Sean McVay has been a head coach in the NFL for three and a half seasons, and he’s been an assistant in some capacity for a decade. He’s seen a lot of defenses in that time, some of which he’s conquered and others that have gotten the best of him.
On Sunday against the Miami Dolphins, McVay appeared as though he had never seen a defensive game plan like the one Brian Flores put together. Michael Brockers, for one, had never witnessed a defense attack a quarterback as relentlessly as Miami did.
The Rams had no answer for the Dolphins’ zero-coverage blitzes, which helped force four turnovers by Jared Goff. Brockers could only watch from the sideline, but after the game, his reaction to Flores’ game plan was candid and enlightening.
“They just brought as many as they could. They brought more than we can block,” he said. “That’s how I felt. I felt like they had 11 guys on the line of scrimmage and had all our WRs one-on-one and once you snapped the ball, everybody was coming. To be honest with you, I’ve never seen that before, that many times. That was zero-pressure, man-on-man, he has to get the ball out fast because there’s an unblocked player. It was a lot. It was a little crazy to look at, because I was like, ‘Man, they’re going to keep zeroing us like that?’ I have a lot of confidence in Jared and in Coach to get those things fixed and if they see it again, I best believe they’ll go ahead and chop it up, for sure.”
Brockers doesn’t play offense and he has no say in what the Rams do on that side of the ball. He can only try to stop the opposing offense, which Los Angeles did; Miami only had 145 total yards of offense and picked up eight first downs.
From a defensive perspective, he was asked what the Rams could’ve done to neutralize and counter the Dolphins’ relentless attack.
“I truly don’t know,” he said. “Maybe you run some draw plays to catch them off-guard. Maybe you run some screens, some running back screens, something. To be honest with you, I’ve never seen that before where a team just zero-pressures you every play and it was tough.”
McVay and Goff didn’t know how to counter it, either, which was the biggest problem for the Rams. The ground game was working, but Los Angeles was playing from behind and so McVay more or less abandoned the run.
There weren’t many screens or draws like Brockers suggested could have worked, which was surprising in its own right. McVay and the entire offensive staff will try to learn from this loss and bounce back after the bye, but this felt like a gut punch for a team that has seemingly lost its identity.