Los Angeles Rams must power through tough early season schedule

The Los Angeles Rams are the defending NFC Champions and have an extremely difficult early-season schedule that must be overcome to succeed in 2019.

The Los Angeles Rams won 13 games last season and had the joint-best record in the NFC alongside the New Orleans Saints. The Rams started off the year extremely hot and did not lose a game until Week 9 against the Saints.

After that loss to the Saints, the Rams looked much more human than we had all thought in the first eight weeks of the season. The Rams continued their great play for another two weeks with great close wins over the Seattle Seahawks and Kansas City Chiefs.

It was after that where the human element came into play. The mileage stacked up on the Rams, particularly Todd Gurley, and the team was embarrassed on the road in Chicago in Week 14. The week prior they looked extremely sluggish against the terrible Detroit Lions, although late scores gave the team a 14-point victory.

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The Rams then dropped a shocker to the Philadelphia Eagles at home before finishing the year with two cupcake games against the Arizona Cardinals and San Francisco 49ers.

The narrative entering the playoffs was not that the Rams were the same world beaters as we all thought at the beginning of the year because of their slow end to the season. Now, in 2019, the team is at risk of a slow start to the season.

Winning 13 games is an extremely difficult thing to do and something that the Los Angeles Rams are going to need to work very hard for in 2019, especially considering the team’s tough start to the year could produce three losses in a blink of an eye.

The Rams start the season on the road against the Carolina Panthers. That is a game that the Rams should win, but it is the classic case of the West Coast team traveling East for an afternoon game against a Panthers team that underperformed last year.

While it is a winnable game, it is not necessarily a great start to the season and is a game that the Rams could also lose.

Then the Rams go back to Los Angeles to host the New Orleans Saints and have to travel back east the following week to play the Cleveland Browns. The Browns have been a bit overhyped but do have a lot of talent and are going to be a tough team to play in Cleveland.

Just looking at the first three games, it is not completely crazy to think that the Rams could start 1-2. Los Angeles then gets relief in the Tampa Bay Buccaneers before having to go into Seattle to play the Seahawks and then hosting the new-look San Francisco 49ers with a healthy Jimmy Garoppolo.

Again, those are both winnable games for the Rams, but both are also losable as well. If we are being completely modest, we can assume the Rams will split those two games, giving the team a 3-3 record after six weeks.

That certainly does not look like the dominant team from 2018. Two winnable games against the Atlanta Falcons and Cincinnati Bengals should give the Rams a 5-3 record at their bye.

That might not seem all that bad but a sluggish 3-3 start to the season is going to have huge implications down the line. The Rams need to at least be 4-2 in the first six in order to cement themselves as a true Super Bowl contender. Because after the bye it gets harder and those three early-season losses could come back to haunt.

The Rams play the Pittsburgh Steelers on the road before hosting the Chicago Bears and Baltimore Ravens coming back from the bye. 2-1 is the best-case scenario in these games, all three are losable.

And then sandwiched between Arizona games is another matchup against the Seahawks and 49ers as well as the Dallas Cowboys. Again, three tough games that the Rams can easily lose at least one of.

Even if the team has a great second half, they likely will record two losses, leaving them with an 11-5 record on the year. However, with all of these losable games, some unlucky rolls could leave the team all the way down at 9-7, especially if Todd Gurley’s knee is as bad as it could be.

Of course, the Los Angeles Rams could just as easily fall on the best-case scenario of all of these games and finish with 12 or more wins, which should be the goal for 2019.

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In order to do so, the Los Angeles Rams must power through the tough start to their 2019 season. If the team struggles early, we might not see the same dominant team that we all loved to watch in 2018.

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