If you didn’t expect the Los Angeles Rams to make the playoffs this year, you are forgiven because you can’t know what you couldn’t have known. The Rams have all the players we knew that they would have going into the season, we just didn’t know how good those players would turn out to be once they got rolling with Sean McVay.
Could you have known that Puka Nacua, the last pick of the fifth round, would set the NFL rookie record for catches and yards in a single season? Or that Kyren Williams, a fifth round pick a year before Puka, would lead the league in rushing yards per game? Or that Kobie Turner, a third round pick, would tie Aaron Donald’s franchise record for sacks by a rookie and be in contention to win Defensive Rookie of the Year? Or that Ahkello Witherspoon, a cornerback who has bounced from team to team, would end up playing like L.A.’s new “Jalen Ramsey”?
These have been shocking developments for a team that went 5-12 last season and then had to tear down the roster, but now that we know what we know there’s only one conclusion to draw about the 2023 L.A. Rams: They’re not just a wild card team.
They’re the last wild card team that anybody wants to face right now.
By full season stats, the Rams enter the playoffs as a wild card and a six-seed in the NFC, but in the past two months alone they are playing much more like a top-5 team and one that is flat out playing better than the Lions since mid-November.
At 3-6 going into their bye week, the Rams looked every bit as downtrodden as most expected them to be after an offseason of cutting corners just in order to field a team under the salary cap. The Rams traded Jalen Ramsey and cut Bobby Wagner among other cap-saving moves, entered camp with 36 rookies, have not made a first round draft pick since Jared Goff in 2016, and had the least-expensive defense in the NFL with most of that money being allocated to one Aaron Donald.
The 3-6 record made sense at the time, but L.A. came out of the bye week looking more like the team that won the Super Bowl than the one that Vegas projected with 6.5 wins.
