Rams’ youth shows in loss to Packers and they’ll need to grow up fast to save season

The Packers defense celebrates a fourth-down incompletion in the end zone as the Rams’ Colby Parkinson complains. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

The Rams are the second-youngest team in the NFL, and they’re showing their age.

They don’t know how to win.

Oh, they’ve gotten close. Over and over. But just as they showed Sunday in their 24-19 loss to Green Bay — incidentally, the league’s youngest team — they haven’t shown an ability to finish the job.

Now the Rams head into their week off knowing that three of their four losses were by six, six and five points.
 
With Sunday’s loss, the Rams’ Sean McVay dropped to 0-5 against his old coaching buddy, Matt LaFleur. The two worked together in Washington and with the Rams, before LaFleur took over as coach of the Packers in 2019.

“This one hurt,” McVay said.

Read more: As Rams slip up against Packers in another close game, is season slipping away?

He was referring to the team, of course, not the head-to-head coaching battle. The Rams have gotten tantalizingly close to winning at Detroit and Chicago, and at home against the Packers but so far they’ve lacked anything close to a killer instinct.

That said, it’s too early to start piling dirt on them. The NFL is weird that way. For instance, both the Rams and Packers were 3-6 through nine games last season, yet both wound up making the playoffs. So a 1-4 start isn’t fatal.

But the Rams can’t draw a lot of inspiration from being close in games, either. That’s the way the NFL is built. After the afternoon games Sunday, there had been 46 games decided by seven points or fewer, and 40 decided by six points or fewer, both the most such games through Week 5 in NFL history.

In other words, there’s a thin line separating the good teams from the bad ones, and at the moment, the Rams are on the wrong side of that equation.

They rose from the ashes last season, but that team was far steadier along the offensive line and was generally healthier than this one….

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/rams-youth-shows-loss-packers-100052076.html

Author : LA Times

Publish date : 2024-10-07 10:00:52

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