The Rams gave up way too many big plays on the ground last season, so that’s an area of focus in 2025<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a lot for the Los Angeles Rams<\/a>\u2019 defense to build on after a dominant stretch to end the 2024 season. They sacked Sam Darnold and Jalen Hurts a combined 16 times in the playoffs and held four of their last six opponents to less than 10 points.<\/p>\n By no means was last year a perfect performance by Chris Shula\u2019s unit, but there are plenty of reasons to be excited and optimistic. One thing does need to be cleaned up, though, according to Kobie Turner.<\/p>\n Turner was asked by J.B. Long<\/a> where the Rams defense can improve as a unit in 2025 and he didn\u2019t hesitate with his answer. He pointed to the long runs given up last season, which plagued Los Angeles early in the year and in its two games against the Eagles<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cOver the course of this last year, what killed us was a lot of the big plays \u2013\u00a0in particular, a lot of big runs,\u201d Turner said. \u201cIf you really look at a lot of those games where we gave up a bunch of rushing yards, it wasn\u2019t every single play they\u2019re getting a bunch of yards. It was a couple of those plays where we fit it up wrong or a couple of those plays where maybe we got caught out. It\u2019s about minimizing those big plays. I mean, that\u2019s what the league is nowadays. Obviously, the points matter the most, the turnover margin matters the second-most but after that it\u2019s the explosive plays.\u201d<\/p>\n If the Rams can limit the number of long runs allowed this season, they\u2019ll give up far fewer points and get the ball back for their offense more often. In the playoff loss alone, they allowed runs of 44 yards, 62 yards and 78 yards, which were the difference in the game.<\/p>\n \u201cOnce we minimize those, the sky\u2019s the limit for us,\u201d Turner continued. \u201cWe\u2019ve already been able to see what it looks like coming to life on third downs when we know that we get them in known passing situations so it\u2019s about on first and second down, owning the run and earning the right to rush the passer. That\u2019s something that we started to focus on last year but another place we can be better at and grow consistency.\u201d<\/p>\n In the regular season, the Rams gave up three touchdown runs of at least 35 yards, two of which were 70- and 72-yarders by Saquon Barkley. They also allowed an 18-yard touchdown run by Malik Washington and far too many other long runs that didn\u2019t wind up as touchdowns.<\/p>\n As Turner said, explosive plays are often difference-makers in the NFL and the Rams gave up far too many of them on the ground last year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Rams gave up way too many big plays on the ground last season, so that’s an area…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":161945,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2079],"tags":[247,265,240,7761,25,7,20842,5998,3418,239,1014,58,2444,2611,248,267,246,88,6,35196,245,264,242,109,424,1064,1878,9,266,1385],"class_list":{"0":"post-161944","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles-rams","8":"tag-american","9":"tag-american-football","10":"tag-angeles","11":"tag-darnold","12":"tag-eagles","13":"tag-football","14":"tag-hub","15":"tag-kobie","16":"tag-kobie-turner","17":"tag-los","18":"tag-los-angeles","19":"tag-los-angeles-rams","20":"tag-losangeles","21":"tag-losangelesrams","22":"tag-national","23":"tag-national-sports","24":"tag-neutral","25":"tag-news","26":"tag-nfl","27":"tag-nfl-hub","28":"tag-overall","29":"tag-overall-neutral","30":"tag-philadelphia","31":"tag-philadelphia-eagles","32":"tag-rams","33":"tag-sam","34":"tag-sam-darnold","35":"tag-sports","36":"tag-sports-news","37":"tag-turner"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/114753975379652830","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161944\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/161945"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}