The Rams are not a perfect football team. They haven’t been consistent. They have strengths – and weaknesses. They’ve let games get away and they’ve just gotten by.
Absolutely, they can win the Super Bowl.
This Rams’ season – next up: Sunday’s NFC title game against the Seahawks in Seattle – isn’t a lesson in steamrolling, it’s a clinic on not rolling over.
Turn off your TV and head out to a theater – or maybe to SoFi Stadium for Sunday’s watch party – because this is big-picture stuff. A study in will and want-to and also why: “Guys want to come back the next day,” Coach Sean McVay said before the season: “It doesn’t have to be miserable to pursue greatness.”
Have your scouting report on his resolute desk by morning.
Because if you’ve followed the Rams this season, you should be able to explain in 800 words why you weren’t surprised on Sunday to see them shake off Caleb Williams’ haymaker – that incredible, ridiculous, miraculous 51.2-yard overtime-forcing, momentum-stealing touchdown heave with 18 seconds left in regulation.
If you know the Rams, you knew it still wasn’t over, even after a nothing-doing three-and-out series to start overtime. You get why they got it together and out-irrepressibled the Chicago Bears for a 20-17 NFC divisional victory.
You know that, for the Rams, figuring it out is a lot of the fun and failing is basically a plot device.
Like when they fell on their faces against the severely short-handed San Francisco 49ers in October. The Rams looked nothing like a contender, except for this: How upset those guys were in the locker room afterward. Heads hung low, players consoling one another or screaming obscenities at no one in particular, the care factor off the charts.
McVay said that loss made him sick, “really disappointed.” But he also had to mention how excited he was “about being able to use this as an opportunity to be able to respond.”
And by now you know, right, that wasn’t just Coach McVay Speak?
At 39, he’s already puzzled his way to 10 postseason victories, double any other coach before his 40th birthday (which, for him, is Saturday). That includes John Madden, Jon Gruden, Mike Tomlin and Zac Taylor, who all had five before 40.
And after losing to the 49ers this season, McVay’s Rams won their next six games, established themselves as Super Bowl contenders and pushed 17th-year quarterback Matthew Stafford to the front of the league MVP race.
But then came losses to Carolina, Seattle and Atlanta.
The Rams’ final six regular-season games featured as many losses as wins – and the final victory, 37-20 against the lowly Arizona Cardinals, required a late surge that did less for fans’ confidence than for the team’s: “They made it difficult on us,” a legitimately grateful McVay said. “[But] it was an awesome job of just being able to settle in and do the things that we needed. I like where we’re at.”
Who needs smelling salts, off-limits now for NFL teams, when you’ve got stick-to-itiveness like McVay’s teams?
Remember when the 2021 Super Bowl-winning Rams went winless in November? Recall the close calls in the playoffs, a pair of three-point victories against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the 49ers in the divisional round and NFC title game?
Go ahead, back McVay’s teams all the way up against the wall, they’ll almost beg you.
Carolina again, on Jan. 10, they trailed 31-27 with just 2:34 left to play in that wild-card contest. Stafford casually told receiver Davante Adams: “Let’s go snatch these guys’ hearts,” before marching the Rams 71 yards on a scoring drive that ended with his sixth completion in seven attempts, a 19-yard game-winning pass to Colby Parkinson with 38 seconds left.
Just brushed that dirt off their shoulder pads.
Again, on Sunday. There went safety Kam Curl, diving to intercept a Williams pass in overtime, giving the ball back to Stafford, who exchanged a knowing glance with McVay before he went and snatched the city of Chicago’s heart. Three first-down passes set up rookie kicker Harrison Mevis for the 42-yard game-winning field goal and a rematch with Seattle, Super Bowl at stake.
In the locker room afterward, McVay and the men on his team celebrated, the scene shared by the team on social media: “There are so many things,” he said, “where you could have said, ‘Man, maybe tonight is not our night.’”
His players finished his thought, chiming in, in unison: “Shhh—” as in, hush with that nonsense, that bunch of gibberish coming from their head coach.
Not their night? They way they’ve trained to look at it, it’s the Rams’ night if they think it is – or until the clock strikes zero before they can figure it out. Which hasn’t happened yet. And which really might not.