The Los Angeles Rams learned this past season that having success in the NFL isn’t a given. Just one year after reaching the Super Bowl and looking like one of the best teams in football, the Rams regressed and only won nine games in 2019, missing the playoffs.
It was a stunning result for a team that went all-in, trading away Marcus Peters and Aqib Talib, and replacing them with Jalen Ramsey. Massive extensions for Jared Goff and Todd Gurley have left the Rams in a difficult spot financially, as has Brandin Cooks’ inflated contract.
Heading into the 2020 season, the Rams have plenty of talent but even more questions to answer. Dante Fowler Jr., Cory Littleton, Michael Brockers and Andrew Whitworth will all be free agents, and Gurley’s future with the team appears to be in doubt.
As a result, Doug Farrar of Touchdown Wire put the Rams in the bottom half of the NFL in his early 2020 power rankings. They were ranked 21st, to be exact, behind the Bucs, Steelers, Falcons and Chargers.
Here’s part of what Farrar wrote about the Rams.
The Rams’ all-in, short-term, win-now philosophy almost bore the best fruit at the end of the 2018 season, if only Sean McVay’s team could have beaten the Patriots in Super Bowl LIII. After that didn’t happen, a whole lot of other things didn’t happen in 2019. First of all, the Rams didn’t make the playoffs, finishing with a 9-7 record after a 13-3 mark the year before. Jared Goff didn’t develop as a quarterback — in fact, he regressed in several areas as opposing defenses seemed to figure him out. A cautious approach to Goff’s future didn’t happen; last September, the Rams gave Goff a four-year, $134 million contract that included an NFL-record $110 million in guarantees. That’s a major commitment to a quarterback who has proven very little regarding his ability to succeed outside of McVay’s structure.
It’s not all doom and gloom for the Rams, despite the negative factors working against them. Aaron Donald is still arguably the best player in football, Goff looked like a franchise QB in 2018, Whitworth appears on track to play another season in Los Angeles and Ramsey is roaming the secondary in front of a safety tandem of John Johnson and Taylor Rapp.
There are a lot of teams with less talent than the Rams, many of which are above them in these power rankings. But the salary cap limitations and uncertainty surrounding Gurley make the Rams a difficult team to project moving forward.
