Sean McVay said after Sunday’s loss to the Philadelphia Eagles that Matthew Stafford injured his ribs early in the game on a play where he scrambled and was tackled by Quinyon Mitchell.
“He got his rib early. He got dinged up. But he is a warrior. He’s so tough,” McVay said.
It turns out, Stafford had been playing with four cracked ribs since Week 15. When he got hit against the Eagles on Sunday, he aggravated the injury, but he had been dealing with it for over a month, his wife Kelly Stafford revealed on her podcast.
The injury originally occurred when he got hit against the 49ers in the Rams’ win over San Francisco on a cold and rainy night at Levi’s Stadium, but he never came out of the game.
Stafford said after the loss to the Eagles that he had been playing through a rib injury “to a varying degree for some time,” but he didn’t disclose that the ailment was four cracked ribs.
“Yeah, it’s an NFL football season,” he said. “I’ve been dealing with those kinds of things to a varying degree for some time, but just kind of got them going again, but was able to kind of calm it down. I didn’t feel like it was much of a factor. It felt like I threw the ball pretty good.”
You would never know Stafford was playing through such a significant injury because he was still winning games for the Rams, even throwing for 324 yards and two touchdowns in the loss to the Eagles on Sunday. It was his highest yardage total of the season, coming in snowy conditions in Philadelphia, no less.
Stafford was never listed on the injury report, which suggests he didn’t miss any reps in practice because of his cracked ribs. He also didn’t miss a single snap all season except in Week 18 when the Rams rested their starters.
This news makes it even more obvious why McVay held out Stafford and other starters in the finale, avoiding any risk of further injury to his quarterback in a fairly meaningless game.
