How can SI project LA Rams to lose more games in ’22 than ’21?
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ramblinfan.com]
by Bret Stuter
The LA Rams roster throughout the 2021 NFL season was an ever-changing mishmash, where players fell to season-ending injuries throughout the season, and a frantic scramble by the team’s front office to swap in veterans who could learn quickly and deliver on game day. This season, the Rams roster appears to have learned a thing or two from a year ago and applied those lessons to form a very competitive roster for the 2022 NFL season.
The LA Rams have plenty of reasons to feel optimistic. But Sports Illustrated projects the Rams to finish with a worse record this season. Not the Packers, who lost starting wide receiver, Devante Adams. Not the Dallas Cowboys, who appear to have lost ground to their division rivals, the Philadelphia Eagles. The LA Rams, who Sports Illustrated starting off the season with a 2-3 season start, are the team they predict will get worse.
And for the life of me, I cannot fathom why. The author, Connor Orr, seems to either have a strong anti-NFC West bias or simply cannot see the good of other NFC West teams for the love of the San Francisco 49ers’ new quarterback, Trey Lance.
Despite predicting the LA Rams to win 11 games, and the 49ers to win 10, the narrative describing the NFC West praises Lance to the point of suggesting that Lance will win 13 games for the 49ers this year. He admittedly has been writing positive narrations about Lance the entire time, so he feels justified in continuing that pattern across an article focused upon the entire NFL.
The LA Rams may only win 11 games, sure. But how can that logic not be applied to the Packers to win 13 games once more, with a much weaker roster, and in the face of a stronger NFC North Division? I would think it far easier to argue that the defending Super Bowl Champions would be just as successful the following season, than a team that failed to do so, and has a less formidable roster this year.
Of course, projections are one person’s fiction. But fact or fiction, the logic justifying it all should at least appear consistent.
