Rams Rob Boras, bed are strangers lately

Rams’ Rob Boras, bed are strangers lately

By Vincent Bonsignore, Los Angeles Daily News

[www.dailynews.com]

TAMPA BAY >> The tossing and turning through sleepless nights has been all too prevalent these days for Rob Boras. And that’s after the Rams offensive coordinator finally pulls himself away from the game plans and play books and video clips he scours over at un-Godly hours of the night in search of some shut eye.

“What’s sleep?” Boras asked rhetorically.

He was responding to a question about the toll of the last two weeks while bearing the burden of the Rams offensive struggles.

To be blunt, he isn’t sleeping very well at all.

“I don’t think any of us are.” Boras said.

To be expected.

And as he and the Rams arrive in Tampa Bay to play the Buccaneers Sunday, they are in search of answers to an offensive riddle that’s left everyone befuddled.

Continued failure to do so will eventually cause a ripple effect of consequences.

“This week is a new challenge with Tampa Bay and the guys have accepted it,” Boras said. “They recognize that we’ve fallen short.”

Who hasn’t?

The Rams have gone eight quarters without scoring a touchdown this year, the measly nine points they’ve posted coming on three field goals and representing the lowest scoring total in the National Football League.

They rank dead last in points per game, yards per game, yards per play, passing yards, first downs, third downs converted and third down conversion percentage.

Case Keenum, the game manager the Rams were counting on to provide efficiency and dependability at quarterback, has an league-worst 57.8 quarterback rating among NFL starters.

Todd Gurley, the second-year star running back, is 107th in the NFL in yards per carry at 2.7.

Tavon Austin, whom the Rams rewarded a new $42 million contract extension and worked all offseason and training camp to unleash on the NFL, has been targeted 22 times — fifth in the NFL — but is 41st in receptions and ranks 200th in yards per catch at 7.0.

Even when the Rams have strung together positive plays or mounted meaningful drives, they’ve sabotaged their goal line aspirations with silly mistakes.

“Negative plays in the red zone, whether its penalties, negative runs, sacks, those are all really big mistakes that you can’t make,” Keenum said. “You have to have a really good play to make up for those. We’ve got to get better at that, we got to get better at red zone, explosive plays, and then stringing together those plays. We had some good plays, but we couldn’t string enough together to put a drive in the end zone.”

You can twist and turn numbers and words to deliver any message you want these day, but it’s impossible not to look at the Rams’ offensive statistics and not come to a very bleak conclusion: They’ve played downright horrible so far.

And for the man in charge of it all, a coach the Rams elevated to offensive coordinator over the last four games of 2015 and then entrusted with the job full time during the offseason, it’s the source of tremendous frustration.

“That’s our job, so I’d be ignorant to say otherwise,” Boras said.

The angst is everywhere.

“We all take it personal — players and coaches,” Boras said. “We understand that’s our responsibility.”

Or, as Rams head coach Jeff Fisher put it: “Anybody that knows this game would be concerned about not scoring touchdowns, now come on. I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but we need to score some touchdowns.”

Two saving graces are the source of hope — or at least provide some positivity in a high tide of negativity.

The Rams are 1-1 while playing some especially bad offense. Things would look a hell of a lot worse standing in an 0-2 hole.

And as terrible as they’ve been, two games is still an incredibly small sample size.

So there’s that, at least.

In all seriousness, there are some things trending in the right direction. You might have to look really, really hard to find them, but they’re there.

Despite not punching the ball over the goal line in Sunday’s 9-3 win over the Seattle Seahawks, the Rams did drive into scoring range three times and did play sufficient situational football in order to consistently win the field position battle.

“It was a step in the right direction. Obviously, it’s just a step. We need to take bigger strides,” Boras said. “The thing we challenged everybody with is making some plays down the field, and I think you saw a combination of (Q Case (Keenum) and (TE) Lance (Kendricks), and Case and (WR) Kenny (Britt).”

The mandate for bigger plays can’t be understated. The Rams need to stretch the field more and create some big-chunk yardage plays rather than moving the ball incrementally.

“It’s hard to drive and score points four yards at a time, and the fact that we pushed the ball down the field, I thought was a good thing,” Boras said. “Even if it was defensive pass interference, we’re gaining chunks of yards.”

By doing so it will help open things up for Gurley, who is consistently running into eight- and nine-man defensive walls so far.

Of all the Rams disappointments, not getting Gurley untracked tops the list. And that falls on everyone.

“It’s a combination, right, it’s the ultimate team game, it takes 11 guys to protect the quarterback, it takes 11 guys to be able to run the football,” Boras said. “It’s just like anything, when things aren’t going well in business or in football, it’s not always the same guy. It’s one guy has a break down here, one guy might have a break down there. When we’re going to hit on 11 cylinders, which we’ve done in the past and we’re going to continue to do, you’ll see the success that we’re going to have.”

In theory, at least.

But it’s time to actually see it.

If not, the sleepless nights will continue.