Was it acceptable for Jalen Ramsey to throw Taylor Rapp under the bus?

After the Rams’ Week 16 loss to the 49ers, cornerback Jalen Ramsey specified who was responsible for a coverage bust. Was that appropriate?

With 58 seconds left in the Saturday night game between the 49ers and Rams, and the game tied at 31, San Francisco quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo heaved a pass to receiver Emmanuel Sanders for a 46-yard gain that took the ball from the 49ers’ 31-yard line to the Rams’ 23. Two plays later, Robbie Gould booted a 33-yard field goal that gave his team a 34-31 win, set the 49ers up nicely for the postseason with a 12-3 record, and eliminated the Rams — the defending NFC champions — from the 2019 playoffs.

It was the second third-and-16 San Francisco converted on the drive — earlier, Garoppolo had hit receiver Kendrick Bourne for an 18-yard gain in a similarly sticky situation.

“I felt like we were [getting] pressure,” Rams defensive tackle Aaron Donald said after the game. We were there but he [Garoppolo] was making some good throws. We were about to get him, if we had a second longer. He made two good passes to help his team to win.”

As it turns out, Rams cornerback Jalen Ramsey was entirely willing to recall what happened.

“It wasn’t me and Eric — he played the other side. It was [safety Taylor] Rapp,” Ramsey said, when asked by ESPN reporter Lindsey Thiry what he and safety Eric Weddle saw on the Sanders play. “We were in a form of 2-Man [coverage]. We had an adjustment check to it because [the 49ers were in a] condensed split, I played my technique, trusting that he was going to be over the top… and he wasn’t. That’s what happened.”

Rapp was the Rams’ second-round pick in 2019 out of Washington. He had seen his snaps increase over the last month due to injuries in the secondary (most specifically, John Johnson III’s shoulder injury), and it’s clear that in a 2-Man responsibility, this was not the right technique. 2-Man is basically a Cover-2 safety look with man coverage underneath, and safeties must be where they’re supposed to be so that the cornerbacks can play man coverage confidently. There is also the question of how closely Ramsey should have covered Sanders through the route if 2-Man was the coverage. If you want to, you can assign all kinds of responsibilities to coverage meltdowns.

Rapp made a mistake, but was Ramsey right to call him out publicly? One could say that, given the specificity of the question, Ramsey had no choice but to point out that it wasn’t Weddle who was the problem. One might also say that this was a form of “tough love” in which Ramsey is making it clear that such coverage busts are not to be tolerated.

Ramsey is a great cornerback, and he’s a tough competitor. That competitive edge has worked both ways for him throughout his career. And while he is a fine player, he’s also not perfect — going into Saturday’s game, he’d given up 26 catches on 35 targets for 324 yards, and an opponent passer rating of 102.6 in his eight games with the Rams this season. Ramsey started his 2019 season with the Jaguars before an October trade, and in the first week of the 2019 season, he gave up two touchdown passes against the Chiefs. One can also imagine that Ramsey would not have been overly pleased if one of his teammates had given a blow-by-blow recitation of Ramsey’s coverage issues in the locker room right after the game.

Donald’s conclusion — we were close to getting Garoppolo, but he made good throws — seems like the way to go in cases like this. Ramsey wasn’t wrong in his analysis of the play, of course, but there are many different ways to bring that truth to the forefront.