Peter King FMIA on the Rams

[profootballtalk.nbcsports.com]

THOUSAND OAKS, Calif.—This encapsulates why the Rams are so high on defensive coordinator Raheem Morris—and the rest of the league should be too—as they begin their quest to try to be the first team to win back-to-back Super Bowls in 18 years:

The Rams led Cincinnati 13-10 at halftime of the Super Bowl last February. But they hadn’t really impacted Joe Burrow, who’d completed two-thirds of his throws and been sacked just once in the first 30 minutes. The Bengals were—surprise!—sliding protection to thwart Aaron Donald, and the Rams couldn’t take advantage of the rest of the defense.

“Coach Rah,” is what the players call Morris, and when he stood in front of the defense at halftime, he announced a decisive change. It involved an unlikely piece of the Rams’ D: a lightish rookie linebacker with a maniacal streak named Ernest Jones. Six months later, Jones, 22, talked like he couldn’t quite believe what Morris said at halftime during the biggest game of his life.

“Rah told us, ‘We’re gonna change things up here. We’re gonna start sending [blitzing] Ernest in the second half. It’ll be Ernest one-on-one against their back. We think we’ll be able to get more pressure that way.”

In the second half, Jones blitzed seven times. He sacked Burrow late in the third quarter to foil one drive, then had a three-yard tackle for loss on running back Joe Mixon in the fourth quarter that stunted another drive. In all, Jones had four pressures on Burrow. Morris’ coaching wrinkle led to six second-half sacks by the Rams, and intense pressure on the final drive in the Rams’ 23-20 win.

“No way I was expecting Rah to send me like that,” Jones told me in camp. “I’m sure the Bengals weren’t expecting us to send the rookie linebacker either. Maybe that’s why Rah’s so good.”

Morris deflected credit for the decisive wrinkle. “The beauty of football, and the beauty of being a coordinator, is that it’s never just one person,” he said. “In this case, it was the clear, concise information given to the players by coaches, their position coaches in particular. It’s about incorporating everybody, the players and coaches alike.”

True. But someone’s got to make the decision to feature a third-round rookie on a defense full of megastars in the biggest game of their lives. Morris’ gambit helped win it.



I came to take the temperature of the Rams on a hot, arid dog day of August. Turns out it was a great day to come. This was a feisty, competitive practice with good news about the quarterback with a supposedly balky elbow. What I saw and heard:

Matthew Stafford, given some time off to deal with the barking throwing elbow, threw at least 70 balls at all distances against the defense. Looked good. “I practiced every practice last year, and it wasn’t a big issue,” he said. “We’re just trying to be smart. I’m fine.” Sean McVay told me: “Looked like Matthew Stafford to me. No restrictions, throwing it all over the yard, all different kinds of launch points.”
Aaron Donald practices hard. There was a scrum, pushing and shoving, in the middle of practice, and Donald grabbed the facemask of right tackle Rob Havenstein, ripped it off and threw it 10 yards downfield in anger. The Rams love Donald in large part because he takes football so seriously on every snap, whether it’s in the summer in training camp or in the winter in the playoffs. Sean McVay got in the middle of it and helped break it up, and then was thrilled with the offense later. “Good job standing up to those guys!” he yelled. McVay doesn’t want his offense to be intimidated by the best defensive player in the game. Donald smiled when I asked him about it. “It’s football,” he said. “All love.” (Recently retired Andrew Whitworth told me the scrums with Donald and the offense are common, and all would be forgotten by the time players are in the locker room. For their sake, I hope so. That was a good rumble.)
Donald told me he plans to play at least through the end of the 2023 season. “I got a two-year commitment right now, so I’m going to do everything I can while I’m here to help the organization win and be successful. I’m gonna last as long as I can, as long as I can play at a high level,” Donald said.
Regarding the future of McVay, who considered TV before signing a contract extension: Whitworth told me he wouldn’t be surprised if McVay coached two more years and he wouldn’t be surprised if he coached 32 more. “That’s somebody who’s one of my closest friends and knows me very well,” McVay told me. He called what Whitworth said “a fair statement. [I’m] just living in the moment and I know I’m loving coach right now.” I doubt McVay would leave as long as he has a powerful offense with a quarterback he trusts. Matthew Stafford is that, and at 35, he’d like to play a while longer.
Raheem Morris, part II:

He stepped into an odd but overall healthy situation last year, taking over the league’s top-rated defense after Brandon Staley left to coach the Chargers. Morris was asked not to change the successful Vic Fangio/Staley scheme but only to tweak it, so that was an adjustment for him. Jalen Ramsey told me: “We wanted to make sure that the next person to come in kept at least that same kind of defensive personality, where we kind of build around the stars and we elevate the quote-unquote role players to play extremely well. I remember having conversations with Sean—he wanted to keep that the same as well.”

“When you get a new coach, it comes down to trust,” Donald said. “He let players he trusts give feedback, and he learned his players. It was real good as the season went on.” By late in the season, after some porous defensive days against Tennessee, Arizona and Green Bay, Morris had a good play-calling feel. After Dec. 1, the Rams’ D allowed 18.4 points a game, including the 4-0 run through the playoffs.

Morris got just one head-coaching interview, in Minnesota. The previous year, five teams wanted Staley for interviews, and the Chargers hired him the day after they lost in Green Bay in the playoffs. Some of that is timing in the NFL hiring cycle. Staley got hired on Jan. 17; Morris wouldn’t have been available till Feb. 14. That’s one of the idiotic things the NFL does: Often times, the best coaches get eliminated from head-coaching contention because teams sprint to fill jobs once their seasons are over. Super Bowl assistant coaches often get the shaft.

Back to that Super Bowl, and Ernest Jones. Watch this video of the play to see why the decision by Morris to blitz Jones at halftime was so smart. Watch the Cincinnati line shade to the left, and watch the massive hole open at right guard. Then it’s Jones versus blitz-pickup-back Joe Mixon, and may the best man win. Mixon wins the first contact, but Jones keeps his feet, and well, you can see the rest.

Football is a matchup game; when Morris saw the Cincinnati effort to eliminate Donald, he changed up. “We knew if we could get Ernest matched up on the back, we had a pretty legit chance of winning on whichever back it was,” Morris said. “Ernest gives us an advantage with his ability to rush, his ability to spin, spin on the move.”

Morris is a power-of-positive-thinking guy. With a top-heavy-spending franchise like the Rams, lesser draftees and free-agent marginalia need to be coached up to contribute. Nick Scott, a seventh-round pick in 2019, was a special-teamer when Morris took the job 18 months ago. “During OTAs,” Scott told me, “Raheem told me based off the tape he saw, I could be so much better than where I’m at at the time. That was great for me because I saw it as a challenge, but he was expressing a belief in me too. It changed my off-season. I attacked my craft hard. I wanted to be the player he saw in me.”

Due to injuries in the secondary last season, Scott became a late-season starter at free safety. He played every defensive snap for the Rams in four playoff games. Scott stalled one Tampa Bay drive in the divisional playoff game on the last interception Tom Brady would ever throw—or so we thought.

Rams defensive coordinator Raheem Morris is a crucial part of L.A.'s journey back to the Super Bowl.
Rams defensive coordinator Raheem Morris is a crucial part of L.A.’s journey back to the Super Bowl. (NBC Sports)
Morris is plagued in the public sphere, to some degree, by his first head-coaching experience. The Bucs were coach-searching in early 2009, and they had a bad memory of letting a young, energetic, charismatic DBs coach, Mike Tomlin, get away three years earlier. So, they promoted their charismatic young DBs coach, Morris, to head coach. He wasn’t ready. After going 17-31 in three years, he got fired. Then he spent a decade coaching on both sides of the ball for Washington and Atlanta.

Had to be tough to go back to being a position coach in Washington and Atlanta after that, right? And switching to a receivers coach for four years with the Falcons?

“Actually,” Morris said, “it was exciting. Going to the offensive side in Atlanta, I got to coach and learn from one of the greatest wide receivers to play the game, Julio Jones. I talked to him through a defensive lens, and I learned so much about offensive football at the same time—and remember, I was with Mike Shanahan, Kyle, Sean [McVay], Matt LaFleur in Washington. Honestly, those years were an outstanding turn of events for me.”

“He sees the game differently than other coaches, and I think it’s because he’s coached both sides of the ball,” Ramsey said. “He’s taught us that too. When you play for Raheem, you see why the adjustments should be made. You feel them.”

Re: second chances … I talked with Morris about Josh McDaniels getting a second chance this year in Las Vegas, and the prospects of him and Morris getting another chance to be a head coach.

“Josh and I were the same age when we got the jobs,” Morris said, smiling. “Thirty-two.”

Hmm. Looked it up. McDaniels got his first head coach job at 32, as Morris said. He’s 46 today. Morris was 32 when his first shot came, and he’ll be 46 in two weeks.

When Morris took the Rams’ job after the ’20 season, club president Kevin Demoff told him it’d be a great opportunity to be a coordinator for what could be a very good defense, then work back to being an NFL head coach. Morris told Demoff: “I’m not gonna be a head coach again.”

“I remember that,” Morris said. “I wanted Kevin to know I wasn’t coming to the Rams for the glorification of Raheem Morris. I was coming to help them win a Super Bowl.

“Now, let’s do it again.”

As with every Super Bowl contender this time of year, so much will have to go right for that to happen again. Joe Noteboom needs to have a seamless transition replacing the retired Whitworth at left tackle. Leonard Floyd and someone (2020 third-rounder Terrell Lewis?) have to fill the pass-rush hole vacated by Von Miller. Allen Robinson needs to take the pressure off Cooper Kupp, who will face double-teams more than ever. Stafford’s got to stay upright, with a healthy-enough elbow. It’s a lot to ask in a 17-game season, with an opener against 2022 Super Bowl favorite Buffalo.

You should know that, in the previous 1,700 words, I didn’t mention that Morris is Black. He doesn’t want to be seen as a top Black coaching candidate, but rather a top head-coaching candidate, period. He’s a coach who had a shot, wasn’t great at it, and set about over the last decade to coach better, on both sides of the ball, with good mentors. He wants people to look at his background, all of it, and then, he said, “The best coach should get the job.” Morris is one of them.

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RFS69