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Rams Junior High: Inside a Dysfunctional Front Office
Jeff Fisher’s recent comments revealed a giant riff between coaches and personnel, with both sides bickering about who’s to blame for the team’s failings. Plus more on Matt Stafford, Gronk and who to watch in Week 14
by Albert Breer
The Rams’ struggles haven’t been limited to the field in their first season back in L.A.
The Rams media session Tuesday didn’t play like a normal press conference inside the team’s temporary headquarters in Thousand Oaks, Calif. It was more like an assembly at what some in the building have come to know as “Rams Junior High.”
Coach Jeff Fisher was the speaker. General manager Les Snead’s new contract was the topic.
“I’m so busy here, I was honestly unaware he was extended. I’m being honest with you, we’re just working here,” Fisher said. “I look at this as being my responsibility, the win-loss record. We need to do a better job from a personnel standpoint. We’ve had some unfortunate things take place with some high picks in Stedman Bailey and Tre Mason and those kinds of things you don’t anticipate.
“But we’re moving forward.”
The comments went over like neutron bomb elsewhere in the ranks of the Rams. And it revealed a problem that’s existed since well before the team arrived on the West Coast.
In this week’s Game Plan, we’ll look at Carson Wentz’s recent struggles, the Patriots without Rob Gronkowski, the Giants’ free-agent class facing a major measuring-stick opportunity, a couple of Heisman finalists and the growth of burgeoning MVP candidate Matthew Stafford.
The Rams have not had a winning season since Fisher and Snead joined the franchise in 2012.
But we start in Los Angeles, with a deeper look into a problem that will be difficult for the Rams to fix going forward. And to be clear: What Fisher said Tuesday about the state of the team’s roster didn’t create a problem, so much as it revealed one that’s existed for quite some time.
The struggling 4-8 Rams host Atlanta on Sunday, then head to Seattle before closing the season with San Francisco and Arizona at home. If the Rams split those four, they’ll match the 2014 low-water mark for Fisher’s five years at the helm. If things don’t get better over the next month, there’s no assurance the club will go forward with any of the current power brokers on the football side.
And when I say “get better,” that means more than just beating the Niners or Falcons. It also means seeing the middle-school lunchroom sniping—the kind that earned the building the “Junior High” nickname—fixed to a reasonable degree.
Fisher’s take about the talent on the roster provides a window into the issue dividing the Rams front office. You can infer that a certain amount of water must flow under a team’s bridge before a high-ranking executive, like Fisher, publicly pees in the company pool.
“It pissed me off because I knew it was meant as a shot,” said one Rams source. “You see it under that umbrella—‘We need to do a better job in personnel.’ OK, but you want everyone to think that you have full control. You can’t have it both ways, and it can’t always be the talent. Look at the roster, 2012 to now. In ’12, Jeff did a masterful job with what he was given. But we’ve gotten more talent, and we’ve gotten worse.”
Fisher and Snead arrived as part of an arranged 2012 marriage after the Rams axed coach Steve Spagnuolo and GM Billy Devaney, and the team outdistanced the Dolphins for the coveted ex-Titans coach. Part of Fisher’s motivation for picking St. Louis was having larger say in personnel decisions, and the organization was structured to reflect that with a partnership between the coach and GM under COO Kevin Demoff.
There are differing accounts of when things soured. Efforts to get comments from both Fisher and Snead were unsuccessful on Wednesday. But the problems have been an open secret in league circles for some time.
Now, this isn’t exactly unusual. San Francisco had issues with Jim Harbaugh and Trent Baalke, which proved irreconcilable. The Colts had their own problems with Chuck Pagano and Ryan Grigson, and those two found a way to make peace and move forward when it seemed impossible. Way back, Giants GM George Young and coach Bill Parcells hated each other all the way to two Super Bowls.
That said, the relationship between Fisher and Snead has been consistently described to me as “toxic.” And it’s been that way for a while.
“It’s always good to have healthy tension between the coach and GM, but that shouldn’t hurt the team or cause finger-pointing,” said another club source. “Over five years, (Tuesday) was the first time you saw public comments. That should never happen. … The organization has given them a long leash. And given that they’ve had time, they have to win, and they have to be able to work together.”
From the coaching side, the only surprise in Fisher’s comments were that they were made publicly. Internally, while acknowledging there’s a talented young core in place (Robert Quinn, Aaron Donald, Todd Gurley, Alec Ogletree, Trumaine Johnson), complaints about the depth of the roster and a failure to strike with draft picks outside the first round haven’t exactly been rare.
As for the personnel side, their retort is swift. After jettisoning Brian Schottenheimer after the 2014 season, Fisher has chosen two first-time offensive coordinators who proved to be in over their heads, and offensive line development has been sparse behind line coach Paul Boudreau. The personnel side will acknowledge the team needs more help there, and at corner and receiver, but point out that losing players like cornerback Janoris Jenkins wasn’t their call.
They’ll also question how hard the team is pushed, with a lack of in-season padded practices being an example of the perceived problem.
Then it starts to get personal. One example: Perception held that Fisher’s guy in scouting for his first four years was Rich Snead (no relation to Les), who was seen as abrasive with scouts and an operative of the coach’s. He left the Rams last winter, amid some feeling that he was a divisive force in the organization.
To his credit, the GM has remained above board through this mess, at least publicly, and in the aftermath of Fisher’s comments. But clearly, there’s blame to go around when a team goes 31-44-1 in five years, without so much as a .500 season along the way.
Can that be fixed by New Year’s Day? It’s become increasingly clear that it better be.
