LA Daily News: Rams Haven't Been the Same Since That Week Off

tRams haven’t been the same since that week off
By Jim Alexander | jalexander@scng.com | The Press-Enterprise
PUBLISHED: December 16, 2018 at 11:42 pm | UPDATED: December 16, 2018 at 11:51 pm

Remember? After that rousing, magical 54-51 Monday night victory over Kansas City Nov. 19 in the Coliseum, they had a week to relax and gear up for the stretch drive. The way things have gone since they came back, the assumption would be that they did too much basking in their good reviews and not enough gearing up.

They struggled to win in Detroit coming out of the bye. They were impotent last week in frigid Chicago. And they were victims of self-inflicted wounds for much of the evening Sunday night against a Philadelphia Eagles team playing for its playoff life, in a 30-23 loss that shouldn’t have been that close.

So these Rams, who were 10-1 going into the break, are now 11-3 and have dispensed back-to-back stinkers on Sunday Night Football, and the folks who watch NBC’s game of the week may be wondering just who inflated this team’s reputation.

Yes, it did come down to the final play of the night and a shot to tie the game. But these are not the high-flying Rams we saw earlier in the season. Maybe they miss Cooper Kupp more than anyone realizes.

Or maybe guys spent too much time in Cabo during their November break. Who knows?

Bottom line: The Rams have lost two straight regular season games for the first time in the Sean McVay era. The No. 1 seed in the NFC, and home field all the way through to the conference finals, may be slipping away depending on what New Orleans does. A first-round bye is no longer a certainty, with the Bears a game behind, although if the Rams can’t polish off Arizona (3-11) and San Francisco (4-10) the next two weeks they deserve to have to play on wild-card weekend.

But seriously, did the bye week knock them off their stride a bit?

“It’s hard to argue against it based on the way that we’ve played,” McVay said. “Your tape is your resumé, and we haven’t played as good as a team. There’s certainly a lot of things that go into that.

“But the biggest thing is we’ve gotta find a way to gather ourselves together, stay connected, stay together and get better next week.”

McVay focused on “uncharacteristic” mistakes, like the play in the third quarter where Jared Goff went down on his own, after center John Sullivan stepped on his foot, and then got up and tried to make a play anyway and had his toss intercepted by Corey Graham and returned to the Rams 12.

It was, incidentally, brutally appropriate that the Rams’ alumnus of the night was former quarterback Jim Everett, who had his own notorious “self-sack” in the 1989 NFC championship game in San Francisco. Remember, the Rams’ SoCal heritage hasn’t always been pretty.

It is also worth remembering, in this league where overreaction is king, that the Rams are still 11-3.

Think of where they were two years ago. And then banish Jeff Fisher from your mind forever.

“I’ve been part of 4-12, when you lose six in a row,” defensive end Michael Brockers said. “This team, we have the tools, we have the weapons to get the job done. It’s all about just getting back in, focusing and cleaning up our mistakes. These last two losses have not been the other team beating us, per se. We beat ourselves a little bit, too.

“I mean, this is the NFL. People watch film. What game is this? Thirteen? Fourteen? We have 14 games of film on tape for people to watch. People are adjusting, and it’s our job to work off those adjustments and just get better.”

There are issues. Todd Gurley was hobbled for a good part of the evening with a knee issue, though he gamely tried to return in the second half and was mainly used as a pass catcher in the fourth quarter. If he is unavailable for any length of time, a Rams offense that’s already less dynamic without Cooper Kupp may be in big trouble.

Understand, adversity isn’t always the worst thing that can happen. Better that the Rams struggle now if it allows them to fix things by January, when a loss ends their journey.

“We were 11-1 prior to last week and the only adversity we’d faced was in New Orleans,” Goff said. ” … We are in a position where we know we’re in the playoffs, but at the same time, like Sean said, we have to be urgent about getting these things fixed. It’s nothing we haven’t done.”

Maybe they’ve already learned something. Whatever they did during the bye week in November, they might want to try something different if they get that idle time during the first week of the playoffs.

No Cabo, in other words.

[www.dailynews.com]

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