With less than three months until the Rams open the season within the somewhat-less-than-friendly confines of Lincoln Financial Field in Philly on September 4th, I find it only fitting to not only announce, but allude to, the K Series: a week-by-week breakdown of the Rams and their opponents.
(Author's note: Some of you may remember a truncated series that appeared last year. Blame the Iraqi insurgency. No, seriously, blame them. I would have finished the series if the Al-Askari Mosque hadn't been re-bombed last year. Thanks for that one.)
This year's 16-part series will take each game, chop it up, and spit it out with relevant editorial and statistical analysis...courtesy of VanRam. I'll mostly be typing bad jokes about the Green Bay secondary's hairstyles.
The series is coming. You can read it here. You can control the series and the discussions that follow. I just have to write it.
More after the fold.
"The experience you gain, whether it's positive or negative, gives you peace of mind, knowing that you've been there before," (Linehan) said. "It couldn't have been a whole heck of a lot worse. It's only going to get better."
That quote comes from a June 12th St. Louis Post-Dispatch story (here) and pretty much sums up the early approach to this season. We won't suffer the same level of injuries to dedicated starters. We won't have as many breaks not go our way. We won't have Jessica Simpson stories running local coverage. (Is that a bad thing? Tough to say.)
All that being said, as we approach week 1 vs. the Eagles, the coverage is going to continue to focus on one singular fact: we won 3 games last year and that number is close to 0. Way, way too close. The only way to get past this is to win games early. It's not just about the numbers, it's mental and this quote from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on June 17th (here) sums up the core of that mentality.
The NFL produces great turnaround stories almost every year. The Rams staged one of them in 1999. That team attacked opponents from both sides of the ball. That team gathered momentum and developed swagger.
Can this team do the same? It’s a long shot, for sure -- but the more we talk about how bad this team is, the more it will want to prove the experts wrong.
It's going to take wins. I'm going to look at how the Rams can stack them up. Come along with me. It should be interesting.