The Rams are in deep, deep trouble already

The Rams sucked out loud on Thursday night. Sure, you can hand wave away their 31-10 loss against the Bills by pointing out that Buffalo is a Super Bowl favorite, the opener is one of the biggest tests of the season for Los Angeles, and say that it’s still early — all of these things are true. What you can’t do though is pretend that the Rams did anything convincing that showed they can still hang with the NFL’s elite. This is a team with deep systemic problems, and they have to be fixed, fast.

It’s not all offense’s fault, but really that’s where the majority of problems were for the Rams. It’s incredible that Los Angeles had eight months knowing their offensive line was poor, and didn’t do enough about it. The loss of left tackle Andrew Whitworth to retirement was far more impactful than people believed, and when paired with rookie Logan Bruss, who tore his ACL in training camp, it created a mess. Instead of finding answers, Los Angeles turned up looking completely unprepared.

Matthew Stafford was under pressure for much of the night, and he was never able to get settled in the pocket. Offensively the Rams tried to mitigate this by having him throw out of the gun, but the o-line wasn’t good enough to protect one-on-one. Still, that shouldn’t hand wave away just how poor Stafford was. It’s too early to draw conclusions on Stafford based on his reported elbow injury which has plagued him for much of the spring and summer, but this wasn’t just an arm problem on Thursday night — the issues went far deeper.

The offensive line problems led to Stafford getting tunnel vision as a result of the pressure. Stafford functionally ignored everyone on offense except for Cooper Kupp and Tyler Higbee, targeting the pair a total of 26 times, 63 percent of his passing attempts. Kupp was producing, so we can justify that — but Higbee struggled to make an impact all night, and didn’t warrant getting as many opportunities as Stafford tried to give him. The tight end finished the night with 5 catches for 39 yards on a shocking 11 targets.

Meanwhile the Rams’ four other receivers combined for 10 targets. Stafford might as well have forgotten Allen Robinson existed, because he only targeted him twice in the game. For comparison, Josh Allen targeted his favorite receiver, Stefon Diggs, nine times — and spread the ball to the rest of his receivers a total of 14 times. In short: Allen spread the ball around more, targeted his depth players more often, despite having 10 fewer passing attempts than Stafford. That is a balanced offense, and a lack of balance doomed the Rams.

That issue of balance is paramount, and leads us into the other critical issue: Running back. Los Angeles decided to let their top running back from 2021, Sony Michel, walk in free agency to sign a paltry one year, $2.1M deal with the Dolphins. A deal Los Angeles easily could have exceeded or at least matched, but instead the team decided to rely on running back by committee — and the committee is trash. Darrell Henderson, promoted to the starter in the offseason, seems ill-equipped to carry the load as an every-down back, and the team is woefully lacking a No. 2. This really reared its head when the Rams were forced to change their offensive focus and try to buy Stafford time in the pocket by using play action, but the problem was that Buffalo had no reason to believe they’d actually run — so the fake didn’t fool anyone.

This means that if you’re following along at home, here are the key differences on offense between the 2021 Rams and the 2022 Rams:

The focus is on the offense right now because it’s more difficult to really evaluate how the defense was on Thursday night. For the most part it felt like the Rams D was ... fine. Nothing incredible, but far from awful either. The receiving duo of Stefon Diggs and Gabriel Davis is going to be difficult for most teams in the league to cover, let alone on a short field when your quarterback throws three interceptions.

There are some very real concerns about the breadth of the Rams’ pass rush. Losing Von Miller in free agency is significant, because as it stands the lions’ share of the pressure has to come from Aaron Donald alone, and the team is yet to find another reliable counterpoint to attack the pocket and take the pressure off Donald to do everything by himself.

I don’t blame Rams fans from wanting to see a silver lining here and try to find reasons this can all be turned around, and obviously there’s time — but some of these issues are deep-seated systemic problems that can’t be corrected in short order. Los Angeles doesn’t need to hit the panic button, but it does need to lift the cover and have their hand hovering over.

We expected to see a Rams team poised to run it back and contend for a Super Bowl. After Thursday night it doesn’t look like they’re even ready to contend in the NFC West.