Seemingly every week, the Los Angeles Rams have lost another player to injury. The offensive line has been a revolving door of new starters, the receiving corps looks vastly different than it did at the start of the year and just about every position on defense has endured an injury or two.
What’s been so shocking about the Rams’ never-ending injuries is that they were one of the healthiest teams in the NFL during Sean McVay’s first five seasons. Sure, they suffered their share of injuries, but nothing like this season.
McVay is running out of ways to describe the Rams’ injuries woes this year, and he also hasn’t uncovered a reason behind them. He and head trainer Reggie Scott have talked about what might be causing the number of injuries Los Angeles has endured, but they haven’t been able to pinpoint it.
McVay has a few theories, however, from the simple nature of it being a contact sport to the shortened offseason the Rams had after winning the Super Bowl.
“Reggie and I have talked about that. I know he’s done a lot of work behind the scenes for when we get through the season,” McVay said. “In a lot of instances, just based on the nature of the amount of new players that we have to our systems, it’s restricted our ability to even just go walk through where you need to say, ‘Alright, we need to get some actual repetition so that they can feel like it, rather than the first time they’re going is in a full speed setting in a game.’ So, those are things that are kind of reserved for after the season, even though there is consistent ongoing dialogue, but there are a lot of things that could contribute to it but sometimes you chalk it up to unfortunate things happen, but whether it be the types of injuries. The main thing that you want to look into is the soft tissue and the accumulation of yardage and how that relates to some of the injuries that that we’ve suffered and even just the quick turnaround with the amount of corrective surgeries that we had after the Super Bowl and then how quickly you’re starting up training camp. So all of those are things that we’ve kind of touched on briefly, but to say that we’ve really dove into it the way that you need to, to really be able to attach some solution-oriented things as far as how you move forward, we haven’t gotten to that yet.”
For McVay, soft-tissue injuries are the biggest concern because the team wants to prevent those as much as possible – and you’re able to avoid those more than you can a sprained ankle or a broken bone.
“I think it’s more about some of the contact issues. Those are the things that consistently come up that sometimes you can’t necessarily attribute to anything other than a part of the game, but there’s been so many. We’d have to talk about all of them individually, but the main ones that we want to try to look at are the soft tissues that have occurred a lot more frequently than what has been our history and how we can do everything in our power to try to prevent those. Some of the injuries that occur just based on the contact or what occurs within the game, I’m not sure that you can do a whole lot other than hopefully avoid those types of collisions during the course of the game or in practice.”
In all likelihood, the Rams just had bad injury luck this year. No one could have predicted that Matthew Stafford, Aaron Donald, Cooper Kupp, Allen Robinson, Brian Allen, Joe Noteboom, David Edwards and Troy Hill would all miss time, among many other players.
Hopefully with a more normal offseason that starts in early January, the Rams can get healthy and come back in better shape for 2023.
