What a horrible 60 minutes of football for the defending Super Bowl Champions. The LA Rams, playing in front of their home crowd, laid the biggest egg as they turned the football over 3 times to lose 31-10 to the Buffalo Bills in the NFL season opener.
That game was the biggest comeback to reality for the Rams and their fans (all ten of them, as you’ll see later on). All offseason long, I’ve seen media pundits talk about how this Rams team will repeat as Super Bowl Champions, or at the very least, they’ll be competing for the Super Bowl again.
And maybe they still can, but not if they play like they did last night.
Essentially, everything that could have gone wrong for the Rams, went wrong. Starting with the opening possession of the game, Josh Allen led the Bills down the field, completely fooled Jalen Ramsay on a fake-hand off in the red zone, and lobbed a pass to a wide-open Gabe Davis for the first touchdown of the game and the NFL season.
And the Bills never looked back, especially this Bills defense. They picked off Matt Stafford THREE TIMES, with the first two interceptions leading directly to points scored by Buffalo, and sacked the Rams quarterback six times.
Von Miller, the former Ram, lead the way for this outstanding Bills defense by getting 2.0 sacks and 4.0 tackles against the Rams’ new offensive tackles.
Looking back, the Rams really should have kept Miller and paid him his desired 6-year, $120M deal.
Even though he’s 33 years old now, the man is still one of the most dominate defensive players in the NFL today. Sure, the Rams might not have been able to sign Bobby Wagner, who had a good game for himself with 7.0 tackles and a sack, if they kept Miller.
But I think keeping the Super Bowl winning D-Line of Von Miller, Aaron Donald, and Leonard Floyd would have been better than bringing in Wagner.
Nevertheless, the true star of this game was Josh Allen.
There’s no doubt taht he’s going to be one of the frontrunners for the MVP award this season as he completely destroyed the Super Bowl winning defense with his arm and legs.
He threw for 297 yards, 2 TDs, 2 INTs (one was not his fault), completed 26/31 (84%) of his throws, and ran for 56 yards and another TD. Those are insane numbers to put up against any team in this league, let alone the defending Super Bowl champions.
His best throw of night came in the 4th quarter, right after Stafford threw his second interception.
The Bills only had a 24-10 led early in the quarter, with more than enough time on the clock for the Rams to mount a comeback, when Allen took the snap. He rolled out of the pocket to his right as the pocket collapsed around him, then unleashed a trademark cannon throw to a wide-open Steffon Diggs (who had just beaten Jalen Ramsey to the goal line).
Diggs hauled in the pass as he was falling backwards and rolled into the endzone to seal the Bills victory. What was even better than that throw was Diggs taunting Ramsey after he caught the pass.
It was hilarious to see Ramsey have to swallow his pride and ego as Diggs and his celebrating teammates danced and taunted around the Rams CB. A little humility (especially forced) for Ramsey is always pleasant to watch.
This win shows that this Bills team is going to be Super Bowl contenders this year, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they won it all after this performance. They are very dangerous.
Anyway, as for the Rams, this was the worst possible way to start off their Super Bowl defense. They were just simply “hungover” from the pre-match celebrations, festivities, and banner raising ceremony as they looked unready to play a tough, gritty Bills team all night long.
Stafford threw his usual 2-3 interceptions a game yesterday, though could only back that up with one TD to Cooper Kupp (who played pretty well, considering the score) to tie the game at 10-10 going into halftime. So, the Rams weren’t awful the whole game.
But Stafford and the Rams offense was then shutout in the second half, so there is that fact.
Still, LA’s defense was actually pretty good, when they didn’t have to defend a shortened field. They managed to pick off Allen (though, one was solely down to the Bills receiver being outmuscled for the ball) twice and sacked him on another two occasions.
But that was never going to be enough when their own quarterback was bent on giving the Bills every chance to score with turnover after turnover on every possession.
What also didn’t help was that the entire crowd was full of Buffalo fans. Stafford and the Rams offense had to use a silent count in their OWN STADIUM!
I mean, come on, LA fans, are you guys really that plastic that you won’t even show up for the opening night game of your defending Super Bowl champion team? And people wonder why I say LA is one of the worst sports cities (unless your team is called the Lakers or Dodgers).
In spite of the Rams horrible season opener, this game really doesn’t mean anything…as long as they can recover from it. Many people were predicting that the Bills were going to win this game anyway. As long as the Rams beat their NFC West rivals and the teams that are “inferior” to them, they’ll make the playoffs.
However, if they can’t, then this team might be in for a very long season.
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