Is This the Rams’ Last Best Chance to Win the Super Bowl?

Heading into the playoffs, I picked the Rams to win the Super Bowl.  

To me, they have the right balance of an efficient running game, an explosive passing game, a young and dangerous defensive line, as well as a super hero at quarterback and play-callers on both sides of the ball that have built mansions on the cutting edge of the NFL scheme world. 

This is, to my eye, the best McVay team ever including the one that won the Super Bowl.  

Even after a relatively average last month of the season, and a life and death win against the 8-9 Panthers, I still can’t see anyone that is better than them in the NFL. 

But, what this last month of the season has shown me is that this season is the Rams’ last, best chance to win it all. Like Harvey Dent going from hero to villain of Gotham, the highest highs are so often followed by the lowest lows.  

And those falls are often precipitous, and faster than we can imagine. 

I wonder if they know that this season is their shot, and that’s why they’ve tightened up at the end of this season. 

As you sift through the key pillars of the Rams’ success this season, all I see is a short shelf life.  

Let’s start with the quarterback. Matthew Stafford has had clearly the best season of his career. He’s thrown a career high and league leading 46 touchdowns, is averaging 12 yards per completion for a league leading 236 first downs and a career best passer rating of109.2.  

He has been exceptional.  

It’s easy to forget that this season nearly never happened.  

Heading into the last few offseasons, Stafford has talked retirement. This offseason, heading into his age 37 season, Stafford had an ammortal chamber in the car park at training camp because normal physio wasn’t good enough to get him playing. 

Over the course of his whole career, he’s been more durable than Boris the Blade. But eventually, even Boris got killed. 

How many more medicines are there that are available to delay the inevitable, including the experimental one from Germany? I’m aware that Gwyneth Paltrow looks incredible at 53, but she’s not playing a contact sport. 

I’m not saying Stafford will retire after a potential MVP season, nor have I seen meaningful slippage this year. But it’s hard to imagine him ever playing better football than this again. 

And if Stafford goes, there’s a live possibility that the best head coach and playcaller in the league, Sean McVay goes with him.  

When he had average quarterback play with Jared Goff, McVay endured an existential crisis and seriously questioned whether he wanted to stay in coaching, fielding offers to become one of the highest energy broadcasters in NFL history. 

It took football genius with impossibly good throwing ability Matthew Stafford coming to town and opening up every area of the field to get McVay back into a “better mood.” 

McVay has only franked his credentials as a broadcaster in the four years since, including winning a Super Bowl with Stafford. Given Fox threw $38m at Tom Brady, the special comments market has been completely reset.  

If the Rams don’t get Joe Burrow after Stafford, maybe McVay heads into the booth when Stafford retires instead of plunging himself into a depression as he watches his quarterback fail to get to the backside dig again and again.  

If he does that, he’ll have his pick of the opportunities after every season and can hand-select the quarterback he wants to work with while making more money to do less work.  

Even if Stafford and McVay stay, the ecosystem around them is just as fragile. 

Puka Nacua is the player that makes offence go, with 166 targets for 129 catches, 1,715 yards, and 11 total touchdowns. On top of the numbers, he’s nominally a wide receiver but is so often used on insert blocks almost like a tight end because he’s so physical. He’s regularly the player at the point of attack.  

That regular motion that they use has also helped to unlock their play action game with Nacua running routes through gaps where he would normally block and usually gets a chunk. 

At just 24, theoretically this should go forever. But Puka spends a lot of time peeling himself off the deck because he is so often dealing with an absurd amount of contact both as a rusher and a receiver. He’s got a Homer Simpson level of pain tolerance. 

Then you look at the Rams’ last super high volume receiver season, Cooper Kupp in 2021. That year he had 191 targets and 145 catches for 1,947 yards.  

He has never had another 1,000 yard season or 100 target season after his extremely taxing year.  

How much longer can Nacua sustain the volume or the physicality? 

Then the other receiver that helped unlock the offence was Davante Adams, who is already 33 and came to the Rams on essentially a two year deal.  

Finally, the defence. This year, the Rams were a good but not great defence, sitting seventh in EPA/play and success rate.  

However, that is a roaring success given the Rams are 32^nd in defensive spending. This team has been borderline miraculous at drafting and developing particularly front seven players and a big part of that is defensive coordinator Chris Shula.  

There are two things that will happen as the Rams go into future years.  

Firstly, the defence will get more expensive as players like Jared Verse and Byron Young start to need extensions. That will limit their ability to keep spending like they do on the other side of the ball.  

Secondly, Chris Shula will probably get a head coaching job if not this cycle then the next one. If McVay sticks around, that probably won’t matter because he’ll probably just find another future head coach to be his DC. But if I’m right and he’s not long for this, a lot will hinge on whoever the new DC is.  

The Rams are the best team in the NFL in my opinion. They’re the best balanced and the best coached. But, this also looks like the Rams last, best chance and they know it.  

I hope that tightness, the pressure that they are heaping onto themselves, doesn’t kill their season before it should die.