The Los Angeles Rams have had some good teams over the past quarter-century. The franchise has also had some bad squads, but we’re choosing to focus on the positive today.

ESPN’s Bill Barnwell ranked the top-25 NFL teams since 2000 and picked two Rams units at either end of the millennium. Oddly enough, neither won a Super Bowl either.

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Barnwell first ranked the 2018 Rams team, which lost to the Patriots in the Super Bowl, as the 25th-best team in the past 25 seasons. His reasoning stemmed from how that team effectively signaled that head coach Sean McVay who was here to stay as a top-flight play-caller.

These Rams felt like the future of football. Building on their stunning 2017 season, it didn’t seem as though anything could derail Sean McVay’s offense.

The 2018 L.A. team was eventually overshadowed by the team that won the title, but over the entire season, it was better than the 2021 edition.

Next up: The 2001 Rams. It was Kurt Warner’s final season as well as the last year of “The Greatest Show on Turf.” Weirdly enough, they also lost to the Patriots in the Super Bowl. This unit made Yahoo Sports’ top-25 team list, too, but earned the No. 10 spot on Barnwell’s list.

Yes, the Rams had the best offense of the past 25 years by this methodology. Even including their playoff run, they averaged 31.3 points, 5.5 more than any other team in 2001. They did this despite turning the ball over 44 times during the regular season, the second most of any team. Turnovers were really the only way to beat them for most of the year; their two regular-season losses came in games in which they coughed up the ball a combined 14 times. When they merely turned the ball over four times or fewer, they went 16-1.

This list shows the true dichotomy of the Rams over the past 25 seasons. They oscillated from the best to the worst to the mediocre before now sliding back to the best in the NFL. And with Matthew Stafford on his last legs as an NFL quarterback, the upcoming second quarter-century could shake out to be yet another era for Rams football.

This article originally appeared on Rams Wire: 2 Rams teams ranked on ESPN’s top-25 team list since 2000