Why do I count the steps a ball carrier needs to transition from a perimeter runway to a downhill runway?

See Puka Nacua below

With force defenders coming downhill to cut off runners, the ball carry must be fast enough to avoid backside pursuit but cut inside the force man. pic.twitter.com/ipQT2nRjmK

— Matt Waldman (@MattWaldman) September 15, 2025

Jim Youngblood 53@53_jim70721
offense got going when back with some explosion came in.

WRs can almost all block, play interchangeably, have good hands.

Oline held up. Jackson is getting to b Pro Bowl level LT

roberto clemente@rclemente2121
since joining the rams as hc in 2017, mcvay is .500 or better against 24 teams and has a losing record against just 7.

one of those tough-out teams is eagles, he’s just 1-5 against them, with the only win coming in 2020, a 37-19 road trouncing in philly… beat the eagles!

Again, however good you think Byron Young has been, he’s been better (via @tejfbanalytics): https://t.co/HJr0k2Wwvd pic.twitter.com/FiJfvBYkKU

— Wyatt Miller (@wymill07) September 15, 2025

Brock Vierra@BrockVierra
Per Sean McVay:

Ahkello Witherspoon appears not to need surgery

Steve Avila is trending towards returning this week

Braden Fiske had a twisted oblique that limited his snaps

Jordan Whittington has a sore groin

Colby Parkinson is working towards his return

Rams Bros.@RamsBrothers
Yikes, Ahkello has a 12-week recovery timeline for his broken clavicle. Rams do have ~$12.5M in cap space if they’re interested in making a trade/taking on a contract.

Nate Atkins@NateAtkins_
Ahkello Witherspoon shouldn’t need surgery to fix his broken clavicle, per Sean McVay.

The Rams placed their top outside cornerback on Injured Reserve today.

Stu Jackson@StuJRams
Asked Sean McVay about internal vs. external options filling the void with Witherspoon on IR, and he said the Rams will “bring somebody in” but didn’t elaborate further.

In addition to not expecting surgery being needed, McVay indicated CB Ahkello Witherspoon’s broken clavicle is not season-ending, but that return would be later in the year.

from https://www.therams.com/news/5-interesting-stats-rams-road-win-over-titans-nearly-perfect-second-half-from-matthew-stafford-explosive-runs-byron-young-pressures

Stafford had a near-perfect passer rating in the second half (152.7)

After throwing an interception during the final minute of the first half, Stafford went back to the sideline and slammed his helmet on the ground. But then he thought to himself, “What’s the one thing I can do? I touch it every play. Let me go make up for it right now,” Stafford said postgame, and that’s exactly what he did.

In the second half, Stafford completed 14 of his 17 pass attempts for 191 yards and two touchdowns. His 152.7 passer rating in the second half was the third-best of the week, and was 5.6 points away from perfection. It was better than any second-half passer rating Stafford had last season and secured 10.8 expected points added to the Rams’ score, meaning his second-half performance raised the Rams’ expected score by nearly 11 points, via nflverse data.

Los Angeles Rams PR@TheLARamsPR
Davante Adams has 33 career games with at least 100 receiving yards and a TD reception, tied with Pro Football HOFer Calvin Johnson and Reggie Wayne for the 5th-most such games since 1970. Only HOFers Jerry Rice (57 games), Randy Moss (53), Terrell Owens (42) and Marvin Harrison (41) have more.

from https://theramswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/rams/2025/09/15/la-rams-pff-grades-week-2-titans-players/86164768007/?taid=68c83de54a6caf0001de0e84&utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_medium=trueanthem&utm_source=twitter

Rams PFF grades

Top 5 offense

TE Davis Allen: 89.4
WR Davante Adams: 82.2
WR Puka Nacua: 81.6
LT Alaric Jackson: 80.6
QB Matthew Stafford: 78.5

Top 5 defense

OLB Byron Young: 90.0
OLB Quentin Lake: 89.3
CB Darious Williams: 79.5
CB Cobie Durant: 73.0
OLB Josaiah Stewart: 72.4

Byron Young cross chop , grtd ssck
rest og DL kinfd of box rush pic.twitter.com/k5YmIAxJ7p

— Jim Youngblood 53 (@53_jim70721) September 15, 2025

from https://theramswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/rams/2025/09/15/rams-snap-counts-titans-week-2-playing-time/86161645007/?taid=68c80f1d23276500015a28fb&utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_medium=trueanthem&utm_source=twitter

There appears to be a new WR3

Tutu Atwell got a $10 million fully guaranteed contract as a free agent this year but that did nothing to ensure he’d have a bigger role on offense, apparently. Jordan Whittington played five more snaps than Atwell in Week 1, which we believed to be because of Puka Nacua’s injury.

However, on Sunday against the Titans, the gap between Whittington and Atwell widened. Whittington played 39 snaps compared to Atwell’s 26, which suggests Whittington has overtaken Atwell as the No. 3 receiver. They’ll both continue to play meaningful snaps but Atwell’s stock is slipping after catching just one pass for 4 yards in the first two games combined.

Rams at Titans | Condensed replay

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oN6x7Jlq6zM

Matthew Stafford, the Rams’ commander in chief, was as cool as can be vs. Titans

Nate Atkins

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6629293/2025/09/14/matthew-stafford-rams-titans-week-2/

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Matthew Stafford slammed his helmet in anger.

The Los Angeles Rams quarterback knew he couldn’t make this mistake, not right now. With his team tied against the Tennessee Titans and less than a minute until halftime, the 17th-year veteran floated a pass up the left sideline and into the arms of Titans linebacker Cody Barton as he dropped back into zone coverage.

With one toss, he handed the momentum over to the No. 1 pick playing quarterback on the opposite team. As a lead disappeared, a normally calm and collected Stafford gripped his blue and gold helmet and spiked it into the turf at Nissan Stadium.

By the time Davante Adams got over to him to talk it through, a metamorphosis had begun.

“I told him during the game: ‘Bro, you are the coolest dude I’ve been around,’” Adams said. “He’s not cussing. He’s not blaming anybody. It was like it happened in practice.”

For the rest of the game, Stafford stopped forcing the ball into tight windows. He peppered Adams and Puka Nacua for 22 targets, rotating based on the coverages each drew. When both were covered, he found tight end Tyler Higbee for first downs, Davis Allen for a touchdown and Jordan Whittington for a 40-yard gain up the right sideline.

Stafford finished 23-of-33 for 298 yards, two touchdowns and an interception.

More importantly, he turned a three-point halftime deficit into an easy 33-19 victory to propel the Rams to 2-0. Now, they stare down a battle with the Eagles in Philadelphia next week, the site where his 16th season ended in the NFC divisional round.

On Sunday, his team played the second half with the demeanor he displayed in that first conversation after the pick and the helmet slam — as cool as an early fall breeze in Los Angeles.

This is the Rams’ commander in chief, playing out the string the only way he knows how. But could this be the best version of him, too?

The unwavering nature of Stafford

A narrative once formed about Stafford nationally, back when he was in Cam Ward’s shoes as the quarterback drafted No. 1 overall to rebuild the worst team in football. People called him Stat Padder for the way he racked up 4,000-yard passing seasons but saw just three playoff games and zero postseason wins in 12 years in Detroit before the trade that sent him to Los Angeles for Jared Goff.

But the reality of mid-career Stafford was that, for as much of a care-free gunslinger as he can be on plays that lead to interceptions like the one to Barton on Sunday, those moments almost always come in the heart of games rather than in the clutch. He’s sometimes the man who leads his team back from his own pick six. By the time Sunday arrived, he was the owner of 38 career fourth-quarter comebacks and 49 career game-winning drives.

There’s something about this quarterback that lets him go from carelessly tossing an interception to furiously spiking his helmet to diagnosing the path forward with the tone of a man ordering a pizza delivery on a Sunday afternoon.

“Mental toughness, resilience, experience — all the things that lead to great players being great,” Rams coach Sean McVay said.

If being drafted No. 1 and serving as the face of a franchise and being traded for a bounty of draft picks to engineer an all-in run to a championship created a weight, it’s been hard to tell when hoisted on the back of this 6-foot-3, 214-pound passer.

That’s still true now, even as that back has a degenerative disorder that led to weeks missed in training camp and has this 37-year-old dirting the ball in the face of rushers and passing up lanes to rush for touchdowns. One week after he became the 10th quarterback in history to pass for 60,000 career yards, he is living to see another down.

Nobody knows this truth better than the coach who led his position meetings every day back in 2016 and 2017 in Detroit and was now tasked with finding a way to make Sunday’s second-quarter interception snowball.

“Today, Matthew Stafford, Hall of Fame-caliber quarterback,” Titans coach Brian Callahan said after the game. “We didn’t do enough to disrupt him.”

That’s because the Stafford that exists now is in a different place. For one, he’s never had a duo of outside receivers like this.

In Nacua, he has a third-year budding superstar who averages 90 receiving yards a game for his career and catches everything in sight. Through two games this season — including Sunday’s eight-catch, 91-yard performance — Nacua has a 90 percent catch rate on 20 targets. That figure would be extreme for a running back catching checkdowns against Cover 2, let alone a wide receiver zipping across the middle and into traffic so much that he needed stitches in his eye last week to check back into the game.

In Adams, he has a 12th-year player with three first-team All-Pro seasons who is making the same push Stafford is, to reach the Hall of Fame and to win a championship before the sands in the hourglass run out. And that receiver, now 33, is likewise performing as if age is just another number. On Sunday, he saw 13 targets and reeled in six of them for 106 yards and scored his first touchdown as a Ram.

In Nacua, he has an easy answer to zone coverage in a rugged player who is gaining the experience to settle between defenders and gain yards after the ball arrives, like he did as a runner on a jet sweep that he took 45 yards for the game’s first touchdown on Sunday.

In Adams, he has a solution to man coverage in one of the best route technicians the sport has seen, as he showed by toasting L’Jarius Sneed with a stutter step on a fade route to reel in a 16-yard touchdown catch. And when that player has the pedigree on the perimeter to force opposing No. 1 cornerbacks to travel to either side with him, as the Titans did with Snead and as the Houston Texans did with All-Pro Derek Stingley last week, it allows McVay to motion Nacua between the outside and the slot to create favorable matchups.

“It gives a lot of indicators to No. 9, and the more information he has, the better our offense is going to operate,” Nacua said. “There’s an opportunity I get in the mornings to be able to go out there and watch film with him. I know he’s there before I am. The iPad’s open, he’s writing things down and I’m watching the clips for the first time. He’s like, ‘Do you see that up top?’ And I’m like, ‘No, I was watching something else.’”

How far can a 37-year-old QB take the Rams?
This is what 17 seasons and 224 games produce in a man whose mind moves at the same velocity as his arm. It’s the way he has to win right now, when his back faces the risk of taking a hit he can’t return from.

But it’s a model that can work in his conference. After all, just two seasons ago, the NFC Championship Game featured Goff against Brock Purdy. It’s a step below the ceiling in the AFC, where the only quarterbacks to reach the conference title game since the 2020 season are Patrick Mahomes, Joe Burrow, Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson.

It’s why the Titans took the swing they did on Ward, who showed a glimmer of that upside when he scrambled for eight seconds to the sideline in the second quarter and launched a pass back across his body for a touchdown.

Through two games, this is working for the Rams. They made Stafford the third-quickest passer in the league in Week 1, according to TruMedia, where he attempted a league-low three passes that took more than 3 seconds. They are deploying more two-tight end looks to draw run-down personnel and isolate Adams and Nacua.

Through two weeks, Stafford is completing 71 percent of passes for 8.8 yards per attempt and a quarterback rating of 107.1. It’s a tiny sample, but all three are career bests.

“I put time and effort into making sure that when we break the huddle, man, everybody is locked and loaded and understanding my plan if we end up changing something,” Stafford said.

He has never had a duo quite like Adams and Nacua. Cooper Kupp was battling injuries to stay on the field to play with Nacua the past two seasons. Calvin Johnson was doing the same in his final two seasons when Golden Tate arrived in Detroit in 2014.

Adams and Nacua are the keys to the engine, and the Rams know who they want steering this ride.

“This is greatness right here,” Whittington said, pointing to the No. 9 Stafford jersey he wore out of the locker room after Sunday’s win. “He’s just in total command. When you’ve got somebody who is so in tune with the process and the game looks so slow to him, it’s really cool to see.”

HIGHLIGHTS: Matthew Stafford’s Best Throws From 298-Yard Game vs. Titans In Week 2

You’re not supposed to be able to do this in the @NFL pic.twitter.com/Aun2A08xoT

— Darius Butler (@DariusJButler) September 14, 2025