INGLEWOOD – The Rams weren’t at their best Sunday. But they didn’t have to be, against a Washington Commanders’ side that seems to have marvelous healing powers. In other words, if you’re coming off of a loss, you get better when Washington comes to town.
And while the Rams’ 28-20 victory was sometimes brilliant and sometimes ragged, the ramifications are mammoth. A team basically ignored in preseason forecasts, expected to be closer to the bottom than the top after shedding salaries and plugging young players into key spots, would be in the postseason if the season ended this week.
Think about that. Four months ago, when the Rams seemed destined for another non-playoff season while shedding salaries and getting younger, playoff talk in December seemed so inconceivable.
So I asked Sean McVay Sunday if it’s too soon to utter the P-word.
“A hundred percent,” he said. “I mean, unless you told me the season ended right now, it doesn’t mean anything to me. So, how we move forward and how we handle our business over the next, you know, 72 hours and then leading into the game on Thursday is what’s most important.”
Ah, if the season only ended after 14 games. Once upon a time in this league, it did … but the last of the 14-game seasons was 1977, and in that era there were three division winners and one wild card team in each conference’s postseason, so scratch that scenario.
But in the current playoff structure, here they are. The Rams got a couple of welcome results in their bid to reach the postseason, with Tampa Bay – co-leader in the NFC South with New Orleans – knocking off Green Bay (6-8), and the Saints (7-7) beating the Giants, which makes the Rams-Saints game at SoFi Thursday night an early tiebreaker. Minnesota is also 7-7 and has a tiebreaker edge over the Rams but faces the division-leading Lions twice in the last three games sandwiched around a game against Green Bay.
Meanwhile, the Rams have their fate in their own hands. Beat the Saints, beat the Giants in two weeks in the Meadowlands, and maybe sneak up on the 49ers – who clinched the NFC West Sunday – in the season finale in Santa Clara on the first weekend in January, and they’re in. Easy, right?
Just discussing playoff possibilities and tiebreakers seems bizarre considering the forecasts before the season began, but it’s probably for the best that none of that stuff was part of the internal conversation.
“I’d never say amusement,” said Rams chief operating officer and executive VP Kevin Demoff when I asked him if the external pessimism was amusing, saying it was more “our belief in the players we had who were growing up, (who) were already here, (and) the belief we had in the draft picks and what they could become.
“Sean and his coaching staff and just organizationally, I don’t think anybody ever assumed that this would be a down year. I think everybody thought that this would be a year we’d be really young, we’d grow, and if we could just keep getting better, keep coaching these players, let the young players develop and have a healthy Matthew Stafford and Cooper Kupp and Aaron Donald, you could be a factor.”
And while it would require a lot of breaks in a sport that can be so unpredictable from year to year, internally the organization was confident it could at least be in the hunt in the final weeks. It looked dim going into the bye week in early November when the Rams lost four of five – close losses to Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, a rout at Dallas and an offensive flaccid performance at Green Bay – to fall to 3-6. The storyline was that the Rams early on were playing good teams close, but there is no “play close” column in the NFL standings.
But consider: If not for a punt return touchdown in overtime last week in Baltimore, the Rams would be working on a five-game winning streak coming out of the bye.
Those “play close” games did seem to reinforce a belief among the youngsters on the roster that they could compete. And it’s not just unexpected stars like Puka Nacua and Kyren Williams, but the line play of rookie Steve Avila and third-year player Alaric Jackson, and the quieter but no less significant contributions of Demarcus Robinson and Royce Freeman offensively, and Durant, Ernest Jones IV, Ahkello Witherspoon, Michael Hoecht and Kobie Turner defensively, among others.
It definitely bodes well for the Rams’ future: A team with Super Bowl champion veterans and young players who might be on the cusp of stardom. Like Williams, who missed four games due to injury but still topped the 1,000-yard mark Sunday with 152 and a touchdown and is now third in the league in rushing with 1,105 yards, behind the 49ers’ Christian McCaffrey (1,407) and Buffalo’s James Cook (1,147). Or Nacua, a rookie who is in the league’s top 10 with 1,213 receiving yards.
No matter what happens from here, the future seems bright. And the Rams organization has established that it will do what it takes to win, as two Super Bowls and one championship in a four-year span would indicate. (I won’t do so, but you can feel free to contrast their track record to that of the other tenants of SoFi Stadium.)
“I think it bodes really well for the future,” Demoff said. “But I think the exciting part for this team is no one’s thinking past Thursday, right? This is a year, I think, when people thought in December (we) might be talking about the future. We’re just talking about the Saints.”
This is the NFL version of house money. When the opportunity is there, you might as well go for it.