Rams and Gators
Legend
- Joined
- Aug 15, 2013
- Messages
- 5,808
Here's the last response from "Yubaking" on the Chargers board. Its clear he doesn't view things the same way I do and there's no way I can force him to see things differently: http://www.thepowderblues.com/forum/showthread.php?10426-The-Rams&p=127990#post127990
There's so many things wrong with this last post, that I can't even begin to respond...
Again, you are missing the point about the Rams QBs. Hill does make fewer mistakes, but they have the virtually the same QB rating. Why? It is because Davis makes more positive plays as well as more mistakes than Hill. If you want to be excited about starting a QB with a mid 80s career QB rating, go right ahead. I am a Chargers fan and we are used to having elite QBs that are/were highly rated in their time, so Hill does nothing for me as a starter. He is a pretty good backup, though. I do not think the Rams can win consistently with Hill at this point. Neither their offense nor their defense is good enough for the team to catch fire with a "game manager" type QB, especially their offense.
Regarding the 8 sacks against SF, that represents over 42% of your team's season total--in one game, a clear outlier. In the Rams other games, they have 3 sacks twice, 2 sacks twice, one sack once and no sacks 4 times. That actually helps me to see that the Rams pass rush is really not as good as I thought it was.
Regarding the Arizona game and the assertions about the defense's "great play all day", the Rams did not play great on defense all day. They actually yielded 17 points, avoided it being 20 because the Cardinals missed a FGA and avoided it being even more when Cardinals defenders scored TDs on turnovers instead of just leaving the Cardinals with the ball in a scoring position. I am sure lots of defenses can claim to be great if their own offense keeps the other offense off the field by letting them score multiple times directly off of turnovers such that the offense the defense is supposed to be trying to stop never sees the field.
No, you did not specifically state that the Rams defense was better than the top defenses that we played, but you seem to think the Rams will shut down the Chargers when these other teams failed to do so for the most part. The implication is that the Rams defense, then, is better than those other defenses, which I do not believe to be the case at all.
As for the Raiders, I said the criticism about us barely beating the Raiders is pretty funny. I didn't say it was your criticism, but there has been criticism about that win and you did mention that kind of criticism, so I discussed our performance against the Raiders in response to you raising the concept.
As for your suggestion that it represents the same kind of logic, I do not believe that is accurate. I think most of us on this forum understand that we are supposed to clobber bad teams and we did that against JAC and NYJ, but did not do that against OAK. I think the reasons for that are that OAK is more talented than NYJ or JAC and a divisional rival, that our defense was too injured and without too many bodies to stop OAK in the first game, and that our offense was not sharp coming off of our bye week in the second game.
In none of those games did our opponent play beneath its standards, which is what SF did and DEN did for sure when they made some really bad mistakes. But that is usually what happens when an upset takes place--the better team makes some blunders from which they cannot recover. To me, that's what happened in the Rams games versus SF and DEN. Against ARI, the Rams kept the game close well into the 4th quarter, but ultimately the better team pulled away and won by two TDs. None of that is similar to our games versus underdogs. I think the Rams win against SEA was earned, but it did feature some quirky plays, which matters because those tend not to be capable of being duplicated again in the same season.
My comments are in no way hypocritical. I think our wins against the Raiders are undervalued because the Raiders are better than their record suggests. I think they are absolutely better than JAC and NYJ and almost as good as BUF. As I have said, if the Rams game versus Oakland were in Oakland, I would be very tempted to pick Oakland to win that game because I think the Raiders would prove that point to Rams fans in a very ugly way for you guys. But I think in St. Louis the Rams will probably get the job done.
Those beliefs are in no way contradictory to my other opinion that some of the Rams wins are overvalued due to the team not being as good as the media thinks they are (SEA, for example) and/or the opponent doing at least as much to lose the game as the Rams did to win it (SF and DEN). And that cuts against our win against SEA as well. They are a good team, but they are not a great team, especially on the road. They are entirely beatable and we could have beaten by more than the 9 points by which we actually won.
Finally, I do not see how you, without being disingenuous, can ignore the unforced errors by other teams in your arbitrary selection of the three games for the period in which the Rams, according to you, turned the corner on defense. All of those games featured quirky circumstances in which a crapload of offensive points ended up being left on the field in a way that had nothing to do with defensive performance. The 49ers left a TD on the field at the end of the game and missed a long FG too in the first half. The Cardinals missed a FG and their offense was not on the field due to multiple defensive TDs. The Broncos lost two of their receivers in the game and passed on multiple FGAs. These were by no means bad defensive games by the Rams, but I think it is pretty clear that they caught a lot of breaks in these games that kept their points yielded on defense down.
Tl;dr. Cliff notes?