Cooper Kupp, Stetson Bennett + Hunter Long ruled out for Week 1. @CedarsSinai Injury Report. ⤵️

— Los Angeles Rams (@RamsNFL) September 8, 2023

Detroit Lions vs. Kansas City Chiefs Game Highlights | NFL 2023 Week 1

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Zooey wrote:

wv wrote:

Good lord. Van Jefferson is a no.3 WR, I’d say.

At best. He certainly would have been behind Hakim in the GSOT.

That;s likely very true but let’s see if he steps up in a contract year. I don’t mean he will or even can become a #1, but maybe that combo of receivers plus the TEs can do so some good things.

As Rams overhauled roster, Sean McVay overhauled coaches, practices, scheme and self

By Jourdan Rodrigue

https://theathletic.com/4830029/2023/09/07/rams-sean-mcvay-roster-scheme-overhaul/?source=emp_shared_article

THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. — In the middle of a late-afternoon practice in August, Los Angeles Rams head coach Sean McVay signaled to cut off the music booming from the sideline speakers, and for his team to surround him in the middle of the field.

Some of McVay’s words, including a few curses, carried on the arid wind as he paced around the center of the group.

In the earlier days of training camp, McVay, who is now coaching one of the youngest teams in the NFL — a team that is trying to be competitive even in a partial-rebuild — was irritated with the lack of urgency and attention to small, but important details. So he’d stop practice, and convene everybody. Players clustered around him, trying not to put their hands on their hips to show their fatigue, their names typed on stickers on the fronts of their helmets.

“ ‘Pick your a– up,’ ” stuff like that,” veteran right tackle Rob Havenstein said of McVay’s message to players in those moments. “We’re doing some uncharacteristic things of what good teams do. There’s going to be some learning curves. But we’re hopefully able to get there.”

In a press conference as camp opened, McVay noted that some younger players seemed under-conditioned and tired, and made sloppy mistakes before the snap or while breaking the huddle.

“I told them, ‘I’m not going to apologize for having high standards for what they’re capable of,’ ” McVay said. “There is a tolerance, there is an understanding (that) there’s going to be a lot of mistakes. It’s the repetitive ones (that draw his criticism), when we get a little bit tired and you’re not really thinking and it’s stuff that we’ve done over and over again.”

Halting practice was, to anyone who has been observing closely for a little while, the biggest sign of just how “back to the fundamentals” McVay and his coaching staff have gotten in 2023. The Rams have been a top-heavy veteran team for years, including in their Super Bowl-winning season and in their catastrophic crash the year after. Now, their 53-man roster features 14 rookies (all of their draft picks made the team), plus 25 players who have less than three years’ experience. They carried 40 rookies on their 90-man roster in training camp.

McVay and the Rams’ executives believed they were prepared for how dramatically their roster would overturn, after they agreed last winter on the partial-rebuild that nobody in the building is calling a “rebuild”.

Living the reality has been bumpy at times. A few coaches, including McVay, said the overall inexperience of the group really sunk in during a preseason game, when players tried to huddle during a two-minute situation. Quarterbacks coach Zac Robinson opened spring OTAs by teaching the rookie reserve additions (Stetson Bennett and Dresser Winn) the number of steps in their play-action pass movement, something the Rams haven’t had to re-introduce any of their quarterbacks to in years. Recently, Kelly Stafford, the wife of Rams starting quarterback Matthew Stafford, said on her podcast that the 35-year-old Stafford was struggling to connect with his younger teammates. Stafford and McVay both downplayed her comments in subsequent interviews.

New coaches, changing philosophy

Onboarding the young players didn’t start when they were drafted or picked up in free agency in April and May, but when McVay overhauled his coaching staff in January, with scheme changes on his mind and a million teaching steps that had to come before any new ideas could be installed.

He brought in some familiar faces who he believes have a knack for reaching younger players — defensive backs coach Aubrey Pleasant (he coached the Rams’ cornerbacks from 2017-20), and McVay’s former roommate at Miami of Ohio Joe Coniglio, who is fresh out of the collegiate ranks just like his entire outside linebackers unit.

Also very familiar to McVay is new offensive coordinator Mike LaFleur, who was fired from the same job with the Jets last winter. LaFleur and McVay share a similar philosophical foundation — both once were employed by 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan (LaFleur is also the brother of Green Bay Packers coach Matt LaFleur, who was McVay’s former offensive coordinator). LaFleur’s continuation in Shanahan’s system from 2017-20 (as McVay’s own offense split from Shanahan’s in Los Angeles) made LaFleur a source of new information where McVay’s previous hire at offensive coordinator, Liam Coen, ran a system in college built out of McVay’s own.

McVay also hired offensive line coach Ryan Wendell, who played center for the Patriots for nearly a decade and cut his coaching teeth in Buffalo as an assistant under former Rams offensive line coach Aaron Kromer. McVay then hired veteran position coaches into new roles, such as tight ends coach Nick Caley — he coached tight ends and fullbacks in New England for the last six seasons — and running backs coach Ron Gould, who has coached the position for three decades at the collegiate level.

McVay’s agenda with his new offensive coaches and tenured staff was direct: He wanted to re-introduce physicality at the line of scrimmage, where in previous years the Rams had garnered a reputation for being a little more of a “finesse” group on that side of the ball. That would be the product of schematic changes in the run and passing game, but also personnel adjustments along the offensive line.

“There’s a premium on physical and mental toughness that we’re placing on this football team,” McVay said. “When we got away from that, I think I was less mentally and physically tough. And I think that’s really important for us to be that, if we’re going to be the team that we’re capable of.”

The team also needed to do more to protect Stafford, including via scheme and play calling, with the understanding that Stafford’s health would be key to McVay’s offense returning from the bowels of the NFL where it had languished through 2022.

Activating a multifaceted run game can help hit each of these notes.

Possible schematic changes that may combine McVay’s signature zone run game with more gap and power concepts can be identified in the backgrounds of many of his assistants — LaFleur (the 49ers run a ton of gap scheme, and started shifting to this when Shanahan’s defense battled Robert Saleh and the wide nine defense in practices in 2019-20), Wendell, Caley, Gould and Jake Peetz. McVay brought in well-respected former offensive line coach Mike Munchak as a consultant during training camp. Munchak is well known for his physical gap-centric blocking schemes.

More clues: The Rams bulked up along their offensive line, although that group — Alaric Jackson, Steve Avila, Coleman Shelton, Joe Noteboom/Tremayne Anchrum/Kevin Dotson, Havenstein — has not gotten many competitive reps together. Lead rusher Cam Akers said at the start of camp that he also put on muscle.

McVay believes that some of the pressure Stafford faced last season — he took 29 sacks and 63 hits in nine games — can be alleviated with a consistent (and consistently called), efficient run game. To McVay, getting more multiple in the run game also means more pass game concepts can be activated for Stafford out of similar pre-snap looks from under center, including the bootlegs and play-action pass game that can also help ward off pressure. McVay gained a reputation from 2017-2020 for using play action at league-leading rates.

Stafford will always be the no-look, dropback-pass-slinging quarterback he especially was in 2021, when the Rams dramatically moved away from the play-action passing game and their run production dipped (to be fair, their passing game blew up defenses through the first part of that season). He can hit any trick shot and manipulate pressure and coverages using his shoulders and eyes, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t have other tools for creating effective space for his receivers or disrupting pressure.

As with the changes to the run game, there are hints about the Rams’ efforts to more effectively blend some of the older McVay concepts with what they did in 2021: Akers may have bulked up, but Stafford has slimmed down, and is evidently quicker.

“I know he’s played a little bit of tennis and he looks like Carlos Alcaraz and Novak Djokovic out there navigating the pockets,” said McVay, smirking. “I know he is really having fun out there and I know that’s when we’re at our best, but he’s done a great job of really doing the work. There will be certain things that we try to do to be able to move the spot and move the launch point, as always is the case with our offense.”

Coaching to teach

Last, but perhaps most personally important on his agenda as the Rams began their roster overhaul: McVay wanted to recommit to his own coaching principles, after admitting in the spring that he had drifted from them throughout 2022.

“How do we really want to play, offensively and defensively and on special teams?” he said. “How are we problem-solving before those problems present themselves? … If you don’t have something going the way that you want, go back to your roots of working hard to try to figure (it) out … how do we provide solutions for our players as opposed to attributing talent or ability or ‘Oh, I’m just good at this.’ That’s not the truth. Work has always been at the foundation of that.

“What comes as the result of that? More resilience. More solution-oriented thought processes, as opposed to a fixed mindset.”

LaFleur, who has been through a couple of rebuilds/partial-rebuilds while with the 49ers and Jets, believes there is a catalytic effect for coaches when a roster changes so dramatically. So much youth forces a coach to think differently.

“You’ve got to go back to square one, and it challenges you as a coach, like ‘Hey, he’s not figuring this thing out,’ ” he said. “So, what am I doing wrong that this guy is not absorbing the information I’m trying to give him?”

The Rams changed their practice structure in training camp. In previous years, they blended some seven-on-seven work with 11-on-11s. These are called “team periods.” During team periods, the offense started at a certain down and distance, then ran four or five plays before rotating out the first team for the second team. The second-team defense often faced the first-team offense, and vice versa. These methods were reflective of having more veteran players who needed less time in game-like scenarios and more concentration on specific plays and sequences. Further, many of those players’ snaps were being monitored because of their age or because some were returning from or managing injuries. Practices could still be competitive, but just in shorter bursts.

In 2022, the Rams were among the worst teams in the NFL at sustaining drives. They went three-and-out nearly 40 percent of the time, a higher failure rate than any offense in the McVay era, according to TruMedia. It was not just because they made mistakes, or because they were hemorrhaging injuries at many positions.

They also weren’t problem-solving on the sidelines, something McVay and his coaches discussed as they planned new practice strategies for their generally inexperienced players.

So this summer, almost all of their team periods were in the more naturally competitive 11-on-11 matchups, with far fewer seven-on-seven periods. The coaches also built significantly longer drives into the team periods, running 8, 12 or even 15 plays at a time with the same groups on offense and defense (obviously with some rotation, such as in the case of sub packages or varied personnel groupings).

Multiple things were true: They could do this, because they were younger almost everywhere on the roster and could run tougher practices with less rep management. They also had to do this, to get those players’ conditioning where it needed to be and to help them understand legitimate game scenarios, especially when they are tired.

“We’re trying to make practices as much as possible like games,” Havenstein said. “The more you can kind of get into that mindless zone where, truly, you kind of block everything else out. … A way to really do that is to put a long drive together. … Guys start breathing and thinking, breathing and thinking, and all of the sudden they forget that they’re breathing. Then they’re just thinking. Then they’re just playing, they’re out there just playing. Boom, next play. Boom, next play. Next play, next play, next play.”

It was during those longer drives that younger players realized with a jolt how closely McVay was scrutinizing them — especially when entering the huddle, breaking it, and watching how they moved to another play even if the previous play failed.

“When we say ‘next play,’ I want to see it more than I want to hear it, I want to see that sh– come to life and organically create those pressure or stressful situations that then become less stressful,” McVay said.

“He wants to see more of (the) look in guys’ eyes. See where they are, how they’re coming out of that break,” Havenstein said. “Are they juiced up and ready to go? Or are they like, ‘f— this, made a mistake two plays ago and can’t get over it, it’s gonna bother me the rest of practice’?

“He wants to see guys move on, take that next step (and) learn from it in the meeting rooms when it’s time to critique and correct. … On the field, it’s all about taking that next step, that next play, forgetting about the rest and going.”

Players and coaches who have been around a while have noticed McVay coaching deeper into the roster than in recent years, rotating frequently between position groups during individual drills and spending some team periods with the defense (when he does, LaFleur, Peetz and Robinson take over the offense).

“I think he’s done a masterful job in this offseason, first fixing himself and getting to know himself, and then finding ways to connect the football team and do that with the team in the biggest way,” defensive coordinator Raheem Morris said. “Meetings, question/answer sessions, or whether it’s just coming to life within practice.”

‘You want to build this thing the right way’

Over days and then weeks of training camp, small changes behind the scenes led to incremental progress. The mid-morning walk-throughs, where players rehearse that day’s practice and install their playbook, were simplified a little after a discussion among coaches. They got smoother and started translating to tighter practices. McVay halted their sessions less frequently as players got more confident. As they got more confident, they got more competitive.

“Sean says this a lot, ‘you want to build this thing the right way,’ ” Morris said. “You want to put the coverages together the right way, do all of those things the right way. No doubt. But there’s also the human. There’s also how you build that human, his study habits, his recovery habits. How you get those guys ready to have two hard practices in a row, three hard practices in a row. You help those guys with their routine. I really think that’s the fun part of coaching, for all of us.”

After consecutive weeks of joint practices with the Raiders and Broncos in late August, opposing coaches (and media) from both teams lauded the Rams’ first-team offense and even the defense. In private, Rams coaches believed their players got better over those two weeks — a sentiment that contrasted with the very public thrashing their second- and third-string units got in three preseason losses.

There is still a long, long way to go.

Especially the defense and special teams units are filled with rookies and players still on their rookie contracts, the result of the Rams retaining high-contract veterans like Stafford, Cooper Kupp and Aaron Donald in 2023 — while still purging their financial books ahead of a resource-rich 2024.

A simple scan of the roster or spending a single day at practice shows its imbalance. While the offense was largely kept intact and even beefed up in certain spots, the Rams sacrificed the experience of the defense by parting with older players such as Leonard Floyd, Greg Gaines and Jalen Ramsey.

In almost every tier, from the pass rushers, to the interior defensive linemen to the defensive backfield, major questions loom.

“I’ve never been an ‘Oh, woe is me,’ guy,” said Morris, grinning. “I’ve always chosen the other path, whatever it is. Just find a way to help people grow.

“I guess it’s glass half-full, as opposed to empty. I’ve never actually had that (half-empty) mentality. I think that’s a loser’s mentality, a little bit, when you worry about what you don’t have as opposed to taking advantage of what you do. I fully believe that.”

Like McVay, during individual position drills, Morris wanders from station to station. Some days he throws the ball during defensive back tracking/vision reps. Some days he stands on the multi-rack hit sled, along with Pleasant, who screams “violence” as his players ram their hands into the pads and try to move the sled, with its added weight, backward across the grass.

Most coaches, including Morris, move to the sideline when 11-on-11s begin. Pleasant paces — a blur moving from the back-third of the sideline where the defensive backs stand as a group, to behind the end zone where he can get different views of the Rams’ coverages and still hear his players.

And, where they can hear him. One day during a red zone team period, rookie cornerback Tre Tomlinson gave up a touchdown pass to veteran tight end Tyler Higbee.

“They put Charles Barkley in the paint, you have to read the play,” shouted Pleasant.

The good: Higbee scored more red zone touchdowns than any other player in camp as that phase of their offense started humming in later weeks.

The bad: While Tomlinson consistently made impressive plays on the ball throughout camp when matched up with receivers on the outside, the 5-foot-9 cornerback was a significant mismatch exploited with pre-snap movement by McVay, Stafford and Higbee, who is 6-foot-6. Instead of quickly passing off assignments with teammates or signaling he’d need help on the play pre-snap, Tomlinson got Higbee one-on-one.

As Higbee tossed the ball back to Stafford to set up another down, Pleasant rushed toward Tomlinson and the other defensive backs, reminding them what to do in that situation as they nodded their understanding and pressed him with more questions.

This is what 2023 may be for the Rams: some good moments, a long way to go elsewhere. Adjustments, ideas, trial and error. Maybe a lot of error.

But also, a lot of coaching.

#Rams HC Sean McVay today on Cooper Kupp from his media session: pic.twitter.com/7AkkZcg4Qu

— Adam Caplan (@caplannfl) September 7, 2023

ramman2999

Wrong observation. The 49ers are not the toast of this Division. It’s the Seahawks. All those picks for Russell Wilson.

Geno DK Metcalf JAXSOn Hunga Lockett Kenneth Walker Zach Charbonett Charles Johnson.

They are going to pound us and run us. They don’t want nothing to do with Aaron Donald so you just run. With Walker and Charbonett take your shots with Metcalf and go after the young cornerbacks.

I think the young cornerbacks are up for it.

Carroll wants to keep Stafford off the field. They have no pass rush and I think Stafford will tee off that’s why I wanted Kupp in there. I think Higbee has a huge game.

And Cam Akers goes nuts. Now Seattle has good DBs cornerbacks Witherspoon Wormbley Diggs back there and home team they got from the Giants they are loaded.

I’m honestly looking at Seahawks 28- Rams -17.

I think we will be coming back playing trying to get back in the game all game. So Stafford will be throwing the ball.

Wagner is on Seattle to back at linebacker so he’s gonna be up on stopping the run. But they are a little light up the middle.

If I’m Stafford I’m going for Higbee over the middle going after those linebackers.

I don’t know about our kickers.

I think we can beat the Niners having Kupp back being back at home. And I just don’t think the Niners are that good of a team. Teams know Purdy n0w. And I just don’t think Purdy is that good.

Mat, from Quora

wv wrote:

zn wrote:

Rams Brothers@RamsBrothers Alaric Jackson • didn’t start playing football until his JR year of HS • starting LT for a team that’s less than 2 years removed from winning a SB • beat out Whitworth’s replacement in Noteboom, who was handed $40MM

This is ridiculously nitpicky….but “didnt start playing football until his JR year of HS” So what. w v

It’s not a criticism though. He’s praising him for being a fast learner who came a long way in a short time.

from Ian on quora

Whittier is a port of call for cruise ships.There’s only one road in and out of the town, and it’s through a 2.5-mile-long tunnel through a mountain, and it’s the only land access to the town. Previously, the only ways to reach the town had been rail, boat and plane.

Once inside Whittier, there’s a 14-story building that makes up the entire town. In the building, there’s a school, health clinic, a market, a post office, police station and in the basement there’s a church.

In 1964, an earthquake struck the area, and as of 2022 it was the largest US earthquake measuring 9.2 on the “Richter Scale.” What became known as the “Good Friday Earthquake” caused Tsunamis along the west coast of the US.

One of the places that got struck was Whittier, when a 43ft high wave washed over the town, killing 13 people.