ST Coordinator John Bonamego rapid repairs to LA Rams

The LA Rams hired new ST Coordinator John Bonamego to restore special teams’ ranking to the NFL’s top ten. But, where must he start?

The LA Rams, like all NFL Teams, organize the team under three separate banners: Offense, Defense, and Special teams. The offense is the easiest to track. Measuring an NFL offense involves direct statistics, or yards gained and points scored.  In other words, move the ball, and score.  Run the ball, pass the ball, score. Pretty straightforward.

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The defense is measured in an indirect fashion. Its ultimate success is measured by how effectively it stops opposing offenses from moving the ball and from scoring. Since the defense is the antithesis of the offense, it is tracked with a different set of statistics. That creates a bit of subjectivity to the process.

Special special teams

Finally, the team has special teams, which is the professional football category of “all other”. And that is what makes an effort to fix the ranking of the special teams unit on any team so difficult.  It is not a homogenous unit, but rather has up to eight separate objectives.

All of this is extremely important to LA Rams new special teams coordinator John Bonamego. After all, he is the only new coordinator who must do more than reformulate how the LA Rams do things. He must reverse the trend of a declining trend among all of the LA Rams’ various special teams’ functions.   Unfortunately, the “all other” category of special teams play makes that a difficult task even in a normal season, let alone a year when social distancing requirements prohibit NFL coaches to have direct contact with players.