But if this week represents the game plan and the players finally meshing, look out, league, and who gives a flip if I can figure it out or not.

And, sometimes it’s what you don’t do that works. About 3:00 left, 4th-and-1 near midfield, it was easy to think Jeff Fisher would consider going for it or deploying some Seattle-style special teams trickery. Instead, the very safe move to pin the 49ers deep with the punt. But unlike the Seattle game, the Rams had some success stopping the 49er offense, and they only had one timeout left to drive 55-60 yards. A failure on 4th down would have left them one completion from tying the game and in very good shape to take the lead at the end. The fact that they almost did made the decision to punt very much the right move. Coaching win for the Rams this week all the way around.

* Upon further review: Must referees constantly use Rams games to compete with one another to see who can be the NFL’s worst? Jerome Boger has always been in the running for that dishonor and made an especially powerful argument this week. Was Boger hung over, or still drunk? Two of the first three Ram penalties, he didn’t even call the right number. Boger made a call in the 2nd that smacked of the game being rigged. Ogletree stripped Gore at midfield, and Laurinaitis scooped and scored, but Boger said the play was blown dead because Gore’s forward progress had stopped. For one, no one whistles a play dead that quickly. For another, no whistle can be heard on TV until Laurinaitis has the ball! All Boger did was was blow the play dead so the Rams couldn’t score! And though it would have been called back by penalty, they called Austin out of bounds on a punt return in the 4th when replay showed he was in, it wasn’t even that close and should have been ruled a TD. Mason got bodyslammed by Chris Borland on a 4th quarter tackle, a move that is now a personal foul. No call. Boger and crew butchered basic procedures, basic rules interpretations, simple visual judgments and player safety calls. Their saving graces: they called penalties pretty evenly on both sides and didn’t blow the call on Kaepernick’s goal-line fumble. That’s all that kept Boger out of the Don Denkinger wing of the St. Louis Hall of Hated Sports Officials. For now. Grade: F-plus

* Cheers: Kevin Burkhardt and John Lynch were such 49er homers when they did this game last year, it did not look promising that they got the call again this week. Instead, this was the best game I’ve heard Lynch call. He made solid observations about the shifting strategies of both teams. He recommended changes the Rams actually adopted. They broke plays down well; Burkhardt saw Britt would have had a TD on Davis’ 2nd INT, and Lynch pointed out the TD Kendricks could have had on 3rd-and-1 of the Rams’ final drive. Lynch’s analysis made that play call look a lot less questionable. Speaking of questionable, they did both call for Shaun Hill to take over as starter, but they stayed on Rams Nation’s good side by being all over the awful officiating, from the denied fumble return TD to the bodyslam tackle personal foul that wasn’t called. There wasn’t a lot of thinking time at the end of the game. In the excitement, they said the clock stopped after Crabtree’s catch inside the 1 when it actually correctly kept running, and there was no mention of when or whether Harbaugh should have considered kicking the FG. I imagine he probably never would have. It was still the strongest broadcast we’ve seen from a Fox “B” team in a while.

* Who’s next?: You know you’re in an insanely difficult stretch of your schedule when the Seahawks and 49ers were the soft spots. Up next on the Rams’ Schedule From Hell: the 7-1 Cardinals. The Rams have, surprisingly, won three of the last four in this series, but the desert has been the setting for many a Rams horror show, such as last year’s uninspired 30-10 loss in which Carson Palmer completed 84% of his passes, 12 to Larry Fitzgerald.

Slowing down either of those two would be a start toward a much more competitive game than the Rams have tended to play in Arizona in recent seasons. They say teams that blitz hate to be blitzed, which showed some in Arizona’s 28-17 win at Dallas, but Palmer’s numbers have been strong: 11 TDs vs. 2 INTs. And the 34-year-old has been surprisingly nimble in the pocket this season. He’s climbing and sliding in the pocket well and it often gives him time to hit something big downfield. The Cardinals are a distinctly downfield passing game, but they’re also still predominantly Fitzgerald. You have to be able to stop and prevent plays like screens and quick slants that let him get a dangerous head of steam. Their best big-play threat is blazing rookie John Brown, but I’d be willing to do whatever’s necessary to take Fitzgerald out of play and make someone else beat me. Palmer spreads the ball around, but their tight ends are not reliable receivers, and along with Michael Floyd, who’s been maybe half as productive as Fitzgerald this season on the same number of targets, have been drop machines. LT Jared Veldheer anchors an offensive line that has improved but is attackable. LG Ted Larsen will be very vulnerable to Aaron Donald’s quickness. RT Bobby Massie is improving but still doesn’t read defenses well and will get fooled by blitzes and switches. Where they’ve really gotten better is run-blocking; you rarely see Andre Ellington without a hole to hit or taking a loss. He’s a tough little back, a smart, patient runner. He runs plays where they’re supposed to go and is a constant threat to break one. Bruce Arians’ team is very good fundamentally. They average less than a turnover a game, and rookie free agent (ahem) Chandler Catanzaro hasn’t missed a kick all season. Unlike their great tradition as the Big Dead in St. Louis, this Cardinal team doesn’t beat itself.

Two of the blitz-happiest DCs in the league, Gregg Williams and Todd Bowles, will square off in this week’s coaching main event. Bowles has the Cardinals blitzing more than any team in the league, a little over half the time, but funny thing: they’ve only averaged a sack a game, and they’re last in the league in pass defense. The Rams’ eight sacks this week matched Arizona’s season total. The Arizona front doesn’t have a lot to apologize for, though. Led by 6’8” Calais Campbell, who will be very hard for Austin Davis to see over, they get good enough pressure when they rush straight up that it looks like they’re blitzing. The Rams will be better off getting the ball out quickly on 1st down, Bowles’ favorite blitz down. It’s time to get a couple of guys going in the passing game. Jared Cook should be able to get open. The Eagles got their TEs matched up on LBs a lot last week. It’s also Tavon Time if it’s ever going to be. Or Central Stedman Time, whatever works, but Jeremy Maclin (11 catches, 2 TDs) killed the Cardinals out of the slot. As the #3 run D in the league (which has to be part of the reason for the low pass D ranking), they’re not going to be easy to move against on the ground. The Rams will want to use Arizona’s aggression against them. They’ll be better off attacking the edges than the middle. This isn’t the first time RamView has insisted the Rams run at Sam Acho. The Cardinals do get great run support from safeties Tony Jefferson and rookie Deone Bucannon, so cool them off with some play action. Davis shouldn’t come into to the Cactus Dome like he’s flying blind. How Jefferson’s lined up has been a tipoff to whether Bowles is blitzing. Patrick Peterson, for all his hype, has been pretty beatable at corner because he’ll often get caught peeking into the backfield trying to play for flashy interceptions. Eye discipline will be a key for Davis; so will finding his checkdowns be. The Eagles beat the Cardinal blitz repeatedly late in last week’s game with play-action dumpoffs. The flat opposite the blitz was always open. The 49ers left that open this week and Davis pounced on it a couple of times, so it should already be on his mind. No chance it’ll be easy, but the Ram offense can adjust to the Arizona attack. They won’t win if they can’t.

Last week, the Rams looked like Napoleon’s army marching back from Moscow. Fortunately, they made a stopover in Sack City and found themselves. The Rams will need Sack City and a smart game from Davis to hang against the best-coached, most fundamentally sound team in the NFC.

— Mike
Game stats from espn.com