VB on Rams & Gurley

Vincent Bonsignore@VinnyBonsignore
My thoughts on the @Rams and Todd Gurley:

It’s important to remember Todd was headed to a second straight offensive player of the year award going into the last month of the 2018 season. In other words, he was justifying the contract extension he signed that summer.

And then something happened to his knee, forcing him to miss the last two games of the regular season and his altering his effectiveness in the playoffs. It’s the ugly side of professional football that teams always worry about, but an element you can never predict.

The Rams tried to manage the situation last year – in kind of an unprecedented way, via a load management plan. I mean, it’s not like Sean McVay woke up one morning and decided the best way to win is to use Todd Gurley 35 percent less than normal!!! That’s absurd.

It was always going to be a tricky situation, tough, and it put McVay in a tough position. Not just having to carefully answer for it week after week but also figure out ways to game plan and play call around it. In many ways he was coaching with one arm tied behind his back.

Through it all, I always felt McVay had Gurley’s back.

It damn near worked, too. Save for a missed game-winning FG and a crazy third down play against the 49ers, the Rams make the playoffs. I still wonder how many teams would have wanted to play them at that point, too.

Bottom line though, considering the finances involved and all the tricky elements and maybe some damaged feelings, it would have been really, really difficult to try to repeat that again this year.

I think moving forward it will give teams pause on doing early extensions, especially for running backs, unfortunately. But I’ll say this: for everything Todd Gurley meant to the Rams and L.A., he deserved that money.