The Los Angeles Rams take on the Miami Dolphins on Monday Night Football this week. They head into the matchup as 2.5-point favorites, despite the trajectory of the teams heading in opposite directions. The Rams are in the midst of a three-game winning streak with the playoffs and an NFC West title well within their sites, while the Dolphins have lost three in a row and have just a 20 percent chance of making the playoffs.
It seems like betting that the Rams would win this game by more than 2.5 points is a good bet. And the NFL experts at ESPN predict it will be a big day for the Rams offense because of a statistical mismatch massively leaning in LA’s favor.
Can The Dolphins Stop The Rams Gap Scheme Running Game
The Dolphins rank 15th in EPA allowed per designed carry. There is one exception, though — when they face runs deploying duo, where the offensive line uses double-teams against the defensive line and the running back reads the linebackers to determine which gap to hit.
On such runs, they’re surrendering 5.5 yards per carry (31st in the NFL) and 0.11 EPA per carry (27th). The sample isn’t huge (46 plays), so this could just be noise, but it’s a pretty unideal number when you have to face the Rams.
The Rams run duo 40% of the time, per ESPN/NFL Next Gen Stats tracking, by far the most in the league (Giants are second at 31%). And things could be worse for the Dolphins if Los Angeles gets interior linemen Steve Avila (knee) and Jonah Jackson (shoulder) back from injured reserve.
The Rams running game has yet to find the special sauce that made it the marvel of the league in the second half of last season, which was executed by sophomore running back Kyren Williams. Last season he finished averaging 95 yards per game, the best in the league, and 5 yards per carry, 4th best. This year he has 75 yards per game, 11th, and 3.7 yards per carry, 41st.
That could be chalked up to a drop-off in offensive line play due to injuries. As a result of those injuries, the Rams have utilized Williams at an incredibly high rate to help protect Matthew Stafford.
This year Williams leads all running backs by a large margin in pass-blocking snaps. The next most prolific pass blocker is Zach Charbonnet. He has 24 fewer reps and has also played one extra game. The next closest running back having played just eight games is JK Dobbins — he has 30 fewer pass-blocking snaps. Kyren Williams already has 84 pass-blocking snaps; if that trend continues, he will hit 178 reps.
You need to track back almost 20 years to find a running back with that much usage as a blocker. There are very real consequences to this way of playing, the biggest being, that one of the Rams’ top offensive weapons can’t be an offensive weapon on more than 10 downs a game, which with the Rams is about 15 percent of their offensive plays.
This trend is likely not to continue if the offensive line gets healthy and plays up to its preseason expectations.
