The Rams' Basketball-Style Super Bowl Win

In Game 6 of the 1998 NBA Finals, Michael Jordan came as close as we will ever see to one person handedly winning a team sports championship. That team was a relic of the group that two years earlier had set the NBA record for wins in a season, a broken down group playing against a superior Jazz team. Scottie Pippen played only 25 minutes running around on a bad back that would soon require surgery, there more for his presence than impact. Dennis Rodman was close to the finish line. Steve Kerr was about to enter a career as a bench-warmer. Simply put, the only way the Bulls would win that game would be for Michael Jordan to take bad shots. Any semblance of an actual NBA offense would not be good enough to beat the Jazz, and they had to put all their eggs in the Game 6 basket- there is no way they could have turned around with all their injuries for a Game 7. The only way they could win was for their best player to continuously take what would normally be considered bad shots- but they had no other option. I like to call these games “figure it out” games. These are games where the coaching staff acknowledges that their work is useless by that point, and they basically say to their best player “everything is screwed up go figure it out.” While Jordan’s is the greatest example in NBA History, the “figure it out” game can often happen in basketball- other examples include Kevin Durant in Games 5 and 7 last year against the Bucks, Kawhi Leonard in Game 7 two years ago against the Sixers, and LeBron James in Game 5 of the 2007 Eastern Conference Finals against the Pistons. Football had never seen a “figure it out” game before on the highest stage. Until now.

In the truest sense of the word, Sunday night's Super Bowl was not a “figure it out” game. The Rams did have more than one person who was given all the responsibility down the stretch. They had four. But considering the fact that football has around four times as many players play in a big game as basketball and it is a more team-oriented game, I feel comfortable calling Sunday Night a “figure it out” game. Coming into the fourth-quarter game, the Rams had broken down, and were frankly a shell of the group that was arguably the best team in football over the first half of the season. Their “stars and scrubs'' strategy had been relegated to “a couple stars and a lot of scrubs” due to various injuries. On both sides of the ball, the Rams strategies had broken down to a point which they simply needed to make plays.

The talk of the week was the matchup between the Bengals’ offensive line and the Rams’ defensive line, and Cincy knew that they would have to overcome that deficiency in order to win the game. They came out to minimize that deficiency with a quick-throw strategy that deviated from what they did most of the year. The Bengals’ don’t have much of a schematically innovative passing game, so most of their strategy has revolved around Burrow holding the ball as long as possible before throwing it up to his playmakers. But that would simply not work against the Rams so Burrow tied the fastest release time in the first-half of a game this year. The Bengals weren’t blocking well- their pass-rush win rate was below 25% at halftime (league average is 60%)- they were just throwing it faster than the Rams could get there. The Rams were getting out-schemed, and they simply needed their best players to make plays. More specifically, they needed Aaron Donald and Von Miller to figure it out.

Throughout the second-half, Miller and Donald were essentially single-handedly making game-wrecking plays to keep the Rams in the game. Following a Stafford pick, Aaron Donald had a third-down sack to keep the Bengals to a field goal, and more importantly to keep the game at one score. This set the tone for a half in which every single Bengals drive except one would essentially end on a sack or stop from either Miller or Donald (the other was a crucial Tyler Boyd third-down drop). As a whole, the Rams defense was not great last night. Jalen Ramsey struggled in coverage, and the Bengals were at times able to successfully run the ball. And of course after the Rams went ahead, Aaron Donald finished things off with two of the most important individual defensive plays in football history, single handedly stopping what had looked like a promising Bengals drive. Time after time Miller or Donald made a play to end everything, and give their offense yet another shot to win the game. This individual defensive play is what truly makes this a “figure it out” game. In games where a team needs their defense to come through, it usually winds up being a collective unit making plays. This was two guys stopping an opposing offense by themselves for an entire half.

Coming into the last drive, the Rams were averaging barely over 1 yard per carry on 12 first-down runs, which is essentially the equivalent of having 12 series of downs where you run a QB sneak on first down. For whatever reason, McVay continued insisting on running the ball on first and second down, keeping the ball out of the hands of their Quarterback who they gave up two picks for and their Receiver who may have just had the best pass-catching season we have ever seen.Offensively, the Rams were stuck in a rut. This was not a normally struggling running game- this was ineptitude the likes of which were unprecedented at this volume. As for the rest of their offense, it was hard to look for other schematic areas to find answers. Robert Woods and Odell Beckham Jr. were both out with injuries, and Van Jefferson was running slot fade after slot fade to little success. Ben Skowronek- God bless his heart- was essentially useless, catching only two of his five targets and making a poor play on what was admittedly a poorly thrown pass, leading to a Bengals interception in the second-half. The only way the Rams were going to win was for Seac McVay to put the ball in Matthew Stafford’s hands and force feed Cooper Kupp- something he realized just in the nick of time.

As the Rams were embarking on that last drive, many older Bengals fans were surely getting flashbacks to another unstoppable Quarterback-Receiver combination connecting time and time again to beat Cincy on a Super Bowl-winning touchdown drive. 33 years ago, Joe Montana and Jerry Rice combined for maybe the greatest drive in the history of the game, with a level of precision not seen before or since. That drive was the (at the time) greatest Quarterback of all time connecting with the greatest Wide Receiver of all time to execute the offense of the greatest Offensive coach of all time (Bill Walsh) to absolute perfection. It was the highest form of football art ever achieved- it was the sport’s Mona Lisa, or it’s Sistine Chapel. This? It felt more like that time my best friend and I ran out of “S” stickers for our eighth grade science fair poster, so we put two “C” stickers on top of each other.

There was little that was schematically pleasing about the Rams' game-winning drive. They were essentially just telling Cooper Kupp to get open, and then telling Stafford to find a way to get it to him. They even did two things during the drive that I normally hate- a lateral run on fourth and one and a goal line fade- that made sense in the moment because they were ways to just let Kupp make a play. Even the now legendary no-look throw was a play designed for Hopkins, or whichever healthy player would normally be running that route, but Stafford simply had to keep feeding Kupp. Stafford said after the game that they had never even practiced a fade with Kupp, which makes sense because he is a smaller receiver who shouldn’t be wasted running an inefficient route. But without Odell on the field, running the fade to Kupp would just put him in a position to try to make a play- which should have been the only goal for any play call by that point (I had said before the play that they should use him like Deebo and put him in the backfield for a power run). This was the opposite of whatever it is called when the announcers say “that game was won in the coaches meeting on Tuesday when they came up with the game plan.” This was two players with unbelievable individual chemistry making plays on their own. The Rams told Matthew Stafford and Cooper Kupp to figure it out. And they did.

With the game now in the rearview mirror, the bigger question becomes how replicable this is. We’ve never seen this type of game in football before, not only because of the team-oriented nature of the game, but because of how important coaching is in football. It is rare to win a Super Bowl in spite of your coach, and when it has happened it has been with dominant rosters, such as the 1995 Cowboys. McVay is not a bad coach- but he coached a really bad game, and had his players bail him out. The other thing to consider was the opponent. By essentially any statistical measure the Bengals were one of the worst Super Bowl participants in NFL history, and the Rams stars were enough to just barely beat them. If the Chiefs or Bills- the two real best teams in the AFC- had made the Super Bowl, the Rams would not have one with that performance on Sunday. They would have either had to have a greater McVay coaching performance or a greater team effort, either of which would make this game ineligible to be a “figure it out” game. The Rams built a team full of stars that were supposed to shine on the field while being elevated by one of the best coaches in the league. They won a Super Bowl by what was left of those stars bailing out the coach and their other teammates who did not show up.

As for McVay, I do not have much of an issue with him being a Super Bowl-winning coach despite how poorly he coached in the game itself. He is a Super Bowl-worthy coach, who is one of the best offensive minds the game has ever seen. He also spent four years bailing out his Quarterback, so he was due to get bailed out. While he does struggle with game management, he has never had a worse playcalling performance than he did on Sunday.. And that is the biggest reason why I think that this game will be a one-of-one in the history of the league. If McVay calls a good game, which we would normally expect, the Rams win by two touchdowns. If they play a better opponent, they lose. The numbers of factors needed to even create a situation for a “figure it out game” in football make both being in this scenario and it actually happening again very unlikely.

The Rams can very well win another Super Bowl, both because of the cesspool that is the NFC, and because they are a better team than they displayed Sunday, both from a coaching and roster standpoint. But that won’t matter to the legacy of this team, because legacy is about what you accomplished. And the legacy of this team will be one unlike any other in football history- a team that was truly carried to a Super Bowl victory by just a few guys figuring it out.