twitter, reporters, the big articles … Browns game

SS@RoyalAndMadSol
I’ll give credit where it’s due:

Rams o-line had their best looking game against a legit defense today.

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Rodrigue: At 6-6 with a playoff shot, Rams’ greater victory is finding their grit

Jourdan Rodrigue

https://theathletic.com/5109815/2023/12/04/los-angeles-rams-playoff-chances/?source=emp_shared_article

INGLEWOOD, Calif. — A year ago at this time, the Los Angeles Rams were imploding. Their quarterback, Matthew Stafford, was broken. So was their top receiver, Cooper Kupp. Their star defensive tackle Aaron Donald, had just gutted through an ankle injury in a game at Kansas City and then was shut down for the season. The middle class of their roster had disappeared. Their offensive line had crumbled, also in large part to injury but they didn’t have enough talent up there overall, either.

Their coach, Sean McVay, was at rock bottom.

I am thinking about that time a lot this week. How lost McVay seemed after the Week 12, 2022, game in which he gave up play calling and stood, reeling, in the cement bowels of the Chiefs’ stadium unsure where to go next. How steep and dreadful the crash from the mountaintop of the previous season was. How quiet the locker room was. How hurt everybody was, and the mental toll it took on them. How the end of everything, including the McVay era, was coming. It had to be.

And then, it didn’t.

Sunday, the Rams beat the Cleveland Browns 36-19. They have won three games in a row, are 6-6 and have a real shot at the playoffs.

A game like this, against a physical and well-coached defense that has been at the top of league statistics for much of the season, was the product of a million steps before it ever kicked off.

Steps that began when the head coach decided not to quit in his worst moments.

McVay got back to his own fundamentals, during a long offseason where he did the hard work on his own process, his values as a coach, the things he had lost within himself during a five-year, all-out sprint to a championship. He overhauled his coaching staff, and the new assistants got fair warning about what they were getting into. This would be a team that had basically sacrificed the defensive roster, including a couple of beloved and productive veterans, for the sake of three massive “weight-bearing-wall” contracts for Stafford, Donald and Kupp and a blatant need to get younger and faster on that side of the ball. This would be a team going back to the basics, like, seriously — days and days of practicing a drill before actually doing the drill in practice — and it wouldn’t be easy.

Now, a team that was criticized even in its Super Bowl-winning season for being “all glitter” has substance to it. Some teeth. That’s what it takes to win in late November and December. That’s what became of the gut-busting, puke-inducing “grueler” drives, 18 and 20 plays at a time in the 90-degree hills of Thousand Oaks, in late summer, which McVay installed because he needed to get his team in shape and disciplined, and accustomed to grinding out a game. Back in those gnarly, sweat-drenched days, McVay had to stop practice over and over again. Re-teach, line up again. Cuss somebody, if needed. Line up again. McVay spent those sessions with the offense, but also partially in collaboration with hybrid coordinator/head coach Raheem Morris and the dramatically inexperienced defense on some days — a hard-to-pry-away delegation of McVay’s previous obsessiveness with his offense. It meant depending on coaches such as offensive coordinator Mike LaFleur, assistants Jake Peetz, Zac Robinson, K.J. Black, Ryan Wendell, Ron Gould and Nick Caley and his veteran quarterback to make those moments seamless and instructive to the younger players.

“Work works,” McVay would repeat to himself, after angsty news conferences following mistake-riddled training camp practices. It’s a phrase borrowed from Donald, who never met a rack of weights he couldn’t punish and did his own part to show the youngest players what it takes to excel at this level.

Work works.

Work works.

By September, the young players started turning a corner in practice. Through October, it started showing up in games. The Rams were hardly perfect — there were bad play calls on both sides, huge misses on special teams, injuries to Stafford and Kupp and multiple running backs, and a truly dreary afternoon in Green Bay. But most weeks, they were a tough out and a team some opponents would even remark was “playing harder” than their own group. Some rookies — starting left guard Steve Avila, receiver Puka Nacua, outside linebacker Byron Young, defensive lineman Kobie Turner — began to break out. At the start of December, their production is strong enough that it is not just measured against other rookies, but against their older peers, too. There has not been a day of silence in the locker room, or periods of resignation. You can see it, you can feel it: These players are all in for each other. They are all in for the work.

“I think the players and the coaches have done a great job of just being able to stay one day at a time, to not forget the joy in the journey,” McVay said this week, when I asked him about then, and now. “I think there’s a lot to be said too — you can’t establish grit unless you go through real challenging experiences. I can’t speak for other people, but I do know that I was spoiled with a lot of the good things (I experienced early in my career). It forces you to continue to grow and mature as a leader, as the man that (I) want to be for the people that (I) love and care about. How (do) you respond to certain things instead of (being) spoiled or taking for granted a lot of the good things that have come our way? And then (I would) just think, oh, well, if it’s not (success/good things), then you know, it’s not worth it. And that is just so wrong.“I did not like a lot of the things that occurred last year, but man it was so necessary.”

Out of those long practices and tougher in-season moments, calluses began to form. A new toughness showed up in many ways especially Sunday afternoon.

Take Nacua’s effort to get back on the field after a scary ribs and shoulder injury in the second quarter as an example. He crossed the 1,000-yard threshold in the first half, but went down hard on the Cleveland sideline in the second quarter. He was still for several moments, as medical staff and McVay rushed to his side, before gingerly getting up and walking to the locker room. But Nacua returned to the game immediately in the third quarter.

“What an unbelievable catch he makes on the sideline, I thought he was dead,” said McVay, joking postgame but noting his extreme worry in the moment (the situation will bear monitoring in the coming days). “Then he comes back to life. He is a tough … competitor. The way he battles through things. The physicality at which he plays this game. He brings an energy to our team that I think you guys can all feel when you watch.”

Yes, the Rams’ defense played against Cleveland’s fourth starting quarterback of the season Sunday (it also happened to be Joe Flacco, who made his share of plays). Yes, the Rams’ defense has some noticeable holes in it that need patching this offseason, particularly where their pressure is concerned. They’ve also held their last three opponents to 16, 14 and 19 points and given their offense plenty of at-bats along the way. Veteran safety John Johnson III, a former Ram who had a brief stint in Cleveland, intercepted Flacco with 6:51 to play. McVay said the play changed the momentum of the game. The Rams scored a touchdown on their corresponding possession.

“I just knew we needed time,” said starting linebacker Ernest Jones, of the defense’s development over the last several weeks. “Everybody was learning, experiencing this game. A lot of us (needed) that experience. We found it. We got it. We’re goin’, now.”

The Rams are a gap and power-running system now, with some mid- and wide-zone still mixed in. They still have their knockout punches: Misdirection (in the pass and the run game) and classic McVay-era passing concepts all unfolding out of identical pre-snap looks. But they’ve got jabs, now, too, especially when lead rusher Kyren Williams, a self-professed duo-run aficionado, is healthy. They can gas you out with duo, with tight-end motion blocks they aptly call “blast” and “DOOM” before they take their big swings in the passing game. McVay admits he is “still a basket case” (his words), but the coach whose state of being always somehow resembles the offense he runs is a more resilient basket case now.

Sunday against a top Browns pass rush (which featured a limited Myles Garrett), Stafford was not sacked. The Browns loaded up the box, often featuring a single-high safety pre-snap — daring Stafford to throw with a still-recovering sprained UCL in his thumb, betting that their pass rush would get home often enough to tamp down some of the Rams’ dimension. Stafford missed a couple throws, sure, but hit the big ones: a 70-yard plane-bending throw to Nacua that he checked into at the line of scrimmage, a 30-yard conversion to veteran receiver Demarcus Robinson late in the game that set up a touchdown, and after a few weeks of disconnect, finally a touchdown to Kupp.

But when the Rams needed to run, they ran. Williams opened the third quarter with an 18-yard carry. Nacua, in his first play after whatever treatment he got in the locker room on his shoulder and ribs at halftime, threw the block that popped Williams loose.

Williams churned for a first down, and then a touchdown just under the two-minute warning after Cleveland had burned its timeouts. McVay had his foot on the gas, playing for the touchdown while already up a score, instead of three points.

A thought popped into my brain as I watched Williams run at the goal line.

Rams general manager Les Snead, who deserves a portion of the overall credit for the current roster as well as for a draft class that features seven rookies now playing meaningful snaps, said something to me in the spring as the partial rebuild or reset or whatever they want to call it began. I won’t soon forget it.

At that time, it was a classic Snead-ism, a line in a sprawling metaphor about McVay’s journey back to coaching after he wondered whether he should walk away for a bit.

It was also about so much more than that.

“Every now and then,” Snead said, “you just got to run (the ball) and go through the roadblock.”
In the fourth quarter Sunday, to ice out a game in December that meant something — because they wanted to, and because they could, because running right at the work was the only way out of feeling so dang-awful and being so dang-awful — the Rams ran the ball right at the Browns.

wv wrote:

When did Raheem Morris become a ‘hybrid coordinator/head coach’  ?     Did i miss the memo or somethin?

Morris is officially designated as the Rams assistant head coach. It just means he inherits the head coach position if McVay misses time for any reason. It’s like he’s the VP and McVay is the president. As a rule guys become assistant head coaches if they’ve been head coaches before, which Morris has. This doesn’t subtract anything from Morris being the Rams defensive coordinator.

wv wrote:

zn wrote:

wv wrote:

When did Raheem Morris become a ‘hybrid coordinator/head coach’ ? Did i miss the memo or somethin?

Morris is officially designated as the Rams assistant head coach. It just means he inherits the head coach position if McVay misses time for any reason. It’s like he’s the VP and McVay is the president. As a rule guys become assistant head coaches if they’ve been head coaches before, which Morris has. This doesn’t subtract anything from Morris being the Rams defensive coordinator.

— OK, well, i thought it was like being the designated figurehead. Like Nittany is on this board. Ya know. Like assistant-hybrid-vice-admin. w v

No Nittany’s powers and responsibilities are different. Morris, for example, does not have power over life and death.