Matthew Stafford growing pains or growing old with LA Rams offense?

The LA Rams were never going to win 17 games this year. We knew that going into the 2021 NFL season. Unfortunately, the LA Rams have faced and lost to, three of the toughest teams in the NFL so far this year.  The four losses of the team have come at the expense of the Arizona Cardinals, the Green Bay Packers, and the Tennessee Titans.

And yes, a fourth loss to the San Francisco 49ers, the team that seems to be on life support until the Rams show up, and then everyone gets healthy and they extend their winning streak against the team for one more game.  Is this just a bunching of games which the Rams were never going to win anyway?

If the goal is to win 12 games, the Rams can still accomplish that by losing once more in the next six games. This is a team that has struggled in multiple levels, at all phases of the game, but let’s not be ignorant of the fact that the team has struggled against three teams that the entire NFL has struggled against.

QB School analysis of Matthew Stafford

So let’s follow along with the QB School video analysis by J.T. O’Sullivan of Matthew Stafford’s techniques, and get a handle on whether the quarterback is truly making a mess of things, or is this simply a matter of the LA Rams continuing to emphasize a passing game despite the fact that the team is going with a host of new receivers running routes for the team?

Lost in the shuffle is the fact that the LA Rams no longer have wide receiver Robert Woods nor DeSean Jackson running routes. The team has placed the entire offense into the hands of wide receivers Cooper Kupp, Odell Beckham Jr., and Van Jefferson. Unfortunately, the team has been forced to do so with the season-ending injury to Woods, an injury from which the offense has yet to recover.

Of course, it’s frustrating to fans to see the team make the same mistakes. But as we’ve pointed out in the past, some of that is simply on the shoulders of the coaching staff, and the head coach, to adapt to the strengths of the changing roster and work with the players’ abilities to move the chains and put points on the scoreboard in different ways.

I don’t think that Stafford is suddenly broken. I think that the playbook has failed this year’s quarterback as it had in the past. The LA Rams are simply choosing not to commit to running the football as the receivers work out their communication and timing. And just as it has been a flaw of the past, that same ghost is haunting this team once more.