The Rams got embarrassed in Melbourne and lost Myles Garrett for a month, and our model still calls them the best team in football
Updated
Los Angeles flew to Australia, watched Matthew Stafford complete four passes in the first half, and lost 27-7 to a division rival our model had at seven wins. Then Myles Garrett, who played 62 percent of the snaps on a knee that had bothered him all camp and did not record a tackle, went for surgery and onto injured reserve for at least four games. That is as bad a week as a contender can have without losing its quarterback. And when we re-ran the season with all of it seeded in, the Rams came out at 14-3 with a 100 percent playoff chance and a 44 percent shot at the title. Both of those title and playoff numbers are unchanged from July. The record dropped one win. The reason is that the roster we graded as the best in football is still the best in football, and the model is not going to pretend otherwise because of one Thursday night on the other side of the world.
Start with the game, because it deserves an honest accounting. Stafford went 15 of 25 for 155 yards and an interception behind a 61 passer rating. Puka Nacua caught five for 74. Kyren Williams ran 11 times for 41. The offense that our model projects to lead the league in scoring managed one touchdown, and it managed it against a defense we had graded 30th in July. Some of that is jet lag and a neutral site and a short week. Some of it is a San Francisco defense that played better than its grade. None of it moved the model's read on what this offense is over seventeen weeks.
That read is still extraordinary. Our model projects Stafford for 4,711 yards and 33 touchdowns against nine interceptions behind a passer rating near 104, down from the 5,045 and 39 we had in the summer but still one of the two best quarterback lines in our numbers alongside Joe Burrow. Nacua projects for 120 catches and 1,599 yards. Davante Adams for 86 catches, 1,238 yards and eight scores. Colby Parkinson for 61 catches and seven touchdowns. Williams for 1,330 rushing yards and eleven scores. The unit projects for 489 points, first in the league by a margin, and the most yards in football. One bad night in Melbourne is a bad night. It is not a trend.
The defense is where the honest conversation lives, and it has two parts. The first is Garrett. Our model now projects the Rams generating 45 sacks, 13th in the league, down from the top of the league in July, because the best pass rusher alive is out until at least Week 6 and, based on how he looked in Melbourne, was not himself before that. Byron Young projects for nearly 12 sacks. Josaiah Stewart and Desjuan Johnson fill in. That is a competent edge rotation, not a frightening one, and for the next month the Rams are a very different defense on third and long.
The second part is Aaron Donald, and it is the reason the projection did not fall further. Donald came out of a two-year retirement on August 30, was held out of the trip to Australia while he gets his body back to game shape, and is expected to make his debut in Week 2 against the Giants. Our model has him for 16 games and nearly ten sacks from the interior, and it grades the unit as a whole at 284 points allowed, fourth in the league, with the fewest yards allowed in football. Kamren Curl projects for five interceptions. A defense with Donald inside and Garrett back in October is the unit we previewed in the summer. A defense with Donald inside and no Garrett is still top five. That is the arithmetic that holds the win total at 14.
The division got more interesting, and that is the other reason for the lost win. San Francisco climbed from seven wins to nine in our projection and now owns the head-to-head. Seattle holds at eleven. When we ran the rest of the season, Los Angeles still won the NFC West in the overwhelming majority of simulated years, but the margin is a game narrower than it was, and the return meeting with the 49ers, with Donald and Garrett both on the field, is now the most consequential game on the schedule.
The market opened the Rams somewhere around eleven and a half wins, and in July our model sat three clear of it. It still sits two and a half clear, and the bullish lean is grade-supported to the hilt even after the worst week the roster could have had. When both units grade in the top four and the quarterback line is the best in the league, a projection near fourteen wins is arithmetic. The market is pricing in Stafford's age, Garrett's knee and the memory of Melbourne. Our model prices the roster that will be on the field from October on.
The path to being wrong is health, and after one week that is no longer a hypothetical. If Garrett's return slips, if Donald's body does not hold up after two years away, or if Stafford takes the kind of hit that ends a season, the ceiling comes down like it does for everyone. Ty Simpson is a capable reserve by our numbers, but no reserve replaces a 33-touchdown season. That is the risk, and it is the only one.
So the read on Los Angeles is a juggernaut that just had a terrible week and is still a juggernaut. The offense is the best in football, the defense will be top five even before Garrett returns, and the projection reflects a roster that has one real weakness, which is the calendar. Fourteen wins, the division, and a 44 percent shot at the title. Melbourne was a warning. It was not a verdict.
