Very rarely does a team win consistently without performing well on third down. So much has been made about the Los Angeles Rams’ red zone struggles, but for as bad as they’ve been inside the 20-yard line, they’ve been even worse on third down.
They’ve had trouble converting on third down all year but now 11 games into the season, nothing is getting better in that area. The Rams have a major third-down problem and it’s weighing down the entire offense.
The last four weeks have been especially bad. After going 3-for-13 in Week 9 against the Seahawks, the Rams went 3-for-12 on third down against the Dolphins, 2-for-8 against the Patriots and 0-for-8 on Sunday night against the Eagles.
it’s only the second time in the Sean McVay era that the Rams have failed to convert a single third down with at least eight attempts in a single game. The other time was in 2019 against the 49ers when they went 0-for-9. Unsurprisingly, they lost that game by double-digits, too: 20-7.
Including Sunday night, the Rams have now converted on just five of their last 28 third-down attempts, a rate of 17.86%. The next-closest team is a tie between the Browns and Cowboys at 25%. The Rams are that much worse than everyone else on third down in their last three games.
On the year, the Rams are moving the chains just 31.7% of the time, the second-worst rate in the NFL. Last year, they ranked seventh at 41.7%. That 10% gap may not seem like much, but that’s the difference in sustaining one or two more drives per game. It could be the difference between settling for a field goal and scoring a touchdown – or in the Rams’ case, missing a makeable field goal instead of scoring a touchdown.
McVay is growing tired of the third-down issues, emphasizing the need for the offense to be better.
“Execution,” he said when asked about what’s causing the third-down struggles. “I’ll go back and I’ll look at it. We were good on the fourth downs. There are a lot of different reasons. It wasn’t one thing in particular, but that has obviously been a very – that hasn’t been successful enough. It’s been an area that we have to be better at, no doubt about it.”
Part of it is getting in third-and-manageable. On Sunday night, they didn’t do that nearly enough. Of their eight third-down plays, only three were third-and-8 or shorter. They faced third-and-9, third-and-13, third-and-16 (bailed out by defensive pass interference), third-and-13, third-and-11 and third-and-9 (offensive pass interference). Those are not high-percentage plays, and it’s because they aren’t executing on second down. Too often, they take sacks or penalties that set the offense back on second down, leading to third-and-long.
And even when the Rams did have third-and-short opportunities, they couldn’t move the chains. They threw the ball on all three plays where they had third-and-4 or less, opting not to give the ball to Kyren Williams or Blake Corum.
That doesn’t bode well when the Rams rank last in the NFL in third- and fourth-down EPA per drop-back. In other words, they have the worst passing offense on third and fourth down. That was before Sunday’s drubbing at the hand of the Eagles, too.
So much has been made about the Rams’ inefficiency in the red zone, and that’s a problem, too. But they’re not going to reach the red zone if they can’t move the chains on third down and keep the offense on the field.
