The Los Angeles Rams are winning games. It hasn’t been pretty, but they are finding ways to eke out wins in slogfests. What that shows is a tectonic shift in how this team used to win games. The Rams used to boat race teams with a finesse-based vertical passing game and just enough defense to get the job done.
Now, they have shifted toward winning at the line of scrimmage with a tenacious running game on offense and a defense with a preternatural ability to win in the highest leverage moments.
This change has caught the eye of at least one NFL executive, according to The Athletic’s senior NFL writer, Mike Sando. In his recent, Pick 6 column, Sando highlighted the Rams’ gritty season.
Los Angeles Rams Now the NFC West’s Most Physical Team
“Not quite two weeks ago, after the Rams outlasted the San Francisco 49ers in an ugly slog played in rainy conditions, an executive from another team made an observation: The Rams had surpassed the 49ers as the most physical team in the NFC West.” Sando writes.
Sando identifies several emblematic pieces on offense that signaled the change in the team’s approach to winning football games;
“Adding offensive linemen in the mold of Kevin Dotson and Steve Avila has facilitated the change. Puka Nacua is one of the NFL’s more physical receivers. Running back Kyren Williams is like a boxer who punches above his weight class.”
On the other side of the ball, an NFL coach lent his insight as to the team’s strategy;
“You look at how Detroit wins on the line of scrimmage, how Minnesota wins on the line of scrimmage, how Green Bay wins on the line of scrimmage,” a coach from a Rams opponent said. “They are much in the same vein, where Verse is having a Defensive Rookie of the Year type season, and Fiske is in the mix as well. They are a physical team on defense and the offensive line is now healthy, so it is more physical too.”
The irony of the Rams’ new approach is that it was exactly how the 49ers would beat them in the past, four-quarters of hard-nosed, ‘make you pay’ football.
Sean McVay has a knack for adopting styles of play that have twisted his arm. This is the second instance of making sweeping changes to his team. The first was hiring Brandon Staley, which led to the installation of more Fangio-style defense — the very defense that held McVay’s offense to three points in LIII.
In the NFC West the pupil has become the master according to the unnamed NFL executive from Sando’s article;
“I give the Rams credit because they were soft and they knew it, and they identified a couple of things, and now they have become a grittier team than the 49ers,” the exec said.