VENT Season Vent Thread

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I am not as pissed as I thought I’d be…

If we beat Seattle we were winning it all. I don’t EVER remember a season that we could/should have won every game.

This WAS a SB quality team and we should have had home field advantage if not for the squeaky losses. Those losses caught up to us.

- The lack of PRESSURE by the defense killed us. Darnold had too much time and he took advantage of it.

- Having said that.. Seattle did a TON of dink and dunk and the defense never adjusted to stop it, or simply couldn’t. Darnold didn’t have to take much risk.

- The defense lost this game.

- Special teams was easily our weakest unit all season. When Whittington is the best kick returner we got, that’s pretty bad. Ethan Evans wasn’t the dominant punter I thought he’d be. Mevis was great, but we had to suffer losses to get to him.

- Xavier Smith picked a horrible time to get the yips.

- Ugh! It is so easy to have a season wrecked by injuries and we didn’t. Can we be so lucky in 2026?

- I will remember this season as the one that got away. The weak AFC has this SB ripe for the taking. Damn it!
 
One thing I'm laughing at on here... "It's the special teams and they've done nothing to address it"..

What utter bullshit.

They fired the coordinator mid-season and replaced the kicker.

And.. here's the thing.. Xavier Smith had never been a problem!!! Seriously? What am I missing? Had he had multiple botched kicks???

No! And he choked. Sucks.. but it happened.

The problematic areas of the Special Teams during. the season... WEREN'T A PROBLEM TODAY.
And if it wasn't so ridiculous, there's something I'd be laughing at, and that's McVay and Snead have done nothing to address the secondary.

Anybody who thinks that they don't know the secondary didn't need upgrading is fucking delusional.

I bet they tried everything they could to improve it. You only have so many free agents, so much cap space, and so many picks in the draft.

Maybe they were expecting more from players who didn't quite deliver. Suck it up, it happens. Players don't fulfil their potential, and others slide back for no rhyme or reason. That's why it's difficult to do this job.

They've been killing it in the draft and built a fantastic roster. Last night, we lost a very tight game after three consecutive tough road games. It happens, we ran out of luck. That's sports.

As for Xavier Smith, People say they don't know what he was thinking. I doubt he does either. And if he never wins a ring, that muff will be in the back of his mind every day for the rest of his life. I'm not saying he's a great player, but great players across every sport occasionally make equally dumb mistakes.

And finally, those pulling out individual bad plays for McVay and criticising him heavily, and saying the loss is on him; they're the ones who don't notice all the brilliant plays he calls and forget that the reason why we were in the game as long as we were was because of the plays he was calling. The O didn't lose this game.

And finally, and seriously, this really is finally. I think we should kick off every game just before midnight local time. So that my fellow UK Rams fans and I can watch it at 8 am. More so that the people in the Game Time Forum who are saying the Rams are out of the game halfway through the first quarter can fuck off to bed, and leave the adults to watch the rest of the game.
 
Two years in a row now, that the Rams really should have won the Super Bowl. This year pissing it away with the best team in the NFL. Seattle is far and away more complete of a team. But not at all components of a team are weighted equally. It's an offensive league. With our QB and WR depth we are the better team, just kept shooting ourselves in the foot. Last year as plucky underdogs when Philly had the better roster but never should have advanced.

Love McVay. Love Stafford. But they seem to excel in the clutch, until they are right on the edge of the redzone, and then they seem to seize up more than you would expect for a coach and QB of their calibers with their weapons. The other side gets paid too. Philly and Seattle are elite defenses and it is 10x harder to score when the field gets short. Particularly through the air. Which makes it all the more perplexing - why not run it with how well it was working if it was 4 down territory, 4 yards to do, 2 downs to get it? Especially as we it wasn't TD or bust. We could have still gotten a 1st down at the 2 yard line.

EDIT - I dunno. Call me old school. But when you have good RBs and the run game is working, short yardage, 4 down territory, 2 downs to go, I run it on 3rd down every single time. The only way I ever allow a throw there is if you have a vet MVP like Stafford, and he sees something he really likes in coverage, I think you gotta let him change the play at the line and let your MVP sling it. Otherwise, it has to be a run if the run game is working. If you are getting owned on the ground, I get it, different story. But with the run game cooking you gotta do it IMO. See what happens. If you go backwards, probably a yard or two max, which is still a very makeable pass, so you're passing on 4th down eithr way. If you get the 1st down on the run great, if you make it 1 yard or less for 4th down that's also good. With a 1st down still being in play, I just don't get it.
 
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Orlovsky just broke down the 3rd and 4th down plays on Get Up. No one was open on either play. They showed heavy pressure and dropped 7-8 in coverage on each play. There was just nowhere to go with the football.
 
This isn't the reason we lost but man this was puzzling


View: https://x.com/i/status/2015592914823352688

I don't agree with Warren Sharp there. Reads like Monday Morning Quarterbacking.

At 2nd-and-5, the Rams were at their 33-yard-line. They had momentum, two timeouts and one of the best passing offenses in the NFL with an elite QB and WRs ... and a Kicker that was hitting the ball well.

To NOT try and advance for another score would have been too conservative, in my opinion; and, I would bet Warren Sharp might have criticized THAT.

Also disagree when Sharp wrote 'if McVay just calls a run, the half is basically over'
... Seattle had all three of its timeouts. We don't know how they would have played it ... neither does Sharp
 
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I don't agree with Warren Sharp there. Reads like Monday Morning Quarterbacking.

At 2nd-and-5, the Rams were at their 33-yard-line. They had momentum, two timeouts and one of the best passing offenses in the NFL with an elite QB and WRs ... and a Kicker that was hitting the ball well.

To NOT try and advance for another score would have been too conservative, in my opinion; and, I would bet Warren Sharp might have criticized THAT.

Also disagree when Sharp wrote 'if McVay just calls a run, the half is basically over'
... Seattle had all three of its timeouts we don't know how they would have played it
Yeah if they stopped are run on 2nd down they likely were calling a timeout

It took them 30 secs to score a td....
 
I don't agree with Warren Sharp there. Reads like Monday Morning Quarterbacking.

At 2nd-and-5, the Rams were at their 33-yard-line. They had momentum, two timeouts and one of the best passing offenses in the NFL with an elite QB and WRs ... and a Kicker that was hitting the ball well.

To NOT try and advance for another score would have been too conservative, in my opinion; and, I would bet Warren Sharp might have criticized THAT.

Also disagree when Sharp wrote 'if McVay just calls a run, the half is basically over'
... Seattle had all three of its timeouts we don't know how they would have played it ... neither does Sharp
Possibly but I can only speak for myself and at the time in chat I said I didn't get his play calls.
If he would have sat on the ball, I feel like the complaint would have been that he was too conservative
True that happens all the time. But like I said above I had an issue with that sequence live.
 
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Yeah if they stopped are run on 2nd down they likely were calling a timeout

It took them 30 secs to score a td....

Yeah, the guy should change his handle to ... "Warren Ain't Too Sharp"

1769442611813.webp
 
In my mind, this season we had a Super Bowl caliber offence and Pop Warner defence and special teams.

The season was ultimately doomed by the bewildering preseason coaching decision to not upgrade our cornerbacks and secondary.

I have no faith in anyone involved in defensive talent assessment and evaluation who concluded that our present db's were capable of being a part of a Super Bowl team.

The services of our defensive coordinator, defensive backfield and d-line coach are no longer required. I don't trust any of them to evaluate players in the upcoming draft.

There has been serious underperformance and no appreciable improvement from our vaunted defensive line, our linebackers have not been impactful and our secondary has been absolutely atrocious, scary bad.

On the other hand, the offence has been magnificent. Matthew Stafford is an incredible talent at the top of his game, and Puka Nacua has been simply astounding, a one-man wrecking crew who makes multiple highlight-reel catches every game.

Sean McVay has created one of the most dynamic offences that the league has ever seen.

What must be acknowledged is the work that offensive line coach Ryan Wendell has done in grooming the Rams' offensive line into being one of the league's very best.

Warren McClendon - who had been disappointing under previous coaches - blossomed this season into being one of the league's best right tackles and Coleman Shelton no longer was a liability at centre under Wendell's tutelage.

Wendell must be retained at all costs.

The focus in the offseason must be on upgrading the talent on defence and bringing in some new defensive and special teams coaches, as our defensive line did not generate sacks or sufficient pressures, our tackling was horrendous and our secondary and pass coverage were abysmal.

McVay has to improve his game management/time management skills and must finally give more priority to special teams, an area that McVay has not often priorized sufficiently.

As an example, not having dynamic return specialists and sometimes having Kyren Williams (and Cooper Kupp in the past) fair catch punts, thereby forgoing 8 to 10 yards at each change of possession.

Unlike this year, next season the Rams cannot rely on a dominating offence outscoring a pathetic defence.
 
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One thing I'm laughing at on here... "It's the special teams and they've done nothing to address it"..

What utter bullshit.

They fired the coordinator mid-season and replaced the kicker.

And.. here's the thing.. Xavier Smith had never been a problem!!! Seriously? What am I missing? Had he had multiple botched kicks???

No! And he choked. Sucks.. but it happened.

The problematic areas of the Special Teams during. the season... WEREN'T A PROBLEM TODAY
The only consistent problem was the discrepancy in starting field position after kicks. We put it in the end zone most the time for a start @ the 35 and our returners would take it to the 25-30ish. Even though not a giant loss it was a pretty consistent deficit
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And it has become clear we need a pass rushing monster at edge. Unfortunately Young may just have a bum knee and I don't see them extending him since he will already be 28 next year. His fall off was a big part of the defense's issue. Vetse is A better version of Jademaveon Clowney. Can apply pressure, but doesn't close the deal. The secondary just can't hold up without a top level pass rush.
I concur and believe the FO does too.
There is a reason our name always comes up in trades for guys like Burns, Garrett etc. This isn't a knock on what we have but a first hand acknowledgement of what a game wrecker can do. We had one and know the impact 99
 
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