CHARLOTTE, N.C. — This past Wednesday, just days after the latest Los Angeles Rams’ blowout victory that secured a lane to the NFC’s top seed, a question came Sean McVay’s way during a news conference that tugged at the new problem he had to face.
“The entire media football world has granted you guys the greatest team in the history of football,” the question started, “and Chuck Noll has nothing on you now.”
It was intentionally hyperbolic, but it held enough truth for McVay to acknowledge they were aware of the noise building around this team. However, the head coach had a consistent message he’d give in settings both public and private.
“Humility,” he said, “is only a day away.”
That day came Sunday in Carolina in a 31-28 loss to the Panthers.
More than 2,000 miles and two time zones from Los Angeles, the Rams took on a Panthers team without the flashy names or postseason buzz and also without the benefit of health. And the humility formed in the sky above Bank of America Stadium, and then it fell in rain droplets and settled into all the nooks and crannies of a chaotic game in football weather.
It was in Matthew Stafford’s historic turnover-less streak coming to not just a stop but a screeching halt, with a pick six and a game-sealing strip-sack, a kind of situational downfall that had long eluded this 17th-year pro. It was in the missed tackles on slippery Panthers jerseys, in the run fits that suddenly weren’t there, in the blocks they couldn’t break free from, in the storms they couldn’t bring to an opposing quarterback as they had for highlight reels the past six weeks.
It was in a clock that ticked just a little too fast before a delay of game. It was in a ball that bounced off a helmet and into the arms of an opponent in the end zone. And it was in a third quarter where the Panthers held the ball for all but three plays, with those slow and steady runs and ticking seconds making this all feel a little too real.
“Coach McVay always talks about snatching momentum and taking it back,” running back Kyren Williams said. “Whenever we lose that, we have to focus on finding ways to snatch that back.”
It says everything about what the Rams have: despite the mistakes and the identity of a game not built to their way of play, they still had every chance to win.
They moved the ball at will against an injury-riddled Panthers defense coordinated by former assistant Ejiro Evero, to the tune of 152 rushing yards on 7.2 yards per carry, with Blake Corum going for a career-high 81 yards. They found explosive plays, like the 51-yard deep pass Stafford hit on a Xavier Smith fly route against Cover 2. They got to the acrobatics, like the 30-yard one-handed Inspector Gadget-like catch Puka Nacua made to set up a go-ahead touchdown in the fourth quarter.
But this is how trap games go: The more a heavy favorite allows an underdog to hang around, the more belief builds in those players that they can pull it off. And they start making plays, too, like the two fourth-down touchdown passes Bryce Young soared over the head of Emmanuel Forbes Jr. and the interception that Mike Jackson took 48 yards to the house.
“All week, y’all just kept talking about how great (Stafford) is and how he’s Superman with no cape,” Jackson said after the pick six. “At the end of the day, it’s about who was better today. We were.”
A crowd can feed off that belief, and suddenly the Panthers drained almost an entire quarter off the clock on the ground with a crowd chanting, “Keep pounding!”
The more plays that have to be made, like Nacua’s leaping grab or Jordan Whittington’s devastating block to spring a 34-yard Corum run, the greater the risk that the wrong mistake will break the will. And there the Rams were in the red zone with just over two minutes remaining, down three points, desperate to avoid asking a young kicker to tie the score in rainy conditions on the road and instead searching for every pre-snap advantage so that Stafford could lead a 40th career fourth-quarter comeback.
And right as he went to snap the ball, the flag came out for a delay of game.
“I can’t take that. That’s on nobody but me,” Stafford said. “I have to get that thing off. I thought I had enough time, and I thought I was going to be snapping it right at one slash zero. … I thought I did a good enough job, but I did not.”
Had the situation remained a third-and-5 from the Panthers’ 17, the Rams could have run two plays to convert. With two timeouts and a two-minute warning, they could have leaned on a run game enjoying its best day of the season behind an offensive line that was throwing Carolina defenders to the side. But once it became an obvious dropback situation on third-and-10, the advantages of unpredictability and a wide-open playbook that got the Rams this far disappeared. And then the ball came free.
For a team that often wins through complementary football, Sunday offered an example of how it can fall by the same sword. Unlike the losses to the Philadelphia Eagles and San Francisco 49ers that could be pinned mainly on special teams miscues, this was a systems failure in the ways the Rams have built a juggernaut over the past six weeks.
For so long, they’ve played from in front with a lethal red zone offense to allow pass rushers to pin ears back and force quarterbacks to throw to defensive backs in zone. But when Stafford threw the pick six to go down 14-7, the Rams fell into a game where they so rarely got to apply the stress to Young.
As the Panthers ran it 40 times for 164 yards, they sucked the juice out of the pass rush, leaving Young in favorable down-and-distance situations. And then even when Byron Young or Jared Verse could get through to the quarterback, Bryce Young found a way to Houdini out of it to keep the play alive.
For Bryce Young’s various struggles, he’s still a No. 1 overall pick. And he put those skills on display to average 10.3 yards per attempt with three touchdowns and a 147.1 rating. It was a reversal of the torment the Rams inflicted on Sam Darnold and Baker Mayfield the past two weeks.
If either Stafford had played a clean game to lean on an unstoppable rushing attack or the defense had made a few of its normal splash plays, this game could have been a scare instead of a lesson. That was how Week 2 in Tennessee felt after Stafford threw an interception, but then Byron Young blew open the game with a strip-sack. These weren’t the one-win Titans they were facing in Carolina.
“This is a humbling experience,” Byron Young said. “We were doing so good the past games. No. 1 seed. I just feel like this is a wake-up call. It’s something we just have to learn from. I think it’s definitely something that we needed. … Don’t get complacent.”
At 9-3, the Rams can flush this loss just like they did after losing to the 49ers to spark the winning streak. They can bet on Stafford to bounce back, and they just got top cornerback Ahkello Witherspoon back to boost the defense.
But they’re no longer in the driver’s seat. The Chicago Bears currently hold the No. 1 seed via tiebreaker, and it’s starting to look like a four-team race between the Bears, Rams, Eagles and Seattle Seahawks. Any one of those other teams taking the top seed would mean the Rams could have to travel into inclement weather and a raucous road crowd in the playoffs.
Los Angeles still has an argument as the best team in the NFL when it plays its A game. But it has flaws it must reckon with, too. Namely, that’s on a defense that needed one game to learn just how much it misses Quentin Lake. The way he rotated from nickel cornerback to strong safety to free safety to confuse younger quarterbacks, the security he brought over the top of aggressive cornerbacks like Forbes and Cobie Durant, the communication and blitzes he brought to thwart running plays — those lifts are going to have to come from somewhere else the rest of this regular season.
They have to make sure the ball security and special teams issues that plagued them early in the season stay in the past.
But most of all, they have to make sure their greatest strengths complement each other rather than disappear at the same time. Because no matter the talent gap in a game, those chinks in the armor can leak on a stormy day in someone else’s building, like the types of road playoff venues they now must win games to avoid.
“We’re all in this together,” McVay said. “We’re going to be tighter than we’ve ever been.”