Sean McVay has adjusted after his Super Bowl letdown. When will Jared Goff?

Sean McVay's offense has taken a step back, but he's not the reason why

The Rams are 3-0 so it doesn’t make sense to say the Rams are in the midst of a Super Bowl hangover. But … the Rams are kind of in the midst of a Super Bowl hangover. At least Sean McVay’s offense seems to be after another underwhelming performance on Sunday night in Cleveland.

The numbers are down from 2018 across the board. The Rams rank 9th in offensive DVOA after finishing second a year ago. They rank 16th in total offense after ranking second last season. They’ve dropped all the way down to 23rd in yards per drive. Their scoring average has dropped by nearly six points and the drop would be even steeper if not for the league’s second-best starting field position.

The simple explanation for the drop-off is that McVay has been figured out. That Bill Belichick exposed his schematic weaknesses with a brilliant Super Bowl gameplan that teams have copied at the start of this season.

That’s partly true. All of the Rams’ 2019 opponents have borrowed elements of New England’s plan for the Rams. The Panthers and Browns both based out of a quarters shell and asked one safety to poach the intermediate crossing routes the Rams love to hit off of play-action.

While Carolina and Cleveland changed a few key phrases when copying Belichick’s work, the Saints pretty much ripped it off word for word. They played that defensive front with six defenders on the line of scrimmage and used the same coverage New England — which came from Detroit — did to stop the play-action passes.

A lot has been made of defenses using that 6-1 front against the Rams and selling out to stop the run. NBC’s Cris Collinsworth brought it up multiple times during the Super Bowl broadcast. But here’s the thing: Even with teams loading up the defensive line to stop the run, the Rams’ running game has still been very good early on in the season. Los Angeles ranked first in rushing DVOA coming into Sunday’s night game. The running game is averaging 0.037 Expected Points Added per attempt, which ranks eight in the league.

McVay has figured out how to defeat those 6-1 fronts just fine. He’s done so by dialing back his usage of outside zone running plays — which have been the foundation of his offense — and throwing in more pitches and quick-hitting perimeter runs that help to negate all of those bodies crammed up between the tackles.

McVay has also ironed out some of the other issues the Patriots exploited in Super Bowl 53. He’s started to vary his personnel usage and deployment. When the Panthers took a page out of New England’s and Chicago’s books and matched the Rams’ favored 11 personnel sets with base defense, McVay went to an empty formation and created mismatches for Cooper Kupp against linebackers and safeties until the Panthers finally came out of it.

Against the Saints, who asked nickel back P.J. Williams to play the same role Patrick Chung did for New England as an auxiliary linebacker, McVay simply ran at the undersized defensive back for good gains.

The Rams ran at or outside the right tackle eight times for 53 yards against the Saints, producing an average EPA of 0.13 on those attempts.

McVay has also had answers for the coverage the Pats and Lions used to slow down his play-action passing game. Jared Goff just hasn’t been able to execute, and that — not any failure on McVay’s part — has been the main culprit in the Rams’ uneven start to the season.

McVay has provided Goff with opportunities early on in 2019; his quarterback, as he did in Super Bowl 53, has just squandered them. He currently ranks second-to-last among quarterbacks who have started all of their team’s games in NFL.com’s Completion Percentage Above Expectation metric. Only Mitchell Trubisky has been worse. His QBR is currently sitting at 37.8 (out of 100). Blake Bortles, Goff’s backup, had a QBR of 41.7 in 2018, and he was so bad the Jaguars opted to eat $16.5 million in dead money rather than having him play another down in Jacksonville. Goff’s Pro Football Focus grade is at 66.2 through three weeks, which puts him behind Joe Flacco and only 0.3 points ahead of Eli Manning.

The Rams’ running game has been productive. McVay’s play-calls have given him open targets to throw to. L.A.’s receivers — Brandin Cooks, Cooper Kupp and Robert Woods — are playing well and all rank in the top-40 of PFF’s grades. Goff has been THE issue.

Quarterback play hasn’t been the only issue, however. The Rams’ offensive line has played poorly. New guys LG Joespeh Noteboom and C Brian Allen have been particularly bad. There are plays where Noteboom just doesn’t block anyone.

Roger Saffold, last year’s starting left guard who signed for big money in Tennessee, has been greatly missed, and the strength of the Rams offensive line — the left side — is now a major weakness. That’s made things even harder on McVay, who has had to figure out how to scheme up a good running game against loaded run boxes with a bad line and a quarterback incapable of scaring opponents out of those fronts.

That the Rams offense has hovered around league average early in the 2019 season is a testament — not an indictment — of McVay’s genius. The same cannot be said for his $134 million quarterback.