The Rams Keep Beating Themselves, and the Season Won't Wait

There is a version of this Los Angeles Rams team that is genuinely dangerous. Matthew Stafford threw for 5,643 yards and 52 touchdowns last season, a performance that earned him the league's most valuable player award. Puka Nacua produced 2,047 yards and 12 scores. Kyren Williams rushed for 1,435 yards. The talent is not the problem. The problem is that a contender operating on a razor-thin margin cannot keep donating possessions, roster spots, and protection snaps to its own dysfunction — and right now, that is exactly what the Rams are doing.

Alaric Jackson is suspended. Harrison Mevis, the backup kicker, is gone. Those two facts, taken together, tell you something about where this organization's execution stands heading into a season that was supposed to be a championship run. Jackson's suspension costs the Rams a starting-caliber offensive lineman for two games. That matters in a vacuum. It matters considerably more when you already know that Justin Dedich has been dealing with a hand injury, that the offensive line depth has required emergency additions since training camp opened, and that protecting a 38-year-old quarterback is not a luxury — it is the entire architecture of the offense. Losing Jackson to avoidable circumstances is not a depth problem. It is a discipline problem wearing the costume of a depth problem.

The Mevis situation speaks to a different kind of fragility. Special teams decisions in October rarely make headlines, but they carry weight for a team that has already demonstrated an inability to close. The Rams won only four of nine games decided by a single possession last season — a close-game collapse that directly contributed to their wild-card exit. Think about what that means in practice: the games most likely to come down to a late field goal, a fourth-quarter stop, a single execution error, are precisely the games this team has shown it cannot win reliably. Roster continuity in the kicking game is not glamorous. It is, however, the kind of thing that costs you a seeding game in January.

The historical precedent here is not encouraging. Contenders that shed points through self-inflicted wounds — suspensions, released specialists, avoidable attrition — tend to find those wounds reopened at the worst possible moment. The 2013 Denver Broncos were a useful cautionary tale: historically dominant in the regular season, undone in the Super Bowl partly by the kind of execution breakdowns that looked minor in November. The margin between a great team and a champion is almost always execution in the moments that feel routine until they aren't.

What makes this particularly frustrating is that the Rams' structural vulnerabilities are already documented and serious. Myles Garrett is on injured reserve. The linebacker room is thin. The wide receiver depth behind Davante Adams is a concern the front office has not fully resolved. Those are the fires that Sean McVay and the front office are legitimately firefighting. Jackson's suspension and Mevis's release are not structural — they are operational, which means they were avoidable. A team with this many real problems cannot afford to manufacture new ones.

My declaration is simple: the Rams will not advance past the divisional round if they continue to bleed self-inflicted damage alongside the legitimate attrition they're already absorbing. The talent on this roster — Stafford, Nacua, Williams, Kam Curl anchoring the defense — is good enough to win a Super Bowl. But good enough is not the same as disciplined enough. The 2025 season proved that. The question the first month of 2026 is raising is whether the lesson was actually learned, or just acknowledged and forgotten.