Great article about Ram defense...

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One reason the L.A. Rams are 3-1? They have the best player in the NFL.
By Mike Renner October 4 at 11:58 AM

Within a matter of hours following their season debut on Monday Night Football, the Los Angeles Rams were the laughing stock of the NFL. In prime time they failed to score a single point on offense and surrendered 28 to a Blaine Gabbert-led San Francisco 49ers team. Meanwhile their No. 1 overall pick and supposed future of the franchise, Jared Goff, looked on from the sideline in street clothes.

What’s happened since though has been nearly unexplainable. The Rams have rattled off three straight wins, two coming against divisional rivals Seattle and Arizona who both made the playoffs a season ago. For a head coach that’s been lampooned in the national media for being unable to evolve, the irony is that the Rams owe their current win streak to a shift in coaching philosophy.

That, and the benefit of employing the best player in the entire NFL: Defensive tackle Aaron Donald.

Let’s take a look at the two biggest factors behind the Rams’ surprising 3-1 start, and how the two fit so well together.

A shift in scheme

Instead of inventing new coverage principles, Fisher and company turned back the clock to a tried-and-true defensive scheme from the 1970s.

When Lovie Smith was fired from his head coaching position with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers after last season, many thought it signaled the death of the Tampa-2 defense, a scheme in which two safeties are responsible for the two deep zones with the cornerbacks and linebackers responsible for five underneath zones. The truth is that the coverage scheme as a philosophy was already all but abandoned. Tampa Bay was running cover-1 more often than the scheme with the city’s namesake in 2015 as the Tampa-2 accounted for only 29 percent of their coverage – still a much higher rate than anyone else in the league though. The defense that rose to fame when Tony Dungy was hired to the same position 20 years prior was now a coverage employed almost exclusively on third-and-long and end-of-game situations.

That is until Jeff Fisher and defensive coordinator Greg Williams altered their game plans after their Week 1 beatdown. Over the last three games, the Rams have dialed the Tampa-2 on 37.4 percent of their coverage snaps (outside of goal line situations) – the highest rate in the NFL and easily the Rams’ most employed scheme. It would be one thing if the Rams were a middle-of-the-road defense, but the results with it are eye opening. In those three games opposing quarterbacks have attempted 51 passes against the Rams Cover-2 resulting in only 31 completions, 266 yards, zero touchdowns, and two interceptions to show for it. That’s a quarterback rating of 58.1 against the likes Russell Wilson, Jameis Winston and Carson Palmer.

The Tampa-2 fell out of favor because it puts a lot of stress on the coverage abilities of linebackers — responsible for a wide expanse in the middle of the field — against a number of increasingly swift slot receivers and tight ends. Those players in the modern era can cover ground much faster than their predecessors. But this is not much of a problem for the Rams, however. In fact, it’s a perfect fit given their rangy linebacker duo of Alec Ogletree and Mark Barron can only be a good thing. It also alleviates the burden on the secondary after losing cornerback Janoris Jenkins and safety Rodney McLeod in the offseason.

Outside of the coverage aspect, there is still one last thing the defense requires to run properly: a dominant defensive line against both the run and pass. Against the run, keeping both safeties deep means there’s one fewer man in the box and the middle linebacker can’t play nearly as downhill because of his deep coverage responsibilities against play action. Against the pass the Tampa-2 requires defenders to drop to a spot instead of matching up with receivers, making the defense susceptible to spacing issues when certain route combinations pull defenders to the edges of their zones. To counteract this, receivers are jammed at the line of scrimmage to slow down that pulling effect, but the defensive line still needs to be getting home and forcing the ball out quickly, as big holes in the zone will eventually be created.

And that’s where the NFL’s best player comes in.

Donald’s dominance

Lucky enough for the Rams they currently have the single most adept player in the NFL at rushing the passer and stopping the run. And with J.J. Watt out for the season it really isn’t close. The kind of impact defensive tackle Aaron Donald is having snap-to-snap from his spot exclusively between the tackles is unlike anything we’ve ever seen. When I talked about the Rams’ need to force the ball out quickly, it’s Donald who has done just that. He may only have two sacks, but he’s on pace for 100 total pressures on the season and has been unblockable in one-on-one situations. In 10 years of data, Watt’s 2014 season is the only one that’s cracked 100 pressures (119).

The biggest concerns about Donald coming out of college were if he’d be able to hold up against the run with his small stature (6-foot-1, 285 pounds) in the NFL. Those concerns have been proven dead wrong at this point. Even at sub-300 pounds, Donald could likely be one of the best nose tackles in the NFL if he wanted to be and he routinely plays there with 58 of his 232 snaps coming over the center this season. Through four games he’s made a stop on 14.5 percent of his snaps, the third highest rate in the NFL. As mentioned before, stopping the run with the safeties removed from the box is a difficult task for most teams in the NFL. So far, on the 29 carries against the Rams this year where that’s been the case, opposing offenses are averaging only 3.28 yards per carry.

On paper, the Rams defense got worse over the course of the last offseason. On the field, that hasn’t been the case. For that, Los Angeles has coaching and Aaron Donald to thank.

Mike Renner is a writer for Pro Football Focus and a contributor to The Washington Post’s NFL coverage.