Good morning, everybody. Today is Monday, July 10th. Thank you for making me a part of your morning and this episode of NFL First Thoughts will talk about the Los Angeles Rams.

And I'm tempted to make this a 26 second podcast episode and just tell you that the Rams very, very likely to be the worst team in football in 2023.

Just end it right there because I think it's the truth.

But we'll go with a little more complex take that gives you a little more substance in this one.

So I think the Rams not from a regular season win total perspective, but from a week to week betting perspective could be a very enticing overhead on a weekly basis.

Let's talk about the two reasons why. First and foremost, I think the defense for the Rams in 2023 is going to be 31st or 32nd when all is said and done at the end of the season outside of Aaron Donald.

There is nobody noteworthy on this defense. I'm not going to rattle off names from the depth chart.

But I'm going to tell you it'll be a very big surprise if this defense ranks any higher than 26th in 2023.

So what that is going to do is lead to the Rams consistently trailing in games. I don't think it is a stretch to say north of 63 64% of offensive snaps for the Rams in 2023.

We'll be with them facing a deficit. Where this gets very interesting is Sean McVay throughout his entire career has essentially been three different coaches in one depending on the scoreboard.

We know what he is when the game is close and competitive and what we call a neutral game state within a touchdown is a very high pass rate.

He plays right around an average pace snap to snap mainly because of all the pre snap motion he uses and he runs almost exclusively three wide receiver sets when he has a lead of a touchdown or more his pass rate drops nearly 20%.

He runs a ton on early downs becomes very predictable and he slows his team down to one of the slowest rate snap to snap in the NFL.

When he is trailing by a touchdown or more especially so in the second half one of the highest pass rates in the NFL one of the quickest paces snap to snap and one of the most aggressive downfield play callers that there is he is three different coaches in one.

And so this is the worst defense he's ever had by a mile going into a season.

If this holds true and there's not some wild increase in talent and hidden depth that we don't see here which I think is very unlikely.

We're probably going to see McVay playing from a deficit more than any other time in his career as a play collar.

That is going to mean we're going to see a very different style of play and play calling from the Rams on a more consistent basis than we've ever seen because he's been the head coach in the play collar of a lot of really good football.

This is going to be the worst and that's really going to force those tendencies that we've seen from him when trailing where I think that gets very interesting is Matthew Stafford's elbow is reported to be night and day from what it was a year ago.

When he was healthy last season just 8% of his passes were considered deep throws that was the lowest rate of his entire career.

If you remember back to what he was with the Lions it was a guy that could consistently pushed a ball downfield especially when trailing and accumulate a ton of garbage time points.

Now we know he's a very different quarterback than what he was in Detroit that Stafford is never coming back the injury and limitations in his elbow are going to prevent him from being that guy ever again.

...