Will LA Rams Everett or Higbee be an NFL top-5 TE?

Can LA Rams produce a top-five tight end in 2020?

The LA Rams have a say in who makes the NFL’s top-five list at tight end. The LA Rams face San Francisco 49ers’ George Kittle twice, Philadelphia Eagles’ Zach Ertz once.  But over the course of 2020, the Rams will face offenses looking to gain yards in any way possible, and right now NFL offenses continue to flow towards the tight end position for those hard-fought yards.

Meanwhile, the LA Rams have their own offense and the stock on both veteran-tight-ends Tyler Higbee and Gerald Everett are rising rapidly.  2019 was a period of trial and error for offensive genius and head coach Sean McVay, a time he takes responsibility for only too late.  The offense kicked in when the scheme changed from shoot-it-out to max-protect-two-tight-ends.

Expensive lessons learned

In the 2019 offseason, teams loaded up with head coach Sean McVay’s associates on their own coaching staff to duplicate his offense’s success. That gave NFL defenses multiple looks at the offense that had stumped them until that point. The pressure then reverted to the oversubscribed McVay to counter punch.  Eventually, he found a new formula for two-tight ends which befuddled defenses once more, and unleashed seldom-used tight end, Tyler Higbee. But the lessons learned came too late to alter the team’s destiny.

As a result, the Rams reformulated their offense. Having committed too many dollars to RB Todd Gurley and WR Brandin Cooks, the Rams had to take absorb the cost in 2020. To prevent future circumstances, the Rams hired offensive coordinator Kevin O’Connell to catch the defensive progress against the offense, and quickly develop countermeasures.