Each week, Touchdown Wire editor Doug Farrar will review one play that, due to an embarrassing use of scheme or personnel or situational awareness or a lethal combination of all three, should be removed from the playbook, set ablaze and never seen again. This week, let’s take a look at how one desperate coach — Sean McVay of the Rams — went rogue as his team seemed unable to remember how to score offensive touchdowns.
It’s safe to say that, one season after he took his Los Angeles Rams to the Super Bowl and was officially declared the greatest offensive play-designer in the NFL, head coach Sean McVay is searching desperately for answers. His offense has dropped from second in Football Outsiders’ opponent-adjusted efficiency metrics in 2018 to 21st in 2019. Behind a patchwork offensive line and let down by a suddenly unspectacular rushing attack, quarterback Jared Goff has — depending on your opinion of him — either regressed severely or simply found his true level as a mediocre quarterback who needs everything going right around him to succeed.
Goff’s touchdown percentage has dropped from 5.7% to 3.1%. His adjusted net yards per pass attempt (ANY/A) has gone from 7.69 to 6.22. And like his entire offense, Goff’s DVOA rating has plummeted — from fifth in 2018 to 24th in 2019. Per Pro Football Focus, Goff led the NFL with 16 touchdown passes off play-action in 2018; this year, through nine games in 2018, he has just one.
Perhaps the most embarrassing distillation of McVay’s offense this season came last Sunday when the Rams lost to the Steelers, 17-12. The Rams scored their points on a Dante Fowler fumble return for a touchdown, a sack of Pittsburgh quarterback Mason Rudolph for a safety, and a Greg Zuerlein field goal. Goff, who completed 22 of 41 passes for 243 yards and two interceptions, didn’t get near the end zone. On the day, the Rams’ offensive drives ended thusly: punt, punt, punt, punt, punt, fumble, punt, missed field goal, interception, interception, field goal, punt, punt, downs, interception.
Wait — that’s three interceptions, you may be asking? I thought Goff only threw two? Well, we’re about to get to that. The weirdest part of this total offensive failure came with 8:33 left in the third quarter. The Steelers were up 14-7, and Goff had thrown his first interception of the day to end the Rams’ previous drive. Now, McVay had third-and-2 to deal with after Todd Gurley’s 9-yard run on first down, and Goff’s second-down pass to tight end Tyler Higbee that lost a yard. At this point, the Rams had gone 13 consecutive possessions without an offensive touchdown.
So, McVay thought outside the box. WAY outside the box. Goff was hit hard by cornerback Mike Hilton on a blitz, causing him to throw quickly on the second-down play, and he left the field with what appeared to be a minor injury. In Goff’s stead entered backup Blake Bortles, who had taken only three snaps all season.
Then this happened.
Bortles botched the snap — he looked surprised by it, in fact — and ran to his right after what appeared to be a completely busted play for a 1-yard gain. One could assume this was the result of a bad quarterback coming in cold and trying to execute an offense he doesn’t yet understand. But Bortles was signed to a one-year contract in March after five up-and-down seasons with the Jaguars; you’d think he’d get the zone-read packages enough to avoid junk like this.
After the game, McVay revealed that this was all part of the plan.
“Unfortunately, for us, that was one of the first times in the game, and it didn’t happen until the third quarter, that we really had a third-and-short situation come up,” McVay said. “There was a couple of things that we had potentially discussed as far as using Blake Bortles, his skill set — he’s a quarterback, but he also has some running threat. That was a play and kind of a package, if you will, that we had worked.”
In other words, they had practiced a play in which Jared Goff came off the field and Blake Bortles came into the game as a misbegotten option quarterback.
While you’re still marinating in that particular genius, it behooves us to explain what happened next. On fourth-and-1, McVay called something that had worked in the past — a fake-punt pass from Johnny Hekker. Before this play, Hekker had completed 11 of 20 passes for 179 yards and a touchdown in his seven-year career. He had never thrown an interception.
Until Sunday. This wasn’t even a fake punt per se — McVay basically threw Hekker out there as his third quarterback on fourth down. The Rams started off in a punt formation, but then motioned to a 3-by-2 empty set. Perhaps in a show of solidarity with Goff, Hekker looked a lot like Goff has all season when under pressure.
Not that this was all Hekker’s fault — since the Rams had special teams personnel on the field, there were no actual offensive linemen in his offensive line, and no top-tier receivers among his targets. Hekker may have been McVay’s most effective quarterback at that point in the game, so why not give him half a chance with offensive personnel?
“There was a certain look that we had, and it wasn’t quite exactly what we were looking for on the fake punt,” McVay explained after the game. “Johnny Hekker does a great job of recognizing those. Some of those things that you end up being able to activate in a game, if it doesn’t always work out the way we want, when you’ve got the right kind of guys like you do in Johnny Hekker and [special teams coach] John Fassel, we learn from it the right way. We use it as a chance to move forward in a positive manner when those situations present themselves in the future.”
Let’s hope so, for McVay’s sake. The Rams are now 5-4, losing ground to the 49ers and Seahawks in the NFL’s most top-heavy division, and if McVay is not able to wrangle some of last season’s brilliance, it will very quickly be a lost season for the Rams.
Touchdown Wire editor Doug Farrar has also covered football for Yahoo! Sports, Sports Illustrated, Bleacher Report, the Washington Post, and Football Outsiders. His first book, “The Genius of Desperation,” a schematic history of professional football, was published by Triumph Books in 2018 and won the Professional Football Researchers Association’s Nelson Ross Award for “Outstanding recent achievement in pro football research and historiography.”