5 reasons Rams are most dangerous wild card team in NFL Playoffs

Chuck Cook-USA TODAY Sports

Why the LA Rams are the last wild card team that anybody wants to face right now

If you didn’t expect the Los Angeles Rams to make the playoffs this year, you are forgiven because you can’t know what you couldn’t have known. The Rams have all the players we knew that they would have going into the season, we just didn’t know how good those players would turn out to be once they got rolling with Sean McVay.

Could you have known that Puka Nacua, the last pick of the fifth round, would set the NFL rookie record for catches and yards in a single season? Or that Kyren Williams, a fifth round pick a year before Puka, would lead the league in rushing yards per game? Or that Kobie Turner, a third round pick, would tie Aaron Donald’s franchise record for sacks by a rookie and be in contention to win Defensive Rookie of the Year? Or that Ahkello Witherspoon, a cornerback who has bounced from team to team, would end up playing like L.A.’s new “Jalen Ramsey”?

These have been shocking developments for a team that went 5-12 last season and then had to tear down the roster, but now that we know what we know there’s only one conclusion to draw about the 2023 L.A. Rams: They’re not just a wild card team.

They’re the last wild card team that anybody wants to face right now.

Hottest team in the NFL?

By full season stats, the Rams enter the playoffs as a wild card and a six-seed in the NFC, but in the past two months alone they are playing much more like a top-5 team and one that is flat out playing better than the Lions since mid-November.

At 3-6 going into their bye week, the Rams looked every bit as downtrodden as most expected them to be after an offseason of cutting corners just in order to field a team under the salary cap. The Rams traded Jalen Ramsey and cut Bobby Wagner among other cap saving moves, entered camp with 36 rookies, have not made a first round draft pick since Jared Goff in 2016, and had the least-expensive defense in the NFL with most of that money being allocated to one Aaron Donald.

The 3-6 record made sense at the time, but L.A. came out of the bye week looking more like the team that won the Super Bowl than the one that Vegas projected with 6.5 wins.

The Rams have won seven of their last eight games, with the only loss being an overtime thriller against the Baltimore Ravens, arguably the best team in football. With an offense that had to rebuild its offensive line on the cheap, traded its starting running back in Week 2, started the season with Cooper Kupp on IR, and has the oldest starting quarterback in the NFL on this side of Joe Flacco, the Rams have been as explosive and dangerous as any scoring threat in the league.

Over the last eight games of the regular season, the Rams ranked fourth in points scored behind the Ravens, Cowboys, and 49ers. They have the fifth-best point differential in that time, +53, behind only the Cowboys, Ravens, 49ers, and Bills.

The Rams and Lions finished side by side in EPA per play on offense and defense.

Maybe homefield advantage will be the difference for the Lions, but under any other circumstances it’s fair to say that the better team and the one that has Super Bowl-winning coaches and players is the L.A. Rams. That’s the type of smoke that most division-winners don’t want when it comes to the first round, or deeper in the playoffs should McVay secure a win over his former quarterback and Stafford over his former team.

Sean McVay’s playoff experience

This will be McVay’s 11th playoff game despite only becoming a head coach seven years ago. How rare is it for a head coach to have 11 playoff games in seven years? By comparison, Mike Tomlin went to two Super Bowls in his first four years as Steelers head coach and even he didn’t coach his 11th playoff game until he had been on the job for 10 seasons.

Ravens head coach John Harbaugh has coached only seven playoff games in the last 10 years. Not even Bill Belichick coached as many playoff games as McVay has since his 2017 hiring, having led the Patriots to four postseason appearances and eight playoff games in that period of time.

In fact, if the Rams reach the Super Bowl this year, McVay will have coached as many playoff games in his first seven seasons as the amount that Belichick had in his first seven seasons with the Patriots, and New England won three Super Bowls in that time. Of course, it would also mean that McVay went to three Super Bowls in his first seven years too.

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That experience of knowing the difference between coaching a playoff game and it being the regular season certainly helped McVay from his first trip (when the Rams were knocked out immediately) to his second (when the Rams reached the Super Bowl) and now it could be an advantage that L.A. has over a first-time playoff coach on the other side in Dan Campbell.

Known for coaching with his heart first and his head second, Campbell could become overwhelmed by the stakes of Detroit hosting a playoff game for the first time in 30 years. Win or lose, Campbell’s going to be shedding tears on Sunday night.

But for McVay, this is another day at the office and since 2018 the Rams are 3-0 in their first playoff game of the postseason, including as the underdog in a wild card road game upset over the Seahawks in 2020 with Goff at quarterback. Tampa’s Todd Bowles is 0-1 in the playoffs, Green Bay’s Matt LaFleur is 2-3, Philadelphia’s Nick Sirianni is 2-2, and then there are the two more experienced coaches in Kyle Shanahan, who is 6-3, and Mike McCarthy, who is 11-10.

But McVay, who is 7-3 in the playoffs, he still has more career postseason wins than Campbell, Bowles, LaFleur, and Sirianni combined.

Matthew Stafford has escaped the pressure of being ‘Stat Padford’

The last time that Matthew Stafford started a wild card game, he had been 0-3 in the playoffs over the first 12 years of his career, all with the Lions. By the end of the postseason, he turned a winless career into a winning career: 4-3 and Super Bowl champion.

Dak Prescott or Brock Purdy could win MVP, Jalen Hurts went to the Super Bowl last year, and Jordan Love is a player on the way up, but no quarterback in the NFC playoffs brings the experience, arm talent, and the nothing-to-lose-ness of Stafford. He’s coming into the postseason with nothing to prove and everything to gain, he’s probably the last quarterback that any team would want to face at this moment.

He has proven he can win a playoff game and he has proven he can win the Super Bowl.

Not only did he win, Stafford had to lead the Rams to a last minute win over Tom Brady’s Bucs, a fourth quarterback comeback over the 49ers in the NFC Championship, and a game-winning touchdown to Kupp in the Super Bowl to defeat Joe Burrow.

This does not resemble the player who could “barely throw” and was contemplating retirement according to an offseason report by Matthew Berry from the combine.

Stafford is arguably playing better now than he did two years ago when the Rams went 12-5 and won it all. He didn’t throw as many scores, finishing the year with 24 touchdowns, 11 interceptions, and just under 4,000 yards, but the level of difficulty was raised by the team almost completely overhauling the supporting cast and then putting Kupp on IR to start the season.

Compared to the Super Bowl offense, every offensive lineman is different except for right tackle Rob Havenstein, and the skill players around Stafford have been almost completely overhauled with the exceptions of Kupp and Tyler Higbee. Puka Nacua and Kyren Williams were not added to the roster until the past two drafts, the team traded away Cam Akers and Van Jefferson during the season, and then McVay had to rotate through street free agent running backs when Williams got hurt.

Kyren Williams ended up leading all running backs with 95.3 rushing yards per game.

The Rams ranked seventh in scoring when they won the Super Bowl but with an offense rebuilt on the cheap following disastrous additions like Allen Robinson last season, L.A. was still ranked eighth in scoring this year. That’s an incredible comeback for a guy who “can barely throw”.

He can throw. He can win.

Giant killers

For all the teams in the NFC that are hoping to make the Super Bowl without facing the 49ers, McVay’s Rams have ironically been labeled as the team that could be best suited to pull the upset: Not expected for a team that had lost nine straight regular season games to the 49ers prior to Week 18’s game between Carson Wentz and Sam Darnold.

But there’s good reason to suspect that McVay could be the one to dethrone Kyle Shanahan from his number one seed. For one, the Rams are the last team to beat Shanahan in the playoffs when he wasn’t down to his fourth quarterback.

L.A. defeated San Francisco in the 2021 NFC Championship 20-17, coming back from a 17-7 fourth quarter deficit to win, something that Shanahan has seen all too many times before as a coach.

And though many key starters were resting, the Rams did beat the 49ers in the final week of the season which if nothing else proves that McVay’s depth and the players that we don’t talk about are better than most believe them to be. But the Rams did more than just beat the 49ers backups this year.

They swept the Seattle Seahawks, keeping them out of the playoffs and contributing to the end of Pete Carroll’s 14-year tenure as the head coach. McVay had dominated Carroll in the series since 2017, even when the Seahawks were very good and the Rams were not. The Rams beat the Colts in Indy, when another win would have gotten them into the playoffs. The Rams beat the Browns 36-19. And they beat the Saints 30-22, another team that would have made the playoffs if not for that loss to L.A..

But perhaps the most impressive game of the season was a loss: The Rams went to Baltimore in Week 10, at 10 AM local time, and took the Ravens to overtime. A Baltimore team that had blown out the Lions 38-6, Seahawks 37-3, and Bengals 34-20 in their three previous home games, the Ravens needed a miracle overtime punt return touchdown—McVay’s greatest weakness being on special teams—to beat the Rams.

So whether you’re the Lions, 49ers, Cowboys, Eagles, or Ravens, it seems every NFL playoff team would rather not face the Rams right now.

They smell danger.