https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2017/...ams-cowboys-raiders-broncos-contender-clarity
Rams vs. Cowboys
The Question: Are … uh … these teams good?
What We Can Learn This Sunday: I want to talk about Jeff Fisher for a second. Fisher, who went 31–45 in nearly five seasons coaching the Rams, never helped them build an offense that finished better than 21st in the league.
Last season, the unit bottomed out and was dead last in the NFL in points. Now new Rams coach Sean McVay, who installed schemes that can be vaguely defined as “pro football plays,” has Jared Goff and the Rams scoring the most points in the NFL through three weeks.
In case you missed it, Goff, the 2016 no. 1 overall pick, looked historically bad last season.
The other quarterback Fisher had last season, who also looked terrible, was Case Keenum, who’s now with the Vikings and was last seen throwing for 369 yards and three touchdowns against the Bucs in Week 3 on his way to a 142.1 QB rating.
Keenum isn’t going to become a star, and Sam Bradford will take back that job as soon as he’s healthy, but Keenum looks like a different player than the one who slogged through a brief Rams career.
Fisher is 59, so I don’t seriously think he’s going to get another head-coaching job (
even though it’s been floated) — but I desperately want him to. I’ve often joked about what would happen if Belichick took over any team — would he, for instance, guide the Browns to the playoffs in two seasons? (Probably!) Fisher, we now know, is the exact opposite.
After watching the Rams play under a new coach, I find myself wondering if Fisher could make the Falcons a low-scoring, dull team if he took over right now. We know so little about the NFL, but it’s nice to realize that some things are constants: Yes, yes he would.
So for the Rams, the questions are these: Was Fisher such a bad coach that he just made the Rams
look like a talentless blob of a team? Or is McVay such a great coach that he took a talentless blob of a team and made it an offensive juggernaut? Or have the Rams just benefited from playing two horrendous teams, the 49ers and Colts, early?
It’s even harder to figure out what’s happening with the Cowboys, who’ve managed two wins against some bad teams (a win over the 2017 Giants is … not impressive) and suffered a blowout loss to a Denver team that looks inconsistent. Dak Prescott tied a career low for passing attempts in a full game last week against Arizona, with 18, but looked efficient with the ball in his hands, completing 72 percent of his passes.
What worries me is that Ezekiel Elliott’s performance this season (3.5 yards per carry, down from 5.1 last year) has not been good enough to enable Prescott to turn into an efficient dink-and-dunk artist. The Cowboys’ current offense is not sustainable. Either Elliott has to start running like he did in 2016 or Prescott has to start slinging it more times per game.
Either way, we’ve learned something crucial: The Cowboys are not going to be enough of an unstoppable offensive machine to allow them to play mediocre defense. They’re currently 19th in pass defense, a metric that must improve quickly; facing the league’s no. 1 offense this weekend will be a good test.
This isn’t college football, where we have to guess about the value of “good wins” and “bad wins,” because ultimately we find out in the playoffs how ready each team really is. But it’s notable now that I don’t know any more about the Cowboys than I did before the season started.
When Dallas faces Los Angeles’s creative Wade Phillips defense (Wade Phillips revenge game!) that’s better than it’s looked, we’ll finally learn something real.
