GREEN BAY, Wis. — Entering the 2023 season, it was the Rams’ offense that was expected to be doing the heavy lifting. That’s how it worked for much of last season, and the defense had lost many of its heavy hitters during the winter.
The offense still had Matthew Stafford, and Cooper Kupp, and Sean McVay, and they could provide cover as the first- and second-year players on the defense got some experience and went through any necessary growing pains, or so the logic went.
But while the defense has proven itself to be ahead of schedule, the offense has struggled to find consistent footing.
Consider the Rams’ three-game losing streak to drop to 3-6 entering their Week 10 bye.
The offense managed just eight snaps total in two drives in the fourth quarter as the Pittsburgh Steelers mounted their comeback. A miscommunication between Stafford and Kupp led to a pick-six before the Rams lost 2 yards on the subsequent drive and had their punt blocked out of the end zone to let the Dallas Cowboys game get out of hand. And with Stafford out with a thumb injury Sunday, all the Rams could manage was a field goal in a 20-3 loss to the Green Bay Packers.
So the Rams hope that the bye week will give them time to find some solutions on offense.
“I don’t think there’s an easy answer to that,” Kupp said Sunday when asked why the offense has struggled to find consistency. “We got some very competent, very smart football minds in our building. So if the answer was easy, we’d have fixed it by now. … There’s a lot of football to watch and just get a feel for what have we put on film for the last nine weeks and what can we do better.”
Again, the Rams were without Stafford on Sunday, and for almost six quarters now since he sprained the UCL in his right thumb against Dallas. Backup Brett Rypien struggled to sustain drives, and he got little help from the rest of the offense on a day the Rams were all out of wack.
But, as the Rams have encountered before this season, the Packers tripped them up by abandoning the tendencies and even the core principles of their defense. The Rams arrived at the line of scrimmage and saw something they had not seen on film during their week of preparation.
“Whether they self-scout that themselves or what they’re doing, but they did a good job changing some stuff up,” Kupp said. “Like most defenses have that we’ve seen this season. So it’s like, shoot, stuff we’re seeing on film, we get some different stuff.”
There are a lot of possible reasons for this. McVay pointed out that Packers head coach Matt LaFleur and defensive coordinator Joe Barry are former Rams assistants very familiar with how the team operates.
But this isn’t exclusive to the Packers. In the week following the loss to the Steelers, Stafford talked about the disparity between how defenses played other teams and how they played the Rams.
“From what I’ve seen from defensive coordinators, I think they have a lot of respect for who our head coach is and who our core offensive minds are in this building. What you see on tape is not what you get on Sundays,” Stafford said at the time. “I think we’ve had to adjust quite a bit, probably more so than some other teams, then you got to go out there and make the adjustments and go make the plays. And certain times we’ve done that from an execution standpoint as players better than others.”
In turn, McVay on Monday echoed Kupp’s Sunday sentiments when he said that defensive coordinators were also showing deference to Stafford with these decisions. He also said his offense is designed to withstand these kinds of in-game surprises.
“A lot of the plays that we have are all-purpose in regard to if they play this, then that’s where this takes you and this is how you exhaust your progression,” McVay said. “That’s part of how you coach. You have primary reads and secondary reads and sometimes they’re coverage contours, sometimes they’re across the board so it doesn’t affect things too much.”
When there have been defensive looks that require extra attention, Kupp said coaches have done a good job of addressing those changes in between series. But that’s not something that can be discussed in between play calls. It’s something players have to be aware of in the moment.
“At the end of the day, it’s like, ‘Hey, they’re doing some different stuff but no one’s reinventing the wheel,’” Kupp said. “It’s about recognizing it and how does that change our responsibilities and now let’s go play fast.”
