Think back to the Los Angeles Rams’ 2016 NFL season. Prize draft pick Jared Goff was a mess. When he finally got a chance to play, in the final seven games of the season, the rookie quarterback looked clueless and panicked, conditions that rule out competence. And, yes, he was 0-7 as a starter. The […]

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Let’s make this formal. I apologize for suggesting that Jared Goff was a bust. (This is Day 2 of the Empathy Tour; pretty sure I will get over it.) I never directly wrote, on this blog, these words: “Goff is a bust.” But I did suggest here and here and here that he could be, […]

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Whoa, there, Rams fans. Your team is not going to sprint to the Super Bowl any time soon. That 7-2 start? Nice. But when the Rams stopped playing cupcakes and ran into another quality team, the Minnesota Vikings … well, it did not go well. To the tune of 24-7, with the “highest-scoring-team-in-the-league” Rams on […]

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OK, everyone who predicted the 2017 Los Angeles Rams would win six of their first eight games, with Jared Goff in the upper third of the league in passing yards (2,030, ninth) and quarterback rating (97.9, ninth) … please stand up. All of you standing … thanks to owning up to your outrageous lies. We […]

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So, the NFL. The pain begins anew, tomorrow, with the New England Patriots and the not annually concussed Tom Brady playing the Kansas City Chiefs. The initial round of maiming for the 2017 iteration of a dead-end sport will be in prime time. Which prompts me to think about the two teams in greater Los […]

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Within days of the San Diego Chargers announcing they will move to Los Angeles and play their games there next fall … someone has put forward the sort of free-thinking, out-of-the-box idea that might have saved the club for San Diego. Granted, this $1 billion plan is built around a hypothetical Major League Soccer team, […]

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Sean McVay, is it? All of 30 years old, is Sean? And this is the Rams’ latest great idea? Hiring the youngest head coach in the Super Bowl era? Will it be seen, in a few years from now, as a club blunder right up there with spending six draft picks for Jared Goff or […]

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Ah, memories. This collection seeped into my consciousness when prompted by the discovery that the Oakland Raiders are playing at Houston on Sunday … and remembering I had covered an NFL game in Houston. At the Astrodome. While covering the Los Angeles Rams. In 1978. A long, long time ago. And I was pretty sure […]

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How hard is it on an NFL team to pick up and move? I was thinking about this after the Rams, having moved from St. Louis earlier this year, stunk it up in their second debut first as NFL representatives of “Los Angeles”. I had a memory of the Rams and Raiders having some difficult […]

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For the first time since 1994, the Rams played a game tonight with “Los Angeles” as part of their name. It went badly. Very badly. Final, from Santa Clara: San Francisco 49ers 28, Rams 0. And the scary thing is … the 49ers weren’t any good either, as some NFL writers noted. The Rams gained […]

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