Why the running game went downhill - especially at the end…
I’ll add my 2 cents… Bear with me then… It will all come together…
1. 23-Akers lost for most of the year… (and then 27-Henderson lost for part of the year…)
2. 25-Michel is a good straight ahead runner but far less explosive…
3. The Rams used significantly LESS play action in 2021 than in 2018…
4. Defenses tried to stop 9-Stafford in the same way they stopped Goff in 2018… And when they did that, 9-Stafford made them pay for it… << see attached article >>.
Has Matthew Stafford significantly upgraded Los Angeles' offense from the Jared Goff days? Will the Rams' QB gamble pay off with the ultimate prize, a Lombardy Trophy? Keegan Abdoo takes an in-depth look at the QB swap.
www.nfl.com
5. The Rams lost Johnny Mundt during the year - their blocking TE… And in the playoff 89-Higbee… TE’s being a key to their double-team blocking scheme… (It’s why the 88-Hopkins block on 4th down in the 4th quarter was SO HUGE…!)
6. And McVay stayed with the run - even when it wasn’t working in the Super Bowl… This was huge… It kept the Bengals D honest… Forced them to stop the run and stay mostly in zone… and made it possible to make big plays in the passing game…
I have attached another article from a few years back… What it highlights is that while the average YPC is about 4.0… The MODE VALUE - i.e. the most commonly occurring value in a range of numbers - is about 2.0 YPC… Most individual carries result in 1 or 2 or 3 yards… It’s the explosive, breakaway runs that bring the averages up over time…
The NFL rushing average may be over four yards per carry, but that figure is skewed by a few dozen big plays. After sorting through three years of data, Mike Tanier discovers that the average running play only yields 2-3 yards and learns that a surprisingly large percentage of runs go absolutely...
www.footballoutsiders.com
So just like in 2020 the passing game resulted in about 5 plays in excess of 40 yards.… This year (2021) - for various reasons - we lacked the breakaway runs in running game…
Effectively, teams tried to take away the Rams running game and for 9-Stafford to beat them…
And he did. (Flame on…!!!)
Blue Boy
( Sorry, but I haven’t posted in a long while… If I didn’t do the links properly, Modes please correct or point me to the instructions for using the ‘positing icons’…)