Rams News: Top 3 takeaways from LA’s NFC Championship win over SF

Los Angeles Rams News and Links for 1/31/22

By Blane Dydasco@BlaneDydasco Jan 31, 2022, 8:05am CST

Los Angeles Rams defeat the San Francisco 49ers 20-17 during a NFC championship football game at SoFi Stadium.

The Los Angeles Rams are Super Bowl bound. After defeating the San Francisco 49ers 20-17, the Rams will play the Cincinnati Bengals in Super Bowl 56 at SoFi Stadium on February 13th. Here are the top three takeaways from Sunday’s NFC Championship Game.

Matthew Stafford is ice cold

He did it again. With the season on the line and the game down to a final drive Stafford delivered. Down by ten points to start the fourth quarter, Stafford executed two drives to tie the game by hitting Cooper Kupp for a second touchdown and setting up Matt Gay for the field goal to tie. Then, with just under five minutes left in the game, he drove the offense down the field again with a big play to Kupp to set up the winning field goal. Stafford was excellent under pressure and made money throws when it was needed. Now he’s headed to his first Super Bowl of his 13 year career.

Cooper Kupp impacted the game more than Deebo Samuel

One big question coming into this game was which teams key player was going to have the bigger impact. While Samuel did impact the game, particularly with a 44 yard catch and run for a touchdown, Kupp was clearly the more dangerous weapon. Kupp had 11 catches for 142 yards and two touchdowns. Samuel had 98 total yards from scrimmage rushing and receiving and one touchdown.

Rams defense shut down the run

The key to the game for the Rams defense was to shut down the run game. The 49ers leading rusher was Samuel who had 26 yards rushing, Eli Mitchel had 20 yards on 11 carries. For Mitchel that's a 1.8 yard average. Aaron Donald, Greg Gaines, A’Shawn Robinson, and the edges, Leonard Floyd and Von Miller were strong up front and secondary players like Eric Weddle came up to support.

And now for today’s links: