Rams looking to post 4 straight winning seasons for first time since 1986

The last time the Los Angeles Rams had posted four winning seasons in a row, John Robinson was the head coach, the quarterback position was manned by Jim Everett, Steve Dils, and Steve Bartkowski, Eric Dickerson accounted for roughly half of the offense, and St. Louis wasn’t even a consideration for nearly another decade.

It was 1986, the Rams went 10-6 and lost 19-7 in the wild card game to Washington.

After going 9-7, 10-6, and 11-5 in the previous three seasons, LA went 10-6 but then slipped to 6-9 in the strike-shortened 1987 campaign. They went 10-6 and 11-5 in the following two years but haven’t enjoyed a seven-year run like 1983-1989 since. Though the Rams never went to the Super Bowl in that span, they made two NFC Championship games and were a consistently solid team in the eighties.

Though they’ve won a Super Bowl in the last 30 years, the Rams couldn’t quite put together another “run” like that or what they had done in the fifties and seventies.

LA/St. Louis only posted losing records from 1990 to 1998, then became one of the most dominant teams in NFL history in 1999. They went 10-6 and 14-2 in the following two years and like today were setup for four straight winning seasons, but the “loss” of Kurt Warner in 2002 dropped the scoring offense from first (as they had been in ‘99, ‘00’ and ‘01) to 13th and the Rams went 7-9.

Following a 12-4 season with Marc Bulger in 2003, the team posted zero winning seasons from 2004 to 2016 and at best went 8-8 in both 2004 and 2006.

Those fortunes changed in 2017 with the transition from Jeff Fisher to Sean McVay and the Rams have gone 11-5, 13-3, and 9-7 in the last three years. Though the team lost four more games in 2019 than they had the year before as the NFC Champions, it should have been expected for them to not repeat 13-3 as that is very hard to do. The difference to me then is more like, “the Rams lost one or two more games than expected.”

It may not be that hard then for them to get back to 10-6 or 11-5. The biggest obstacles in their way could simply be the San Francisco 49ers, Seattle Seahawks, and Arizona Cardinals, all of whom are expecting winning records and playoff trips in 2020, should they be expecting a season at all.

The Rams posted a winning a record every year from 1973 to 1980, their longest such streak, and the only time they won fewer than 10 games (1979) is also the only time that team went to the Super Bowl during that run.

You really don’t know what to expect. The Rams hope to receive another winning season though.