[HopHead Ram]

Although it's true that Akers is no Gurley, I would argue that the level on which Gurley played went above and beyond what was required for the scheme to work well. I am also excited to see what the 2021 offense will look like.

[aeneas1]

speaking of systems, martz once said that the gsot 3rd down plays were so great, and so many, that they decided to start running them on 1st down, even second down, which proved to be highly successful....

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The genesis of the Rams’ aggressive strategy came when Martz was coaching quarterbacks for the Washington Redskins a year earlier. As ESPN analyst Ron Jaworski tells the story in his book “The Games That Changed The Game,” Martz realized that his pass-heavy third-down play packages were too effective to be confined to such a narrow situation.5 “Since we both love these plays so much,” Martz asked head coach Norv Turner, “why can’t we run them whenever we want? Why wait till third down?”

“So what happened was that we decided to run these third-and-long plays regardless of down and distance or field position,” Martz told Jaworski. “To us it simply didn’t matter anymore. This kept defenses guessing — they couldn’t zero in on our tendencies, personnel packages, or formations, because they’d always have to be ready for the big pass.”

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/re ... w-on-turf/

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you have to wonder if goff's fortunes would have turned out differently if mcvay had done the same, run a lot of his 3rd down plays on 1st and 2nd downs, i.e. throw from the shotgun a bunch on early downs, which the rams have done almost exclusively on 3rd downs, instead of from under center in order to establish play-action... goff's rankings:

3rd down drop-backs (pass attempts + sacks) converted into 1st downs:

2017 - 5th
2018 - 7th
2019 - 16th
2020 - 2nd
2017-2020 - 3rd

also, fwiw, red zone qb rating rankings -

2017 - 7th
2018 - 14th
2019 - 3rd
2020 - 9th
2017-2020 - 3rd

[Hacksaw]

MM must have had a lot of those automatic 3rd down plays to use them on first a second downs too.

Jared Scapegoat?
Who knew the new helmet horn was our first clue?