The Rams

[SFW]

Hoarse kept it simple here but he is right, they just need to execute. If the Chargers execute as they can tomorrow they will win the game. I look at it this way, if both teams play their "A" game then the Chargers will win. The Rams are probably a better team than their W-L record indicates and are good enough to beat the Chargers if the Chargers don't play a good game. The Rams are no push over team and I don't think any SD fan takes sees them as a push over team.

A couple key advantages for SD....1) the game is in SD, 2) the team knows it is fighting for its playoff life, and 3) the return of a fresh Mathews, Ingram, Attaochu and Te'o has added life to the team when they desperately needed it.

[Yubaking]

Hoarse kept it simple here but he is right, they just need to execute. If the Chargers execute as they can tomorrow they will win the game. I look at it this way, if both teams play their "A" game then the Chargers will win. The Rams are probably a better team than their W-L record indicates and are good enough to beat the Chargers if the Chargers don't play a good game. The Rams are no push over team and I don't think any SD fan takes sees them as a push over team.

A couple key advantages for SD....1) the game is in SD, 2) the team knows it is fighting for its playoff life, and 3) the return of a fresh Mathews, Ingram, Attaochu and Te'o has added life to the team when they desperately needed it.

I agree with this. I do not consider the Rams pushovers at all just like I did not consider the Raiders pushovers. Just like you said, the game is in SD and we are the better team and are fighting for our playoff lives, so if both teams play a good game, we win. If both teams play a bad game, we win. But if we play a bad game and St. Louis plays a good game, we could lose.

That said, I still think the most likely outcome is a 2 TD win for us, perhaps with us scoring late to put the game away.

[thelightningwill]

If we lose, people will say we shouldn't have taken a good team like the Rams lightly. If we win, people will say we were lucky we were playing a loser.
Either way, we need to block or stop calling long-developing pass plays. Stick with the quick stuff. And, if the quick stuff isn't open, Rivers needs to throw the ball away long before he gets hit. Then we need to rely on Scifres and the defense.

[QSmokey]

If you want an informed idea of what people on this board might be thinking, pretty much ignore anything Yubaking and QSmokey say and you'll be on safe ground.

This is true. The small difference - and I mean no disrespect to Yuba who, by all accounts, is a decent fellow - is that I REALLY don't know shit about football, and just love to come in here and mix things up with my fellow Bolt fans (most of whom are tired of my schtick and want to see me die).

[QSmokey]

Here's someone else to respond to.

I think the Chargers will win. (But then, I tend to think they can win every week, so I'm seen as a bit of a Pollyanna.)

LOL! "Think they will will every week" = "A bit of"

Yeah, as in the Vice President of the Pollyanna Club.

[Rams24/7]

Do a search for Yubaking. Or, if you'd rather not use this site's crappy search engine: Yubaking's opinions, although recently very weirdly not so out of whack, are not usually representative of board opinion. He tends to take some very questionable positions based on misunderstanding statistics and then writes novel-length posts detailing how our opinions are whack, his are fact, and obviously any moron can see his point (usually along the lines of something like "size is the most important attribute in a football player," "yards per carry is the most important statistic in the history of mankind," "John Jenkins would have been a better draft pick than Keenan Allen," "Shaun Phillips would have made the 2013 Chargers a Super Bowl team," and so on). I'm sure the popcorn comment was more directed at the fact that Yubaking was jumping into the fray with you more than anything you could have said, but the fact that you responded with equally long posts just adds to the amusement. A lot of us, me included, haven't bothered to read the posts, but I do grin a bit when I see another lengthy response in that discussion.

If you want an informed idea of what people on this board might be thinking, pretty much ignore anything Yubaking and QSmokey say and you'll be on safe ground.

Yeah, I've found that out now. I guess responding to chapters with chapters isn't the best way to combat his posts, but I wanted to address how he was misinterpreting multiple aspects of the Rams. I realize now that I'm not going to convince anything, so there's no need to respond with chapters.

I do get the sense that most people on this board are pretty objective and have reasonable opinions. This is probably why I didn't have any extensive discussions with anyone other than Yuba

[Rams24/7]

1. Hill makes fewer mistakes than Davis. Great. He also makes fewer positive plays. That's why both QBs end up having a virtually identical QB rating. I think you failed to get my point--Hill is a career backup that isn't a significant improvement over Davis. The Rams offense still sucks. Hill scored one TD against DEN on a 63 yard pass play even after being given the ball twice near midfield on Manning INTs. Hill led ZERO long, sustained TD drives versus DEN that were not aided by a single big play. Yeah, he rocks--woot, woot!

Over the course of his career, he's protected the football much better (42 TD/24 INT) than Davis. That's the big difference. Davis choked away games we had in our grasp w/late TOs. Frankly I think we can win games with him if he plays similarly to the way he did last week. He doesn't need to carry the O. The emergence of Mason is going to be huge down the stretch.

2. The Rams defense is emerging. They may be getting better, but they had nowhere to go but up. Your focus on their points yielded in the arbitrarily chosen last three games (I guess you didn't want to count that 34 against KC 4 games ago to make the Rams number look better) fails to take into consideration the mistakes that their recent opponents made (Kaepernick fumble at the goal line as the 49ers were about to win the game when they had a FG in the bag to get the game to OT) or other reasons why more points were not scored (like the Cardinals scoring on defense twice so their offense couldn't have the ball--yeah, great Rams defense there; the Broncos repeatedly eschewing FG attempts). If you don't think that a defense that yields lots of short pass completions does not have a matchup issue with a team that completes lots of short passes with one of the league's most accurate passers, that's your prerogative no matter how ill-conceived such a notion may be. Also, I have pointed out that we have played 6 top 10 sack teams and 8 top 10 run defenses in terms of yards per carry--the points you have emphasized--and we have beaten many of them, especially the ones with weaker offenses.

I picked the past 3 games because we've been consistent for the most part across the board on D. TO me that signals we've turned a corner past meltdowns like the KC game. In the SF game we did sack Kaep 8 times, so its not like we played bad D. Even if they scored on the goal line that's still only 17 points. Yest the Cards did have the 2 defensive TDs late in that game, but we did enter the 4th with a 14-10 lead. We had played great on D all day.

It is laughable that you think the Rams defense is better than those top ranked defenses.

I don't think I ever said that. I've simply been saying that we've vastly improved within the past 3 weeks.

Honestly, the criticism of the Chargers win over the Raiders, a divisional opponent, is also pretty funny since we held them to a season low 6 points.

Again you're misrepresenting my words by taking them out of context. You said:

They caught a flier at home against the Broncos when the Broncos were without half of their main receiving weapons, which left them exposed because they are not a good running team. Throw in a couple of picks by Manning and the upset was ready to happen. They also beat the 49ers when they self destructed and held on against the Seahawks after jumping out to a big 21-6 lead at the half in a game that featured a gimmick punt return TD and a fake punt.

To which I responded:

If I were to go by the same logic, I could say well the Chargers barely squeaked by a 0-10 Raiders team twice and blew out two bottom feeding teams in NYJ and Jax at home. But I won't use that logic.

Its hypocritical for you to downplay the Rams close wins over 3 of last years 4 championship game teams (SEA, SF, DEN) and then expect me to give the Chargers credit for beating the Raiders because they're "better than their record suggests."
__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ ____________________________

I've had enough of this back and forth with you, but I wanted to address these last few quotes because you're putting words in my mouth and misrepresenting what I have typed. May the better performing team win on Sunday.

[Yubaking]

Yeah, I've found that out now. I guess responding to chapters with chapters isn't the best way to combat his posts, but I wanted to address how he was misinterpreting multiple aspects of the Rams. I realize now that I'm not going to convince anything, so there's no need to respond with chapters.

I do get the sense that most people on this board are pretty objective and have reasonable opinions. This is probably why I didn't have any extensive discussions with anyone other than Yuba

Most of the posters here do not take the time to respond to posts such as your 17 paragraph post which addressed two of my (comparatively shorter) posts because they do not like to deal with longer posts. Unlike many on this forum, I have no issue with dealing with longer posts such as yours, so I responded to your posts, but it takes some length to respond to various points in a 17 paragraph post, which made my responses fairly long (even by my well earned reputation as a lengthy poster).

The thing that I take issue with is your suggestion that I am not following your points. I understand what you are saying perfectly. I just disagree with some points and believe that other points you have made are of no moment. Nowhere is this more the case than with your emphasis of the Rams run defense over the last couple of games. I begin with the notion that we do not run the ball well because we are bad at it most of the time. Mathews will help us a little, but the problem is more with the OL than it is with the RBs. In fact, Oliver has been a nice find for us as an UDFA with our other RB injuries. So, the Rams may stop our running attack. That makes them like just about every other team
we have played.

And the other thing that I have not bothered to mention that I might point out is that while the Rams very well may have defended the run better in their last two games, those games were against the #32 and #27 teams in yards per carry. And the difference between us and DEN is that we will not only have 10 carries even if we struggle to run the ball. Reich (our OC) is annoyingly way too stubborn with the run to leave it at that. I actually think that that may tend to help the Rams.

I think if Reich calls short passes on 2 first downs out of three and runs on some second downs in passing situations, the offense should be fine against the Rams. What he needs to avoid is running too much on first downs and too much in known running situations until the team is running to run out the clock when we have a big lead. I agree with you that the Rams are likely to limit the effectiveness of the running game so the Chargers have to make hay on cross up runs when the pass rush is coming. Reich needs to avoid being too stubborn with the running game.

The thing about the Oakland game was that not only did Rivers uncharacteristically miss some throws, but even with that, we would have sustained our drives if the offense did not also commit two key holding penalties and an offensive pass interference penalty to kill three different drives that the defense did not stop without help from the Chargers and which negated positive plays for us (including one that would have given us a first and goal). Add in Novak's first miss in 33 FGAs and the fact that we chose to punt instead of going for it on 4th and less than 1 yard to go in Raiders territory on another drive because the Raiders were doing nothing against our defense, and it becomes pretty clear that that was a game we could have and should have easily won by a 3 TD margin give or take. As best as I can recall, at no time in the second half did the Raiders have the ball in Chargers territory with a chance to tie the game.

I think if the Rams are expecting that type of offensive execution again by the Chargers, their hopes are likely to be dashed. The Chargers are way too good on offense to keep playing like they did last week.

[QSmokey]

I think Yuba has found his Soul Mate.

[Yubaking]

Over the course of his career, he's protected the football much better (42 TD/24 INT) than Davis. That's the big difference. Davis choked away games we had in our grasp w/late TOs. Frankly I think we can win games with him if he plays similarly to the way he did last week. He doesn't need to carry the O. The emergence of Mason is going to be huge down the stretch.



I picked the past 3 games because we've been consistent for the most part across the board on D. TO me that signals we've turned a corner past meltdowns like the KC game. In the SF game we did sack Kaep 8 times, so its not like we played bad D. Even if they scored on the goal line that's still only 17 points. Yest the Cards did have the 2 defensive TDs late in that game, but we did enter the 4th with a 14-10 lead. We had played great on D all day.



I don't think I ever said that. I've simply been saying that we've vastly improved within the past 3 weeks.






Again you're misrepresenting my words by taking them out of context. You said:



To which I responded:



Its hypocritical for you to downplay the Rams close wins over 3 of last years 4 championship game teams (SEA, SF, DEN) and then expect me to give the Chargers credit for beating the Raiders because they're "better than their record suggests."
__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ ____________________________

I've had enough of this back and forth with you, but I wanted to address these last few quotes because you're putting words in my mouth and misrepresenting what I have typed. May the better performing team win on Sunday.

Again, you are missing the point about the Rams QBs. Hill does make fewer mistakes, but they have the virtually the same QB rating. Why? It is because Davis makes more positive plays as well as more mistakes than Hill. If you want to be excited about starting a QB with a mid 80s career QB rating, go right ahead. I am a Chargers fan and we are used to having elite QBs that are/were highly rated in their time, so Hill does nothing for me as a starter. He is a pretty good backup, though. I do not think the Rams can win consistently with Hill at this point. Neither their offense nor their defense is good enough for the team to catch fire with a "game manager" type QB, especially their offense.

Regarding the 8 sacks against SF, that represents over 42% of your team's season total--in one game, a clear outlier. In the Rams other games, they have 3 sacks twice, 2 sacks twice, one sack once and no sacks 4 times. That actually helps me to see that the Rams pass rush is really not as good as I thought it was.

Regarding the Arizona game and the assertions about the defense's "great play all day", the Rams did not play great on defense all day. They actually yielded 17 points, avoided it being 20 because the Cardinals missed a FGA and avoided it being even more when Cardinals defenders scored TDs on turnovers instead of just leaving the Cardinals with the ball in a scoring position. I am sure lots of defenses can claim to be great if their own offense keeps the other offense off the field by letting them score multiple times directly off of turnovers such that the offense the defense is supposed to be trying to stop never sees the field.

No, you did not specifically state that the Rams defense was better than the top defenses that we played, but you seem to think the Rams will shut down the Chargers when these other teams failed to do so for the most part. The implication is that the Rams defense, then, is better than those other defenses, which I do not believe to be the case at all.

As for the Raiders, I said the criticism about us barely beating the Raiders is pretty funny. I didn't say it was your criticism, but there has been criticism about that win and you did mention that kind of criticism, so I discussed our performance against the Raiders in response to you raising the concept.

As for your suggestion that it represents the same kind of logic, I do not believe that is accurate. I think most of us on this forum understand that we are supposed to clobber bad teams and we did that against JAC and NYJ, but did not do that against OAK. I think the reasons for that are that OAK is more talented than NYJ or JAC and a divisional rival, that our defense was too injured and without too many bodies to stop OAK in the first game, and that our offense was not sharp coming off of our bye week in the second game.

In none of those games did our opponent play beneath its standards, which is what SF did and DEN did for sure when they made some really bad mistakes. But that is usually what happens when an upset takes place--the better team makes some blunders from which they cannot recover. To me, that's what happened in the Rams games versus SF and DEN. Against ARI, the Rams kept the game close well into the 4th quarter, but ultimately the better team pulled away and won by two TDs. None of that is similar to our games versus underdogs. I think the Rams win against SEA was earned, but it did feature some quirky plays, which matters because those tend not to be capable of being duplicated again in the same season.

My comments are in no way hypocritical. I think our wins against the Raiders are undervalued because the Raiders are better than their record suggests. I think they are absolutely better than JAC and NYJ and almost as good as BUF. As I have said, if the Rams game versus Oakland were in Oakland, I would be very tempted to pick Oakland to win that game because I think the Raiders would prove that point to Rams fans in a very ugly way for you guys. But I think in St. Louis the Rams will probably get the job done.

Those beliefs are in no way contradictory to my other opinion that some of the Rams wins are overvalued due to the team not being as good as the media thinks they are (SEA, for example) and/or the opponent doing at least as much to lose the game as the Rams did to win it (SF and DEN). And that cuts against our win against SEA as well. They are a good team, but they are not a great team, especially on the road. They are entirely beatable and we could have beaten by more than the 9 points by which we actually won.

Finally, I do not see how you, without being disingenuous, can ignore the unforced errors by other teams in your arbitrary selection of the three games for the period in which the Rams, according to you, turned the corner on defense. All of those games featured quirky circumstances in which a crapload of offensive points ended up being left on the field in a way that had nothing to do with defensive performance. The 49ers left a TD on the field at the end of the game and missed a long FG too in the first half. The Cardinals missed a FG and their offense was not on the field due to multiple defensive TDs. The Broncos lost two of their receivers in the game and passed on multiple FGAs. These were by no means bad defensive games by the Rams, but I think it is pretty clear that they caught a lot of breaks in these games that kept their points yielded on defense down.

[Stinky Wizzleteats+]

If the game is anything like this thread, it will be a long close low scoring game with a ton of penalties...

[Rams24/7]

If the game is anything like this thread, it will be a long close low scoring game with a ton of penalties...

Haha. I'm just ready to let our teams settle the dispute.