After four weeks of tragedy with one lone bright spot in the middle, Sean McVay's Los Angeles Rams are currently sitting in the basement of the NFC West with a 1-4 record.
Their offense is bereft of explosive talent. Their defense has been bad against the pass and among the worst run defenses in the NFL. And with the team heading into the bye, there's a real danger of everything falling apart in an even more spectacular way moving forward, as the team could stop giving it their all if they don't believe there's a point.
And yet, in his media availability after the Packers game, McVay addressed reporters, his players, and Rams fans alike about the team's plans moving forward and how they're going to stick together moving forward.
“Yeah, just what I said to you guys. I think you look at it, and the reality is, you can tend to think you're a lot further away than you are. There's going be a lot of outside noise and we have to stay inside out more than anything. I'm excited about the opportunity to respond. I'm excited about the opportunity to say, ‘Alright, we've got some adversity. How do we handle that?' Alright, here's that storm that we talked about, and want to be proud of the way that we handle it,” McVay told reporters.
“Want to make sure that our guys get away, and then we do a good job as coaches being able to reflect, evaluate, and say, ‘alright, with these five games, are we getting guys back? Are we not? What does it look like to try to avoid some of the different things that we haven't done well enough? And try to continue to replicate some things that have been some positives. But this one…you keep it real. This was tough because we put a lot of work into this week. There were plenty of opportunities that I thought we had to be able to change the outcome and we came up short. We all have our hand in it.”
While there are no moral victories in the NFL, the Rams really have tried their best to hold things down despite a string of injuries, with three of their four losses coming by a touchdown or less. Whether they can flip that differential after the bye and finally get back to winning games, however, remains to be seen, as it will rely just as much on who is healthy as anything McVay can control.
Sean McVay names the Rams player he wants to evaluate over the bye
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Later in his media session, McVay singled out one player in particular he wants to spend time evaluating over the next few weeks, Quentin Lake, who he believes could become a good fit at safety full-time after splitting his time around the defensive secondary.
“I think everything. We'll evaluate everything. That was a result of Josh Wallace playing some ‘star' today. That enabled Quentin Lake to play safety almost exclusively with the exception of a couple things. But that's a good observation,” McVay explained. “We'll observe everything. When you're in these situations, we have to do a good job of making sure that we look at the totality of everything, regardless of position, and make sure that we're doing a great job of trying to make sure that we play as good a football as we can with the remainder of the season.”
One of the most popular players on the Rams, finding a way to get Lake more involved moving forward feels like a great idea, especially now that Los Angeles has four cornerbacks who would theoretically like to play moving forward. With John Johnson III still on IR, considering Lake at safety feels like a good use of the bye week.
