Arizona Did Not Score a Touchdown and Still Beat the Rams. Chad Ryland Kicked Six Field Goals.
The Los Angeles Rams lost 18-16 at home on Sunday to a team that never once reached the end zone. That sentence should end the argument about who the Rams are right now.
Chad Ryland kicked six field goals at SoFi Stadium and scored every Arizona point. The last one went through from 43 yards as time expired. Arizona went 0 for 5 in the red zone, scored on six of ten drives, and won anyway.
Six Kicks, Zero Touchdowns
Ryland’s day went 34, 30, 22, 38, 27 and 43. It is a career high for him. It is not an NFL record, which stands at eight, set by Rob Bironas in 2007, and no outlet has called it a Cardinals franchise mark either.
Jacoby Brissett started for Arizona and went 24 of 35 for 218 yards with no touchdowns and one interception. The Cardinals gained 338 yards, held the ball for 34:52 and converted five of 15 third downs. They also got a 21-yard Brissett completion to Jalen Brooks plus a questionable 15-yard unnecessary roughness call on Rams cornerback Josh Wallace to set up the winner.
Arizona snapped a four-game losing streak. Both of its wins this season have come at SoFi Stadium.
The Rams Beat Themselves All Afternoon
Matthew Stafford finished 25 of 33 for 222 yards and two touchdowns without an interception, which looks fine until you notice he was 18 of 26 for 137 yards before the final drive. He averaged 4.2 yards per attempt and was sacked three times.
Los Angeles got a 15-yard touchdown to Blake Corum and a late one to Colby Parkinson. The two-point try after the first one failed when Stafford was sacked and fumbled, and the Rams went for two because kicker Blake Grupe had hurt his knee making a tackle on a first-quarter kickoff return. Punter Ethan Evans kicked the extra point after the Parkinson score, the first placekick of his NFL career.
Then there was everything else. Tyler Higbee fumbled after a catch in the fourth quarter and Arizona recovered at its own 25 with 7:47 left. The Rams failed on fourth-and-1 at the Arizona 27 in the third. They turned it over on downs in the fourth after a false start turned fourth-and-3 into fourth-and-8. Four penalties, three of them costly, and no sacks or takeaways after Quentin Lake’s opening-drive interception.
McVay Knows
Sean McVay did not reach for excuses. “We won’t win a game unless we figure out how to not beat ourselves,” he said. “Just so many unforced errors, so many things that are not in alignment with what we want to do.”
He added: “We gotta be able to figure it out, and it starts with me.”
Stafford went simpler. “Football is a game of execution when you boil things down to it,” he said. “We’re just not doing that at a consistent enough basis right now.”
This Is a Season Problem
The Rams came in leading the NFL in total offense and were a preseason Super Bowl favorite. They were listed as roughly a 13-point favorite. CBS Sports called it the largest upset of the season and the largest upset loss of Stafford’s career.
Both teams are 2-4. San Francisco is 5-0 in the NFC West and Seattle sits in between. Arizona holds the head-to-head tiebreaker, which puts Los Angeles alone in last place in its own division at 0-2 in it.
Mike LaFleur, in his first year as Arizona’s head coach after three seasons as McVay’s coordinator, beat his old boss by never crossing the goal line. McVay has won 16 of 19 meetings with the Cardinals. This one is going to sit with him.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
