Late in the season, half of the NFL gets labeled as the “team nobody wants to face in the playoffs.” It’s a tired and lazy label, and it’s already been applied to several teams this season. But the Los Angeles Rams might actually be the team nobody wants to face in the playoffs.
For one thing, the expected dominance from the elite hasn’t been there this season. The San Francisco 49ers looked unstoppable, but they had already lost three games before imploding against the Baltimore Ravens on Christmas night and now sit in a three-way tie atop the NFC at 11-4.
One way of thinking about whether a team is dangerous in the playoffs is asking what happens if their best players are firing on all cylinders on a given day.
The Rams can cause a lot of problems to opposing teams if their best players fire, and they’ve been firing pretty consistently all year.
Matthew Stafford leads the league in big-time throw rate (6.4%), and he has the lowest turnover-worthy play rate in the league at the same time (1.6%). Earlier in the year, the box-score numbers weren’t reflecting that play, but he has now thrown multiple touchdowns in five consecutive games, with just one interception opposite 14 touchdowns.
We already know the kind of damage Cooper Kupp can do when healthy, but he has a very real foil in rookie Puka Nacua.
Nothing about Nacua’s pre-draft measurables suggested he was a diamond in the rough, but player tracking data — that the Rams have access to and put a lot of stock in — highlighted Nacua as a 99th-percentile athlete. It doesn’t always jump off the tape, but you consistently see him outrunning players, and he now ranks seventh in the league with 2.56 yards per route run this season, just ahead of A.J. Brown.
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