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ZooeyModeratorOrlovsky, essentially sayin season is over.
And after the Rams beat the 49ers this week, he will be saying McVay and Snead are geniuses the way they keep finding great receivers where nobody else does.
So it goes.
ZooeyModeratorI was afraid of where this one was going from the very first panel, and…there it is.
ZooeyModeratorRams have injury crisis after being NFL’s healthiest team in 2023; how slew of ailments impacts Matt Stafford
Is a 36-year-old Stafford safe behind patchwork OL while throwing to less experienced receivers?By Garrett Podell
Crisis isn’t a word typically used when describing many situations in professional sports, but it’s fair when discussing the 0-2 Los Angeles Rams’ injury situation through two weeks of the 2024 NFL season.
Quarterback Matthew Stafford’s longtime favorite target in Los Angeles, wide receiver Cooper Kupp, could miss “an extended period of time” after suffering a left ankle sprain in the team’s 41-10 loss against the Arizona Cardinals on Sunday, per ESPN. Kupp suffered an ankle sprain in Week 10 against the Cardinals in 2022 and needed season-ending surgery to fix the issue. Kupp is a candidate for injured reserve in 2024. as are guard Jonah Jackson (shoulder) and safety John Johnson III (shoulder), after Week 2.
“We’re kind of running out of those [injured reserve] spots and we’re only into Week 3 in terms of the return to play, but that is a possibility for all of those guys,” McVay said, via ESPN.
The trio of Kupp, Jackson and Johnson join a CVS receipt-long list of players on injured reserve, putting the prospects of the postseason in 2024 in early jeopardy.
Notable Rams on injured reserve
WR Cooper Kupp (ankle): possible IR candidate
WR Puka Nacua (knee): IR
TE Tyler Higbee (knee): PUP
OT Joe Noteboom (ankle): IR
OT KT Leveston (ankle): IR
OT Conor McDermott (undisclosed): IR
OG Steve Avila (knee): IR
OG Jonah Jackson (shoulder): possible IR candidate
DL Larrell Muchison (arm): IR
CB Darious Williams (hamstring): IR
CB Derion Kendrick (knee): IR
S John Johnson III (shoulder): possible IR candidate
McVay even noted how chaotic the offensive line’s lack of continuity in front of Stafford is just two games into the season.“The amount of moving parts that we’ve had offensive line-wise has been wild,” McVay said. “And that’s such an important spot to be able to get a rapport with the guy that you’re playing next to.”
It’s remarkable the Rams are at this point despite McVay putting almost ever starter on ice in the preseason outside of joint practices, but according to Yahoo Sports, this glut of injuries isn’t all that surprising given the team’s recent trends.
“One tangible reason to worry about Rams regression is their injury luck last season,” Yahoo Sports’ Frank Schwab wrote in July. “In 2022 they dealt with numerous injuries and finished second in adjusted games lost due to injury (a metric by Aaron Schatz of FTN Fantasy). The pendulum swung the other way and last season the Rams were the healthiest team in the NFL, finishing with the fewest adjusted games lost due to injury. It went from 146.6 AGL in 2022 to 26.4 last season, which is an incredible shift and shows how injury luck often has no rhyme or reason. The Rams’ good fortune last season included the fourth-fewest injuries on offense and the fewest on defense. Just like the Rams’ miserable 2022 injury luck, the great run from last season is unlikely to repeat. Though, as Schatz pointed out, the Rams were in the top 10 in fewest AGL for six seasons in a row before 2022, so perhaps they have a formula that works.”
What to do with Stafford?
It turns out Los Angeles’ injury formula was unable to prevent all these injuries, leaving their 36-year-old quarterback in danger. Stafford threw for 216 yards and lost a fumble after being sacked five times in the loss against the Cardinals, tied for the third-most in Week 2 entering “Monday Night Football.” Part of the reason he was sacked so many times is because his 3.25 seconds to throw ranked as the fifth-longest average time to throw in Week 2 as he was scanning the field, desperate to find targets who could get themselves open with both Kupp and Nacua on the shelf. Life could get even more uncomfortable for Stafford ahead of the Rams’ Week 6 bye with Los Angeles set to face Nick Bosa’s San Francisco 49ers, Montez Sweat’s Chicago Bears and Rashan Gary’s Green Bay Packers the next three weeks.While this may sound silly, it might be worth considering at some point during the year if all the aforementioned players’ stays on injured reserve last for weeks: should the Rams put Stafford in bubble wrap and wait to put him back on the field until his offensive line and/or receiving core is healthier? Stafford missed the second half of the 2022 season with a spinal cord contusion and concussion, which led to him having to clear up that he wasn’t retiring in the 2023 offseason.
Three-time NFL Defensive Player of the Year and future Hall of Famer Aaron Donald is retired, leaving the Rams defensive front seven extremely young with rookies Jared Verse (2024 first round pick) and Braden Fiske (2024 second round pick) along the defensive line next to second-year players in Kobie Turner and Byron Young. Two key corners in Darious Williams and Derion Kendrick are on injured reserve. Donald no longer being around to be Los Angeles’ magic eraser when it comes to potential defensive weaknesses is a massive deal.
In the time since the NFL postseason expanded to 14 teams in the 2020 season, two teams across the previous four seasons have started 0-2 and made the playoffs, the Cincinnati Bengals in 2022 and the Houston Texans in 2023. Just five of those 32 finished their respective seasons with winning records. Los Angeles is up against in Week 3 against it since it is facing the reigning NFC champion San Francisco 49ers with a depleted roster. No NFL team to begin a year 0-3 has gone on to win a Super Bowl.
Should the Rams start 0-3 with all these injuries piling up, it would make a little sense, even though it would be pretty extreme, to preserve Stafford until his offensive line’s and receiving room’s health improves. Losing a few games early could go a long way toward providing general manager Les Snead much better draft picks in 2025. Better picks could be used to inject more youth into a squad that is aging rapidly in some positions. Or, Los Angeles could trade away its picks in the name of veteran aide, a Snead special. The Rams currently own the 2025 draft rights to their own first, third, fourth and sixth-round draft choice while also possessing a sixth-round pick from the Atlanta Falcons, Pittsburgh Steelers and Houston Texans via the Pittsburgh Steelers. {NB: This paragraph demonstrates that the article was written by a guy who doesn’t really follow the Rams}
McVay has long raved about his kinship with Stafford as a football mind, but his quarterback’s body may not be around for much longer if the Rams don’t take action quickly as their 2024 season continues to spiral out of control.
September 16, 2024 at 10:29 pm in reply to: Arizona game: tweets, highlights, plays, articles #152261ZooeyModeratorI saw a blurb that said 176 NFL teams have started 0-3. Only 6 of those 176 teams have made the playoffs. w v
I don’t know why you’re worried about that. The 49ers actually won their first game, so they will be 1-2, not 0-3 after next week.
ZooeyModeratorThis year like last year, it looks like they will struggle before the bye, but then get it together (preumably) after the bye. By then injuries will return, the OL ought to be intact, they will (presumably) be able to run the ball. On top of it, the Rams typically do some serious self-scouting and scheme adjusting and/or “fix things” like technique during the bye, which could help the defense.
I think a less mobile QB might have been in trouble yesterday. I’ll be interested to see the “pressures” from yesterday, and see how it compares to avg pressure across the league. If Murray had Stafford’s agility, that game would have been completely different, imo.
ZooeyModeratorI’m surprised that the Rams continued to play Stafford in the 4th.
Especially since he was clearly dinged up, and was getting hit a lot.
I don’t know that we can conclude anything. While I would not have expected this much of a lopsided outcome, it happens. We’ve seen OL Musical Chairs before. And Puka is out, and Kupp got dinged up.
Clearly, McClendon was not ready to play LOT. Limmer is a rookie. Promising, maybe, but.
And I’m not so sure we saw on defense. Even with Donald, Connor has been a nuisance to the Rams. To me the difference today was Murray. He played the way today that I always thought he was supposed to play, but never did. He just put it all together. The Rams put pressure on him again and again, and he just moved away, and kept his cool.
I still wanna see a slo-mo of Harrison’s first TD, though. I just don’t think so. Not that it mattered, but still.
ZooeyModerator
There are a number of weird pockets of Rams/AZ east of the Mississippi which I don’t understand. St. Louis isn’t among them. I would think JAX would be more interested in either TB or IND, and I would think Nashville and Minn would be more interested in the IND/GB game. I woulda thought CHA would be more interested in either TB or NO games. Baltimore, of course, would want the Rams game because they know the Rams are the team to beat in the Super Bowl.
ZN and Nittany are undoubtedly delighted by the game broadcast where they live.
ZooeyModeratorZooeyModeratorMcVay said the plan was to accelerate his {Avila’s} recovery.
WTH does that mean? Get him weight-lifting earlier than typical? Giving him colloidal silver and taping crystals to his knee?
ZooeyModeratorBased on those season records, it looks like the Rams are the better team.
ZooeyModeratorwhat do people think of jared verse? and fiske? and limmer? seems verse did particularly well no?
From an article on CBS about rookies.
ZooeyModeratorCan’t think of a current player I like less than Aaron Rogers, but I hope he goes off tonight.
Ditto
Rodgers can feel free to throw 4 INTs every game for the rest of the season.
ZooeyModeratorthe los angeles rams are down 4 starting offensive lineman and 1 reserve offensive lineman, puka nacua, and dee will, and still took the lions to OT in week 1. get healthy and this team is a problem.
This I believe.
ZooeyModeratorCan’t think of a current player I like less than Aaron Rogers, but I hope he goes off tonight.
Ditto
ZooeyModeratorThe Rams played better than I expected them to play, given the OL. And I am heartened by the defense giving up only 20 (regulation) to a fully healthy Detroit at home in their first battle action with no Aaron.
I did not need to see Puka, Avila, and Noteboom carted off. This is going to be a good, exciting season, if the Rams don’t spend it on the IR.
ZooeyModeratorIt is already starting to look like this is one of the years where the Rams will have to regroup at the bye.
I’m sure all your buddies over on the Seahawks board really loved it when you posted this over there.
ZooeyModeratorUh…okay. McVay was a big part of the problem there. But McVay isn’t a “domineering head coach” who put “training wheels” on Stafford, so maybe Goff’s problem in LA was not just that his coach didn’t trust him. There were reasons the coach didn’t trust him.
I don’t agree actually. McVay was openly and derisively impatient with Goff once he became the de facto qb coach starting in 2019. He was pushing Goff into doing certain things that he, McVay, wanted to do, and Goff wasn’t really ready for or especially adept at doing. It was a confidence issue, which led a former Rams coach, who I am pretty sure was Zak Taylor, to say that McV knew how to tear Goff down but not how to build him back up. And McV did put training wheels on him–that was the whole talking into the helmet thing, that New England took advantage of in that super bowl, where Goff just didn’t know how to respond to the new and unexpected things the defense was showing him. The difference in Detroit was that Goff and Johnson built the passing game together around Goff’s strengths and the things Goff liked to do, so that was a case study in confidence building. The difference in LA was that McV was always going to respect the long time veteran Stafford, so they have both described their relationship as collaborative. Another coach, in 2019, would have built around the qb’s strengths. McV instead was basically saying “keep up! why can’t you keep up?” I mean, you know, we’ll see about Bennett, but so far in his career McV has never developed a young qb. In 2017 and 2018, both years, he had accomplished and very involved qb coaches who could mediate between the qb and McVay. One of those was Zak Taylor, the coach I mentioned as saying McV worked against Goff’s confidence. After 2019 McV became the de facto qb coach though, and I think it made a difference. After 2022 McV talked about how he fell into bad habits that season and he had to rethink how he did things, and I think the signs are that losing the way they did that year brought out his worst kinds of impatience and his habit of riding people. I think he was doing that with Goff in 2019 and 2020, and then crashed into that tendency of his in 2022 and had to reinvent how he approached coaching. Which he obviously did, and that’s part of what makes him great. It took a bad year for that to happen, but still, some guys actually don’t learn from bad years, so that’s to McV’s credit. In terms of qb comparisons, Goff is a very good qb and Stafford is a HOF level qb. And I defended the trade the minute it happened. My take was that Goff at that stage of his development was not in a good “marriage” with McV at that stage in his development. With a bad marriage, you move on, and I thought that Stafford would work better with McV. McV didn’t have to develop Stafford, if anything he would benefit from listening to him. Which I think is what happened and I think this is an especially good HC/qb marriage.
I think I can agree with all of that, and still think that Goff made a bunch of bad decisions and terrible throws.
McVay made things worse. Far worse. I think everybody agrees with that, even McVay.
ZooeyModeratorHow has Goff been able to reinvent himself in the Motor City and how has he morphed into the ideal fit in Johnson’s offense?
Goff hasn’t morphed into the ideal fit for offensive coordinator Ben Johnson’s offense so much as he was a part of its creation. Both Goff and Johnson looked at how the veteran quarterback was successful and developed an offense that plays to its signal-callers strengths. There’s a lot of variety, there’s a lot of deception in terms of different plays being run out of the same looks, a lot of pre-snap motion and play-action. It’s an offense that lives over the middle and really utilizes that space from hash to hash.
Goff was finally trusted to not be a quarterback surrogate for a domineering head coach. He’s proven his football acumen by more often than not, making the right checks at the line of scrimmage, delivering the ball to where it should go based on the defense in front of him, and just, you know, quarterbacking without training wheels.
Uh…okay.
McVay was a big part of the problem there. But McVay isn’t a “domineering head coach” who put “training wheels” on Stafford, so maybe Goff’s problem in LA was not just that his coach didn’t trust him. There were reasons the coach didn’t trust him.
ZooeyModeratorI have to think that the bullet grazed him. If it hit him ANYWHERE in the chest, he would have had to have surgery. I think. There is no way he is in-and-out of the hospital in under 24 hours if a bullet went into his chest.
I decided to ask my idiot brother, and this is how it went:
ZooeyModeratorI posted something here a couple of hours ago. I am not sure why we have constant problems here. But I’m losing my patience.
What’s the rule? Don’t post two links at the same time? Don’t link anything? I’m getting tired of this.
ZooeyModeratorBullet went right through and exited out the back without striking vital organs.
Or a bone? A rib, a scapula? How the hell is it possible not to hit either an organ or a bone?
Nobody comes back from a rib injury in 4 weeks. I assume if a bullet hit a rib…you know.
Of course, the fact he’s on the list for 4 weeks doesn’t mean he will be back in 4 weeks, but the guy was in the hospital just over night. Wow.
ZooeyModerator
ZooeyModeratorLooks like Detroit fans have revised their history to make Stafford a bum, and Goff a hero.
https://x.com/PhantomKrueger/status/1830717655327617281
ZΛᄃK @PhantomKruegerWe can’t appreciate Lamar Jackson’s greatness because he hasn’t become the 6th QB in *checks notes* 30 YEARS to win a ring before age 27, but we will give grace to Matthew Stafford since he had to endure 7 years of throwing to *checks notes again* Calvin Johnson. Whoever that is.ZooeyModeratorRicky Pearsall was released from the hospital yesterday, and didn’t need surgery for his injury. I don’t know how long it takes to recover from a bullet wound, but I guess it didn’t hit any organs, so no lasting damage. I would think he would be able to play this season at some point, although he was already behind because he missed a lot of camp due to injuries. Not a great start to his career, but at least the dude is alive and reasonably well, considering. Jeez.
ZooeyModerator
ZooeyModeratorHoles sheet (thanks, autocorrect)
https://x.com/LondonBreed/status/1830038614203646072?t=58x_66d8gcXRGCN5H726Hg&s=19
London Breed@LondonBreedThis afternoon, there was an attempted robbery in Union Square involving San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Ricky Pearsall and he was shot.SFPD was on scene immediately and an arrest of the shooter was made.
My thoughts are with Ricky and his family at this time.
We will provide more updates, including on his condition, as I receive them.
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Zooey.
August 31, 2024 at 5:43 pm in reply to: roster aszesz…uh, azsehs…asysamint…(?) … roster ideas #152010ZooeyModerator -
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