The Los Angeles Rams enter the NFC Championship game in a very different spot than the team they are playing against on Sunday. Ever since the Week 16 loss to the Seattle Seahawks in which the Rams blew a 16-point fourth quarter lead, they’ve struggled at times to find their previous form. The Rams lost their next game to the Atlanta Falcons after going down 21-0 and trailed in the second half to the Arizona Cardinals.
It hasn’t necessarily been easy in the playoffs either. It’s taken back-to-back game-winning drives from Matthew Stafford to beat the Carolina Panthers and Chicago Bears. As Jeff Howe of The Athletic wrote,
“While the Rams have won three in a row, they’ve looked more vulnerable with a 5-3 record since Week 13. They blew a 10-point lead in the wild-card round against the Carolina Panthers before erasing a pair of fourth-quarter deficits in the 34-31 win, and the Rams needed overtime Sunday to survive the Chicago Bears, who had a sudden-death possession with a chance to advance.”
It’s a small sample size, but over the past four games, the Rams offense has only been better than the Denver Broncos among the playoff teams from an EPA standpoint.
The eye test would certainly show that the Rams offense hasn’t been the juggernaut that it was early in the season. Against the Bears, the Rams were held to 20 points or less for the first time since Week 6 against the Baltimore Ravens. It was just the third time this season with the other instance coming in the win against the Houston Texans in Week 1.
The production for the most part has still been there. They’ve converted on third down at a rate of 37.8 percent over the last three games which is on pace with their full season rate of 38 percent. Over the last three games, they’ve converted in the red zone at a rate of 66.7 percent which is actually higher than their rate on the season of 64.3 percent. Their points per play have slightly dropped from 0.46 to 0.41.
On the season, the Rams averaged 2.9 points per drive which led the NFL and that’s been 2.55 over the past four games. That would still be good enough for eighth-best in the NFL. Ethan Evans punted more last week than he has in any other game this season. However, before the Bears game, it was nothing out of the ordinary. They’ve averaged 33.5 yards per drive which is down from 38.95. The overall offensive success rate has dropped from 51.4 percent to 45 percent which speaks to the down-to-down consistency.
For much of the season, the Rams offense was so incredibly dominant that not sustaining that has made it look worse than it is. They had a 30.7 percent offense DVOA which is the fourth-best since 2018. They went from averaging 0.61 EPA per play to 0.1 since Week 16. That’s still the sixth-best during that time span.
At the same time, the last four games are still a small sample size. It also says a lot when an offense is considered to be struggling, but has still averaged 26.3 points per game since Week 17. They’ve scored more than 30 points in two of those games.
This is a case where multiple things can be true. Is the Rams offense still good? Without a doubt. However, it does need to be more consistent and there is room for improvement. That’s what the eye test would say. The defense was able to pick up the slack last week, but this is still a team built around its dominant offense. If the Rams are going to get past the Seahawks and make it to the Super Bowl, they’ll need to find that spark from earlier in the year.
