[phoenixrising]

they also did a great job of shooting gaps upfield when the rams zone stretched rather than flow with the oline or the implied direction of the play... this is something a few other teams had a lot of success with against the rams, and something that makes the rams oline look horrible.

I noticed that. The Rams play with fairly wide spreads on the OL, and NE exploited that. They consistently attacked the gaps, got the OL reacting, and then countered with stunts and the OL wasn't athletic enough to change direction. It seems to me that the wide gaps can be used to advantage when angle blocking, i.e. zone, but NE was just too quick. Also, for whatever reason the Rams have gone away from primarily zone blocking. Blocking straight up, the gaps became a liability.