Los Angeles Rams 10, Denver Broncos 6: Home, defended

Stop me if you’ve heard it before.

Limp offense. Robust defense.

Welcome to the Los Angeles Rams’ 2019 preseason!

The Rams held home field against the Denver Broncos tonight winning 10-6 in yet another offensively curtailed performance. In fact, the 10 points matched their preseason high after scoring 10 against the Dallas Cowboys in Week 2 and just 3 against the Oakland Raiders in Week 1.

Suffice to say, the offense in the preseason has been offensive.

And it starts with the offensive line.

Again, the Rams’ backups on the line struggled to open much room for RB Darrell Henderson and the depth thereafter. Again, they struggled to keep pockets structured, though the Rams’ offensive braintrust scheduled the playcalling well to give the quarterbacks opportunities to operate shorter offensive schemes save for QB Brandon Allen’s beautiful deep pass to WR Michael/Mike/Mickey/Mork Thomas.

It’s tough to evaluate the relevant depth on offense because of that. And it’s tough to really invest much concern into the line depth knowing they’re only going to be called upon (a) in the case of injuries which we need to again sacrifice our babies to avoid and (b) will only, should we fail to sacrifice our babies (and I don’t see that happening), occur in ones and twos. There’s a 0 (.0012%) chance that the offensive line that started this game will play together at any point in the 2019 regular season.

It is what it is. Welcome to the preseason.

The defense though, again, was stellar! Plenty of depth to praise here, and I’ll leave it to yall in the comments and throughout this week.

I think the bottom line is that we’re seeing a combination of benched offensive talent and truncated offensive playcalling making it tough to really get much out of the offense in these games. We’ve played three preseason games and the total points scored in both teams in all three is just 57. That’s 19 points total scored per game. It’s at this point I remind you (and you are hereby ordered to not bring up the Super Bowl) that the 2018 Rams scored 32.9 points per game in the regular season last year.

It is what it is. We’re treated to deal with these glorified practices which Rams Head Coach Sean McVay rightfully uses them as such and forced to grapple with the bias of overreacting to the performances of the players therein while acknowledging that those performances matter much to their adherence to the 53-man roster but little to the performance of the roster once the regular season rolls around.

You don’t need to sort this out.

The Rams don’t either.

The regular season starts in two weeks.

Eyes on the prize.