wv wrote:

I will be surprised if Austin Davis
ever learns to
1) trust the pocket
and
2) make good-quick decisions.

…

I’d bring Hill back with
no hesitation, though.
I hope they can afford him
cause he’s gonna have good
numbers and a lot of teams
are gonna offer him good back-up money.

w
v

Agreed. I will be very surprised if Hill is not our #2 next year. They’ll pay him the market price for a good #2. (This would be a notable contrast with their response to Clemens’ year last season.)

Davis? I have trouble seeing his future for the reason you mention and others.

We need to draft a promising developmental guy this year. 1st round or, at the latest, the 2nd.

I guess the #1 will be Bradford. But damn, I do not trust that knee.

I would actually like to acquire a mid-career, mid-table FA QB. People say, “Sanchez (or the like) doesn’t do much for me.” OK. But there are unexciting but generally capable QBs who have had successful seasons who could provide us with better than what one expects from backups. That would be a good thing, even if it weren’t exciting.

Thing is, Hill is a bit of a ‘tweener. He is a shade better than the normal backup type. But I dunno if I see him as a true starter.

The whole issue is a real challenge. If we can’t trust Bradford’s health, then we really have very few good options. Gonna be tough to nget it right.

wv wrote:

Dak wrote:
RIP, Jeff. So sad to hear.

I also wonder often about Billy T. Anybody hear anything lately about Billy and his battle with cancer.

Dont know about his struggle with cancer,
but he’s still posting on the Herd regularly.

w
v

How about SanFram? He had his own health struggles. Anybody hear from him?

wv wrote:

I can tell you, i watched the Oakland game and == that was
virtually all Oakland, LoL. They were the worst
team I’ve seen since Jacksonville last year.
An inexperienced QB with no weapons.

Lets see if the Rams can actually beat two
bad teams in a row

w
v

Oh, indeed. No question. They were just embarrassingly bad. Scott Linehan abysmal.

But here’s my thing. 52-0.

As I say above, if it’s 36-6, I say, “Poor opposition” and not much else.

But 52-0? That’s not easy to do. I don’t think even Scott Linehan lost that badly.

The Rams flashed something in that game.

I just dunno if they are capable of building on the flashes.

InvaderRam wrote:

haven’t watched the last 2 games, but it’s possible that we’re all witnessing a turning point for this team?

Well, we’ve seen turning points, again and again, both positively and negatively.

But, yes. Especially on defense, we seem to be seeing a unit finding its way. And the bad game in SD can, I think, be attributed to a DC who forgot where his assets lie.

I mean, sure. That team on Sunday did, as one of the PD pundits put it, distance itself from the bad teams. That’s a good thing.

But didn’t we do that last year? Before regressing into the gutter this year long enough to kill our chances at competing? Will we regress again next year until 9-7 will seem like a major achievement?

And see here’s the problem. We’re playing with house money. Our season is already over from a competitive viewpoint. Over the last 3 seasons, we have lost a lot of games, then solidified, then stolen some games AFTER it became mostly pointless. When you’re reduced to a late November goal of 7-9 or 8-8, you can play pretty freely ’cause the consequences are limited. You’re not really playing for much.

For me, OAK was not a meaningful test. People talk about bouncing back after the SD heartbreak last week. Big deal. There was very little on the line SUN. No one around the league cared. There were few competitive consequences one way or the other. We’ve SHOWN for 3 years we can win some games that don’t mean much late in the year.

What we have NOT done is to follow wins with more wins and notched victories when we had something significant in our grasp. DEN was a great win. SD was a massive failure. OAK was a pleasant romp, but it doesn’t do anything about the SD game we lost robbing us of the chance to pursue a 9-10 game season. It was not a game about becoming a competitive winner.

In the Fisher era, we have not won ONE opportunity game that allowed us to step up into the real competition in the league, the one leading to the playoffs. Not one. Not one time have we kept momentum going as we vaulted into contention. Nada. Our Nada which art in nada.

So, for me, we have not turned anything around. Every time we have faced a gateway game, we have lost: MN, DAL, Philly, SF I, KC, AZ, SD. Win any one of those games and you enter the discussion. We lost every one.

Well, we have one last chance for a turn around this year. It isn’t 1 game. It’s a string of winnable games which brings a winning season into reach. WASH. AZ (beat up). NYG.

If we FOLLOW a big OAK win with a series of well played games, we ought to win each one and then SEA will mean a winning season, playoffs or no. I’d like to see us at least earn the right to play that game for a + .500 year. If we have turned a corner, we WILL start translating talent into execution and wins. It’s entirely doable.

But I wouldn’t hold my breath. We’ll lose soon, a .500 or worse season will be guaranteed with several weeks left, and we can sit back and hope for moral victories. And however many wins we post with 50 points, we have not turned a corner until we get ourselves over .500 and into contention.

One of the pundits said the only thing wrong with the win SUN was that it only counted as 1 win. Damn straight!

As WV says, a team is not “good” in any meaningful sense until it can win numbers of games. Laurinaitas, for example, makes that point emphatically.

We all know that any one game can be very misleading. This is particularly true for a Ram team that this year has been all over the map. Just looking at the defense, the fine efforts against DEN and OAK sandwich a really poor effort against SD. How does one tell?

And then there is the problem of accounting for the opposition. OAK was gawdawful. I just kept laughing and thinking, “Well, I guess there are fans that have it worse than we have.”

One way to evaluate the game is to look at aspects of the game and ask myself, “is that repeatable?”

A positive: the pass D. Against DEN and against OAK, we had numerous cases of passes defended in the short zones. Against both, we had effective pass rushes. I think that those 2 factors go together. We A) have DBs who CAN challenge short passes and B) an excellent pass rush. Put those together, and we’re tough. Sure, OAK is limited. But DEN isn’t and we showed in BOTH GAMES that we can do business when we challenge the short ball.

Which, from my point of view, provides a way to understand the SD game. A defense that could effectively defend against DEN is CAPABLE of defending Rivers & Co. We didn’t because, in my view, Williams regressed into Blitz-Mania like a drunk falling off the wagon. Many an observer, including professionals, has observed the deep drops against SD and the effortless ease Rivers had dumping off before our pass rush could get there. To me, lousy coaching explains SD and good coaching supporting good talent explains DEN and OAK. I think that, with effective game plans, our pass defense IS repeatable.

Now, a negative. The running game. Mason looked great … especially on 1 memorable run. But is that repeatable?

I doubt it. On Mason’s big run, the OAK LBs blundered like Ram LBs. They just ran away. And Mason ran into a huge lane due to blocks by almost no one. The lead blocker literally had no one to block. OK, that can happen. But can you hope for it to happen again?

Nope. Those same LBs got their act together in the 2nd half and we couldn’t run for like 3 series in a row. I think our running stats were padded by Mason’s big run, Hill’s bootleg (definitely not repeatable) and Tavon trickery which is nice but not much to count on. Our RBs got stuffed a lot, especially when we had the lead. If we are going to be a tough team that protects leads, we have to be able to run when it is expected. And I don’t think we did.

The OL is still not really much good at imposing its will in the run game. And Saffold’s shoulder is becoming a serious problem. I believe that we are at least a solid OG and OC away from being genuinely “good” in the running game. We have the backs, but not the interior OL.

So, some aspects of yesterday are repeatable. Others aren’t. It’s hard for me to say what they add up to.

A puzzle: why do we not throw to Britt and Bailey more consistently? Both are capable. But we spend so much time working elaborate underneath stuff. And we rarely work simple, bread-and-butter throws to our solid or better WRs. I do not get that, and I am convinced it hurts us. Against a better team, it would have put the win in jeopardy, as it has done repeatedly this year.

But now for the really hard question. We beat OAK. OK. We beat them comfortably. OK.

But we scored 52 freaking points and pitched a shut out! What does that mean?

I have to think it means something. I mean, suppose we won 37-6. That would’ve been very nice, right? But it wouldn’t make a significant POINT.

But 52-0? I dunno. Even if OAK sux, that does seem to make a point. It’s kind of like developing your golf game. Teaching pros sometimes advise guys to play solo rounds on a largely empty course, taking 2nd or even 3rd shots. The idea is to prove to yourself what your body is capable of doing. It’s a developmental stage which of course can’t directly carry over to competition. Yet discovering what you CAN DO can help you raise your ceiling in competition.

I just have to think that, on some levels, a beat down that big will raise the team’s understanding of its own ceiling. At some point, that might well translate into the team commanding its destiny.

But when? I dunno. This coaching staff has markedly failed to teach the team to win numbers of games, even when they were in reach. How long it will take these guys to translate 52-0 against stiffs into a winning team mentality is anybody’s guess.

zn wrote:

Defensive Line: C

The Rams applied decent pressure, but the Chargers countered with screen plays and quick-hit passes.

Secondary: C
But as the game wore on, Rivers worked over the secondary while completing 29 of 35 passes for 291 yards. After rallying to the ball nicely in the first half, the defensive backs missed some tackles in the second half.

You cannot blame the DL for the opposing QB dumping the ball off quickly.

And you cannot blame the DBs for allowing lots of underneath yards when half of them are committed to the blitz.

Williams called a lousy game today. I cannot count the number of times Rivers could simply dump off to a guy underneath with acres of room because so many LBs and DBs were blitzing.

Williams has not learned to trust our DL to do its job. He blitzes and blitzes and there is nobody home to challenge the quick release passes. Williams is negating our best team strength by refusing to enhance its impact by keeping bodies to challenge quick throws.

Agree with this thread in general.

These “little things” make a big difference–they comprise the difference between a capable, starter-quality QB and guys who do this and that but can’t put the package together.

Clemens gave us a lot of these intangibles. But he lacked the arm strength.

Davis has a somewhat better arm and can make more plays. But he lacks composure and continuity, and his success window is pretty narrow.

Hill gives you the whole package. Not at Pro Bowl level. But at a sufficient level of capability and on a wide enough range of skills that a defense cannot expect to simply shut him down. It makes a big difference to our offense.

And BTW, note the fact that several of these quotations came from vets … on defense! The whole team responds to capable QBing.

All of this makes me think of Sam. We all want to believe that a healthy Sam woulda been worth a few wins. And I think it’s true.

But it isn’t NECESSARILY because Sam is/could be a great QB. You don’t have to believe that he would be pushing Rogers for the Pro Bowl to believe that he would have made a big difference.

Whether or not one wants to see Sam as a franchise, top shelf QB–and many do not–he certainly WAS a solidly capable QB. He offered all of these “little things” and was a respectable threat. All of that makes a huge difference even if one denies that he could ever be a star.

Personally, I think he was a star. I just don’t trust his knees.

We need AT LEAST what Hill offers next year. Not sure how we’ll get it.

If we take an OT #1 I am going to be pissed.

I want a MLB, an OC, a developmental QB, and a solid, route-running WR for depth.

OT for depth? Sure. But we have other needs to prioritize.

Anyway, you’ve done it, haven’t you? Kicked off 6 months or more of draft talk. The consolation of the fan following a perpetually losing team!

What I know is that we tend to think the team is terrible, and needs a complete teardown after disappointing losses, and think they’ve turned the corner into a powerhouse after a good win.

Well, I’ve never been about that. This year at least.

I’ve said all year that the coaching staff is responsible for failing to get this team, especially the defense, ready for the year.

I think the performance against DEN supports that view. That bunch is too “good” to have stunk up the joint for half a season as they did. I see this last game as an indictment of Fisher’s staff.

And that’s the thing. This team had it EASILY in its hands to have been at least 6-4 right now. In which case everything would be on the table.

The COST of the horrendous start has been that playoffs are no longer on the table. Even if we go 5-1 and finish above .500 the rest of the way, that won’t change. We have already blown the year in that sense.

And BTW, I don’t really think we will go 5-1. I am saying that the team we saw SUN (or in my case this morning) SHOULD be able to do that.

But I doubt they will. I think they’ll go about 3-3 the rest of the way and finish in the mediocre range again. I do not trust this coaching staff. I still want heads to roll … though I know they won’t.

Still, I will always be delighted to be wrong and see the lads win games!

Dak wrote:

I still think part of the O-line looking better is Hill getting rid of the ball quickly. Being at home helped, too. A lot of times Austin Davis held onto the ball and left the pocket when he sensed pressure. It’s amazing what quicker decision-making can do for pass protection. There’s a reason that Peyton Manning has so few sacks over the years.

Amen, Brother!

Watching the 1st Q, the difference we night and day. Hill was so FAST in his read and decision-making. The 2 long passes to Britt were released quickly! See and throw.

And as you say, suddenly the OL looks good!

But the receiving corps also looked like different people. Britt, of course. But consider Baily.
People were asking last week about what had happened to Bailey.

This week, he makes about 3 tough, clutch catches. ‘Cause Hill saw him and brought him into play!

HighPlainsDrifter wrote:

When you are talking about those two quarterbacks, then, yes, I think it would make a world of difference. Those two QBs are on different planets. I think a huge part of the Rams’ struggles is the play of the quarterback. The offense is very limited by both the physical limitations of the QB as well as the understanding of the game of the quarterback. Bradford’s injury was huge for this team. I think they could’ve overcome some of the early shortcomings of the defense with an offense that had a chance to move the ball, but that hasn’t been the case. Swap out Manning for either of the QBs the Rams have to offer up and things could have been much different, and could be different on Sunday. Instead of worrying that Denver might hang 50 on the Rams, I’d be much more comfortable with the prospect of Rams’ win. If you could make that happen, you’d be my hero.

Well said.

InvaderRam wrote:

what happens if the rams still lose with hill at qb?

This is the wrong question to ask.

There are no guarantees. We might lose with Hill. Hill might play poorly. Who knows?

Coaching decisions must be judged on what is known BEFORE the event. What do we know?

We know who Davis is. Really, we do. He is, as ZN says, an emotional guy who blows hot and cold, a pop-gun armed passer who can only throw the high ball, and a guy who panics and collapses into disaster mode. He hasn’t troubled a defense in weeks. We won the SF game, but not because of Davis, who sucked.

Going into this week, most people expected AZ to shut Davis down. They did. He made like 3 good passes all day and then melted down. THIS WAS COMPLETELY PREDICTABLE KNOWING WHAT WE KNEW BEFORE THE GAME!

We also know that Hill has a track record of pretty good, fairly sophisticated QBing in this league. He is no star. But he is solid and can be productive. He has DONE IT over a range of years.

We don’t know if his age will be an issue. We don’t know if he will be rusty. We don’t know whether we can win even if he plays better than Davis has. Hill could have a great day and not be within 15 points of Manning.

The point is whether a coach makes the decision that gives his team the best chance of winning. For weeks now, it has been clear that Davis has actually reduced our chances of winning. Hill at least gives us a chance of doing better.

We don’t have to win the game to prove the logic of the switch to be correct. Hell, even if Hill tanks, it would still have been worth it to take the chance. Davis will NOT get it done. Hill might. I’ll take Hill.

Well, you make a good point.

We’ve had injuries this year. But look at all the guys we depended on with injury histories?

Sam. J Long. Saffold. Joseph. Wells, a shadow of his former self. That’s a pretty big chunk of the offense right there. And all have been injured except for Joseph, who has not yet recovered his form from before his injury.

I supported the trust in Sam. Still think it was the right gamble. And we had gotten Hill. (Then we dumped him for a flash in the pan.)

But J Long shoulda been cut. And we needed a solid center and at least one more proven OG or OG.

FO decisions have consequences. Fish and Snead gambled on physically unhealthy players and they got burned in virtually every case. Gee. Who could have imagined that?

PS. WV, remember when we could be proud of the team? Sure, they lost Conference title games. And they couldn’t match up with the Whiners in their glory. But they always played tough football.

No one thought SOSAR. We were the Rams. We knew how to defend and run the ball. Even when we lost, we did it with pride.

Damn. What would it feel like to think that people actually RESPECTED us? Can’t remember.

PA Ram wrote:

Maybe he got the sense that Davis is just mentally broken.

Maybe there were grumblings from vets, who knows?

And he didn’t get that sense the week before? Most of us did.

I doubt the grumbling from vets just began this week. And with a good coach it doesn’t take grumbling veterans to point out the need for a move as obvious as the Davis one was.

Sorry, Man. I don’t mean to be contentious with my friends here.

But that man is the walking definition of failure right now. He can’t even figure out how to give his team a CHANCE of winning!