WOODLAND HILLS – Yogi Berra would’ve loved these ain’t-over-till-it’s-over Rams, these professional, perennial optimists who just keep on ticking, keep on keeping on, keep pulling us back in.
That it’s Week 15 and they’re 7-6, over .500 for the first time all season and looking at a 36% chance of getting into the playoffs entering Thursday’s game against the San Francisco 49ers (6-7) feels both like a minor miracle and business as usual.
Because these are the Rams, and though they’d surely rather not live on the brink, they’re there so much they probably own property.
How it started: 0-2. The Rams were immediately so banged up they were running out of IR/designated-for-return spots. They’d just been tattooed 41-10 in Arizona. They had a date with their nemeses, the San Francisco 49ers, up next. And, yes, that was 2022’s frustrating 5-12 Super Bowl hangover staring back at them from the abyss.
It looked like it was going to be a long season.
Blessedly so.
Because long, long ago, when the Dodgers’ World Series run was still revving and Shohei Ohtani and Mookie Betts were going yard in back-to-back ninth-inning at-bats on Sept. 22, down the freeway the Rams hit “reset” when they erased a 14-point second-half deficit against the Niners in a 27-24 victory that reminded us all: Oh yeah, the Rams aren’t going to stop showing up for work.
“Even if we were 0-3, what are you going to do? Shut the season down? Just stop playing?” Rams right tackle Rob Havenstein asked reporters after that game. “Stop getting better, stop developing as a football team? That was the mission from [Coach] Sean [McVay], was, ‘Hey, no matter how the cards fall, our job is to play better football week after week after week after week.’”
“It’s a journey…” quarterback Matthew Stafford said almost three months later, before Tuesday’s practice. “You lace up in August, or July for training camp, and you don’t really realize how much of the journey it is. And what you trotted out there Day One on a training camp day and how different that can look throughout the season. You have to find ways to try and win, be tough and resilient.”
Stubborn, too. Single-minded. A most obstinate crew of problem-solvers.
Because two weeks after that rousing comeback against San Francisco, the second-youngest roster in the league had no more wins to speak of. At 1-4, the Rams were off to the worst five-game start since McVay took over in 2017. Aaron Donald was still retired, unable to come to their aid. It seemed prudent to start thinking about Plan B, to consider the future, to start weighing whether to punt … or, what the heck, to reel off three consecutive victories.
Don’t they ever stop believing? No, they don’t, Cooper Kupp said.
“It’s just part of the fabric of this building and of the guys that are on this team. Guys that have come in here are expected to mesh into that or are expected to take hold of the beliefs and the standards that we have here,” the star receiver said.
“There is something to be said about a team that just believes that they’re going to find a way to win games. Some teams are on the other end of that. They just believe they’re going to find a way to lose it.
“You see it over and over again that there is something there when it comes to football of just believing that you’re going to find a way to win and making it happen. I think that’s something in this building that we’ve taken that mindset and it’s going to continue to be what we’re about.”
It probably gets easier to find your way through when you’ve done it so many times.
When you buried 2022’s disappointment and rallied from a 3-6 start and get back to the playoffs, like they did a season ago …
When you’ve bounced back this year from a deflating home losses to Miami and Philadelphia, would-be backbreakers for a weaker-willed contingent, by turning around and taking care of business on the road against New England and New Orleans …
When you’ve somehow survived Josh Allen’s six touchdowns in an epic shootout with the Super Bowl-contending Buffalo Bills last week, succeeding in not only giving yourselves the biggest win of the season, but a real crack at the postseason too …
When, now, three of your final four games are against divisional opponents, meaning you’ll control your own destiny – which, in the Rams’ minds, is nothing new.
“That’s all year,” Kupp said. “That’s been the mindset every single week. That is the case until you don’t perform and that’s taken from you.”
In other words, the journey ain’t over until it’s really and truly over – and the Rams might just be getting started.