Rams first joint practice results in plenty of homework for offense

The LA Rams were not surprised that the aftermath from their joint practice session with the Los Angeles Chargers leaves them with quite a bit of homework to clean up in the days and weeks ahead. Hopefully, fans were not shocked either.

There is no reason to sugar coat this. The coaching staff scheduled joint practices in 2024, four sessions between three different NFL teams, for this reason. This was not a search for confirmation of how good this team has grown in training camp. Rather, this was a designed trouble-shooting session to get immediate feedback of where this team needs to work at improvement.

Based on an aggregation of reports, there is plenty of homework to take away from this first of four joint practices.

If you want to see a video of the Los Angeles Chargers highlights from their joint practice session with the LA Rams, you can click this link here. Keep in mind that any video highlighting Chargers highlights will naturally expose the worst of the Rams' plays. As a result, you won't see any Rams interceptions, receptions, or big runs from RB Blake Corum. In fact, you will likely not see any visual evidence of any play referenced in our hidden crowd-pleasers article.

The team struggled early with the joint practice session, leading to multiple quarterback sacks, tipped passes, and turnovers. It was the 'whatever could go wrong, did go wrong at first,' which is not necessarily a bad thing in the confines of training camp, joint practices, and scrimmages. It does provide an unschedule scenario in which the team must calm down and regroup, which is ultimately what happened in this session.

Rams HC Sean McVay was not pleased with his team's offensive performance, but he did not seem overly rattled or aggravated by his team's less-than-stellar debut:

You can check out the Rams post-practice press conference held by QB Matthew Stafford and HC Sean McVay in the video that I have embedded below:

Even as Coach McVay had stressed 'work' plenty of times, he did state that the defense had a pretty good showing on the day.

At the 8:10 mark, Coach McVay elaborates on why he is not shaken by his team's debut in joint practices. Alluding to a bad showing in 2021 against the Las Vegas Raiders, he described how his team regrouped and put out a much better effort in the joint-practice 'rematch.' McVay is looking for constant improvement, getting better with each practice, and day.

Coach McVay admitted that teams do not game plan when facing one another in joint practices. What means is that its a low-prep, let's see what happens sort of slobberknocker. Since the Los Angeles Chargers sent out their top defensive front, and the Rams sent out at least three backup offensive linemen to pit against them, the results were predictable and not shocking.

Joe Noteboom, Zach Thomas, Steve Avila, Kevin Dotson, and Warren McClendon faced the Los Angeles Chargers first-string defensive front. They have not had a lot of time to play together yet, but will be getting a lot of emphasis in the interim until some of the Rams starters are able to suit up and join their teammates.

While the joint practice session did give the team plenty to work on afterwards, it also gave the team invaluable experience to work with to focus practices to improve the team for their next time. The LA Rams host the Dallas Cowboys in their first preseason game on August 11, 2024. In a month's time the 2024 NFL season will get underway.

Thanks for reading.