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Sam Shields’ Two-Year Journey Back from Concussion
- By Prime Time
- RAMS / NFL TALK
- 2 Replies
https://www.si.com/nfl/2019/01/10/sam-shields-los-angeles-rams-concussion-comeback
Sam Shields’ Two-Year Journey Back from Concussion
By Michael McKnight
The Riddell “Speed” helmet that Sam Shields prefers measures a little more than two inches thick, from its blue exterior shell to the inflated pads that touch his scalp. This membrane of polycarbonate alloy, foam and polyurethane, plus pure dumb luck, are all that stands between the 31-year-old Rams cornerback and a head injury like the one that turned his life inside out two years ago—the one that turned sprinting outdoors for a living into lying indoors every day; that changed feeling invincible all the time into feeling weak and vulnerable; and that traded pursuing his life’s passion for shopping online for opaque curtains and trying in vain to sleep.
And yet there he was, all season long, snapping his chinstrap and lining up as a gunner on the Rams’ punt team, answering the call to cover Stefon Diggs or Tyreek Hill when needed, clacking his helmet against someone else’s a few times each Sunday. With every snap that Shields plays for the Rams, he knows he’s risking the return of the uninterrupted headache he endured every day for fourteen months, whose only hint of relief came “when I was still, calm, and in the dark.”
Yet there he is.
“I haven’t seen anything like it,” says Wade Phillips, L.A.’s 71-year-old defensive coordinator. Phillips got his first NFL coaching job eleven years before Shields was born, and he can’t think of another player who returned to the sport after a 700-day hiatus caused by a hit to the head. “I mean, there’s been guys who have been out for a while, but it’s because they weren’t particularly good players. When they put the pads back on it’s a neat story. But this is a really good player we’re talking about. And he was gone for two years.”
The story of Shields’ return features a renowned medical team that didn’t know what he did for a living. Its soundtrack is the din of two conch shells being pressed to his ears in time with his pulse— the sound of Shields’ 14-month headache. It stars a protagonist who just a few months ago had “given up on football entirely,” but now finds himself in the 2019 playoffs for the NFC’s No. 2 seed.
The story begins with a hit that looked like it shouldn’t have injured anyone.
The Packers were in Jacksonville on Sept. 11, 2016, leading the Jaguars 27-23 late in the fourth quarter, when Jags running back T.J. Yeldon carried off left tackle for a two-yard gain. It’s football’s most common play—picks up one, maybe two, the broadcaster usually says.
Shields had done his duty, as he’d done hundreds of times in his six-year career, advancing from his cornerback position and throwing his shoulder into Yeldon to stop the 218-pound ballcarrier near the line. Only this time Packers D-lineman Letroy Guion had slammed into Yeldon from the other side just as Shields delivered his blow.
It wasn’t the violence of Shields’ impact with Yeldon that hurt him. It was the 320-pound wall that showed up behind Yeldon from out of nowhere. Shields’ 184-pound body—most importantly, his brain—had nowhere to go.
It happened in less than a second, the violent sloshing of Shields’ brain into the left side of his skull, then back to the right, then back to its home position. As everyone else got up from the pile, Shields remained face down on the grass for five seconds. When he rose, Morgan Burnett, Shields’ friend and teammate of six years, sensed something amiss and steered him toward the sideline for a couple of steps before Shields took over and jogged off by himself. He didn’t stumble or swerve on his way to the tunnel.
“Right afterward I was fine,” Shields said a few weeks ago, reclining in the Rams’ special teams room. “I don’t know if it was the adrenaline or what, but as soon as I got in the locker room I almost fell down. Headache. It was like a heartbeat. Constant.”
Shields hid the effect of the blaring conch shells as he greeted his parents and daughters after the win. “He seemed fine,” his dad, Sam Jr., recalls. “We even took some photos with him.”
Father and son hug after the game in Jacksonville in which Shields was knocked out.
Courtesy photo
No one knew that Shields would sit out the next 31 regular-season weekends, pursuing relief from his merciless headache instead of pursuing the game’s swiftest players.
He had done everything right on the Yeldon tackle. Hips low, shoulder first, head to the side. The randomness of the injury—that little white roulette ball hopping around the wheel and settling in the wrong spot, due not to any bad actions on Shields’ part—might have frustrated a less-experienced player. But Shields knew all about fate’s fickle hand. Six years earlier, that same hand had nudged an undrafted rookie into the starting cornerback job in Green Bay and then toward the game-clinching interception in the 2011 NFC Championship Game and a Super Bowl ring.
Shields knew about skinny windows and bad odds. He hardly had a chance to catch the grown-man passes his dad fired at him when he was a kid. Starting at age five, Shields’ dad would place him in their backyard in Sarasota, Fla., turn the boy’s back to him, walk a few paces, then slap a football and unleash a spiral at the spot where the kid’s face would be when he finished a 180-degree spin.
Call up Shields’ career highlights and look at his 19 interceptions. Each one, including the one he snagged against the Cardinals in September of this season (his first pick since 2015) was caught with his arms extended, elbows nearly locked. “My dad would throw it so hard that if I tried to catch it like this,” Shields says, cradling an invisible ball to his chest—“it would hit me in the face.”
“Pain,” Shields adds, “can be a teacher.”
Pain. In the immediate aftermath of Shields’ 2016 injury, every contraction of his heart brought a fresh wave of it to the inside of his skull. Day after day. “The Packers gave me balance tests and computer tests,” he says. “I failed them all. I couldn’t concentrate on the computer for longer than two minutes. I couldn’t balance. They kept sending me home.
“It was winter, I was cold, I wasn’t playing, I was miserable. So I was just going home and—s---, getting high. That was the only way I was gonna cope with it. I could eat better, sleep better [after smoking cannabis] … I’m not saying it’s always good. But it helped me get through some things.”
As the Wisconsin winter deepened, and the 2016 NFL season continued without him, Shields, unmarried and alone, stayed indoors in near darkness. The brightness of his iPhone screen was unbearable. His was the life of a mobster in prison: He had a sweet pad, with every amenity, but not being able to leave is still not being able to leave. So he went home to Sarasota. If he was going to be quarantined, he at least wanted to be near his girls.
“I got three baby mamas,” Shields says with none of the shame that our society expects to accompany such a statement. “After the Atlanta playoff game [January 22, 2017] that’s when they cut me. That’s when I went in the tank. I just had my family and my kids to keep me going.”
His daughters, Sammyla, 11, and Sanii and Emme, both nine, didn’t care about his decision to quit football. “They were just happy I was home,” he says. “‘Daddy’s home! Can you take me to school tomorrow?’
“I was able to do all those things that I missed. Birthday parties for my little nieces, for my mom, for my daughters, I was there for all of it. Family graduations. I loved the s--- out of it. I wasn’t even thinking about football.”
Scott Varley/Digital First Media/Torrance Daily Breeze via Getty Images
“He spent most of his time with his mom,” says Shields’ dad. “They’d go shopping together, do things together … When he was with me he had his chest out. It’s like that with dads, you know. His chest was out. ‘I’m doing good, I’m doing fine.’ ”
But at home, drawn blinds and silence remained the rule. “A lot of people don’t understand—being in the house, just mentally, I could have lost it.” Shields manages a laugh. “Seriously! That s--- is real! … I didn’t know what to do because [the headaches] wasn’t stopping. The pills weren’t working.”
Asked about his son’s lowest point, Sam Jr. pauses 30 seconds before answering. The sounds of a proud man trying not to let his emotions overtake him leaks through the phone line. “The night he asked his mom to come over,” he says.
“It was three o’clock in the morning on some night in January 2017,” Shields wrote for the Players’ Tribune earlier this season. “It felt like my brain was cramping, or like it was trying to break out of my skull or something. I was rolling around in my bed, whipping my body back and forth, trying to escape the pounding inside my head. Next thing I know, I’m curled up in the fetal position, shaking and crying.”
So he called his mom. Michelle Shields, Sam Jr.’s wife of 33 years, came over, made soup, and rode it out with him. But Shields knew that more nights like that one lay ahead.
It had been a good run. Seven years. A ring. A trip to Hawaii for the ’15 Pro Bowl. He’d earned more than $30 million. The end of his career was no tragedy. Letroy Guion beat his man and hit T.J. Yeldon at the same time Shields did, the white roulette ball stopped in the wrong little square, and now Shields was paying up on a bet he had made willingly, years earlier, when he first suited up for the Ringling Redskins Pop Warner team.
Harry How/Getty Images
But then, not long after the night his mother brought him back from the brink, he found himself on the phone with a friend in Los Angeles. “She said, ‘You need to come to UCLA, they’ve got the best neurology rehab thing going on,’ ” Shields recalls. “This was the time, in my mind, I was done. I was like, f--- football, I just wanna be with my family.”
When Shields booked his flight to L.A., he didn’t do it because of football, he says. “It was them headaches, man.” Was his brain going to pound like this forever? Would he watch his daughters grow up through eyes squinted in pain?
Dr. Christopher Giza, director of UCLA’s Steve Tisch Brain Sports program, declined to discuss Shields’ case, citing patient confidentiality, unless Shields agreed in writing to waive his right to privacy. Shields signed the documents as soon as a Rams PR staffer passed them along to him. “I want people to know what happened,” Shields says.
Freed up to talk, Dr. Giza explains that most concussion treatments “are focused on the first four weeks after the injury: monitoring symptoms, avoiding re-injury, engaging in a modest level of activity, and just letting time pass. That kind of management doesn’t tend to work when you are outside that four-week gap.”
Shields walked into UCLA 26 weeks after he tackled T.J. Yeldon. He had hardly exercised at all during that time. Which is why it’s important to note, as Giza does, that a normal adult’s response to exercise “can overlap with the symptoms of concussion. Headache, fatigue, dizziness.”
In other words, when you’re as far removed from the concussion-causing incident as Shields was, and you’ve hardly broken a sweat during those six months, you have to discern whether the discomfort you feel when exercising is related to your head injury or simple lethargy. When athletes don’t make this distinction, Giza says, “they can become unduly worried that the concussion is ‘coming back.’ We don’t want patients to sort all this out on their own. But that’s what was happening with Sam.”
The first thing Giza’s team did, after evaluating Shields and conducting introductory interviews, was put him on a stationary bike, with wires reporting his vitals. As Shields pedaled, a member of Giza’s team, which included a sports neuropsychologist and a cognitive behavioral therapist, sat next to him “and asked me a thousand questions,” Shields recalls. The questions weren’t about how Shields was feeling as much as how he felt about how he was feeling.
“They asked me, ‘Sam, what if your headaches were gone [and] what if you go out on the field again and you ding your head, would you automatically assume it was a concussion?’ ”
Another query: When your headache intensifies during exercise, does that frighten you?
Asking Shields to consider these questions about his brain had the added benefit of knocking the cobwebs out of its corners with a broom. Giza told him, “Your brain is like a muscle—you gotta work it,” Shields says. “He said by sitting in the dark, I was killing my brain. Not challenging it. Not talking to anybody. Just making it worse.”
“One of the biggest challenges that the public and media face right now [regarding concussions],” says Giza, “is kind of a microcosm of our political world. People listen to the extreme … so you hear that everybody who gets a concussion is doomed and has a risk of developing CTE or dementia.
Or the opposite side, which is the more traditional side from 20 years ago: ‘Well these injuries are just bonks on the head, they’re not really something to worry about.’ It seems like people take up their camp on either side, and then they sort of interpret the research to conform to what their pre-existing ideas are.
Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images
“In reality, the truth is in between. I often refer to concussion and traumatic brain injury as the most complex injury to the most complex organ. To think that there’s a little checklist or formula that’s going to work for everybody—it doesn’t do justice to how complicated and individualized this injury can be.”
When Shields began his treatment at UCLA, hardly anyone on Giza’s team knew what Shields used to do for a living. Giza only knew that “the patient had a history of head injuries [whose] main symptoms were intractable headaches that affected him on a daily basis.” (“We didn’t know he had chosen to go back to football until you reached out to us,” Giza told SI in November.)
Treating Shields was a novel experience. “Some athletes come in, and their thing is, ‘I need to return by this date, because this is when tryouts are,’ ” says Giza. “That isn’t the impression we got from Sam. He just wanted to get healthy.”
When Shields wasn’t at UCLA, “he was doing homework,” Giza says—riding a bike or an elliptical machine at his AirBnB, nearby. When Shields returned to the clinic, Giza increased, ever so slightly, the volume and intensity of his exercise. “Meanwhile, some of the interventions we’d made with the headaches were kicking in,” Giza says. Like taking Shields off the Tylenol he’d been popping like TicTacs since the end of the Obama administration.
Football?
“The doctors said, We don’t care about that,” Shields recalls. “They were loving the situation that they was in. Because they was learning from me. It was an enjoyment to them. We became like a family, damn near.”
Knowing when an athlete has completed his treatment, Giza says, “is very individualized.” Giza tells a quick story about a pro basketball player who went through a process similar to Shields’ and “thought he was ready,” until he went to a gymnasium for the first time and “nearly had a panic attack.”
At this point, Shields still wasn’t interested in returning to football. But then the headaches became intermittent instead of constant. A couple per week instead of one unrelenting one. He was a few weeks shy of 30. He started to think about what he could give a team, just on special teams.
He thought about the feeling in an NFL locker room, the post-practice smell of sod and sweat. The jokes, the art of playing them off when they’re aimed at you, and the way the sharks circle when vets discover a teammate with thin skin. And yes, he thought about the money.
“I can still run,” he thought. “Why not?”
Whether it was wise for Shields to drop that white pebble onto the black and red wheel again—only one man can make that call. Shields makes a strong argument that what football provides his family in terms of financial stability is worth the 14-month headache he endured, and any medical problems he might incur down the line, too.
In the middle of the 2017 NFL season, as Shields’ six-month treatment at UCLA wrapped up, he decided to consult three more experts. “I said to my homeboys, if I ask my kids if they want daddy to go back [to football] and they say yeah, I’m going back. If they say no, I’m not.”
To his surprise, his daughters screamed in delight at the mention of it. Shields didn’t ask the younger two to explain their reasons, but he probed deeper with his oldest, 11-year-old Sammyla. “She said, ‘Because I like watching you play, Daddy.’
“That’s real.”
The Rams expressed immediate interest, along with the Browns. “Since I’ve been coaching we’ve had our eye on Sam,” says head coach Sean McVay. “Our safeties coach, Ejiro Evero, coached him in Green Bay. Couldn’t say enough good things about him.”
“He was one of the best, if not the best, man-to-man players in the league a couple years ago,” says Phillips, the white-haired defensive coordinator. “Everybody knew about him.”
In the spring of ’18, the Rams invited Shields to a one-man tryout in Los Angeles. Cornerbacks coach Aubrey Pleasant, who usually likes to throw unexpected drills and demands at free agents to see how they adapt to discomfort, says he handled Shields differently. “I wanted to give Sam respect and say, Hey we’re gonna put you through some movements, see what you have, but we’re not gonna kill you.”
Shields’ cleats tapped the turf, planting and cutting on command. Footballs whistled at him. His elbows straightened and his hands stopped them cold and cradled them to his ribs.
“Man, he looked exactly like he always did!” McVay recalls with his trademark intensity. A contract was drawn up that afternoon.
Now Shields just needed to make the team.
“If you’re good at running punt [coverage], you can make all 32 teams if you want to,” Shields says. “So I went to the special teams coach [John Fassel] and I said, ‘Listen, whatever you need me to do, I’m willing to do it, I’m ready. I appreciate this opportunity.’ ”
“What he’s been doing on special teams,” says Pleasant, “to me that is the ultimate show of selflessness. For him to play in a Pro Bowl, be the best of the best, and then come back and start as our gunner, I think that says a lot.”
Re-mastering his main craft, though—covering people—“that part was tough,” Shields admits. “I was off. I’m talking about off.” Working against the Rams’ offense didn’t make things easier.
Jevone Moore/CSM/REX/Shutterstock
“I was from the NFC North, where there’s a lot of West Coast offense. Then this?” As quarterback Jared Goff ran through a training-camp script of fake jet sweeps, elaborate route combinations and sneaky pitchouts to the reigning MVP, Todd Gurley—sometimes all on the same play—Shields responded, “Oh, shit, what the hell is going on here?
“But each day I was getting better. I wasn’t getting worse.”
Shields was thrust into a more prominent role when starting corner Aqib Talib underwent ankle surgery three weeks into the season. Shields ended up playing an unexpected number of snaps at corner this year—343—which also increased his odds of taking a shot to the head. McVay and his staff kept close tabs. “You care about all these guys,” says McVay, “but with him you’re a little more sensitive. He banged his shoulder against Seattle [in Week 5], and he was down, just holding it, and our immediate reaction was, ‘Oh gosh.’ ”
Shields, who was recently named the Rams’ recipient of the Ed Block Courage award, has played in 96 NFL games in his career and made 265 tackles. How long does he want to keep doing this?
“Three years,” he says without pause. “I wrote on a piece of paper when I was in high school: 10 years in the league. That has always been my goal … I got a few Dunkin Donuts franchises with my partner, [Lions defensive lineman] Ricky Jean Francois. I’ve been putting my money in the right spots. I played in Green Bay so I haven’t spent s---,” he says with a laugh. “You can’t spend any money in Green Bay.
“I just know that around that time—10, 11 years—my kids’ kids will be good.”
His dad, when asked if there’s a moral to this story, says, “Time does heal. And I think a lot of guys that play this game—you do need to take some time off.” Then Mr. Shields gets to talking about his granddaughters again, which makes him tear up a little again, and reminds him of that scene in the backyard, 25 years ago, with his namesake.
“I remember having him run around the house. I’d be on one side of the house, and when he comes around the corner he doesn’t know the ball is coming. He’d hear my voice—I’d say, Come, and he’d come and I’d throw it—”
He claps for effect, mimicking the sound of a child’s hands ending a football’s flight just inches from his forehead. (Pain can be a teacher.)
I imagine you didn’t lob it to him either, someone says.
“No. No, I didn’t.”
Sam Shields’ Two-Year Journey Back from Concussion
By Michael McKnight
The Riddell “Speed” helmet that Sam Shields prefers measures a little more than two inches thick, from its blue exterior shell to the inflated pads that touch his scalp. This membrane of polycarbonate alloy, foam and polyurethane, plus pure dumb luck, are all that stands between the 31-year-old Rams cornerback and a head injury like the one that turned his life inside out two years ago—the one that turned sprinting outdoors for a living into lying indoors every day; that changed feeling invincible all the time into feeling weak and vulnerable; and that traded pursuing his life’s passion for shopping online for opaque curtains and trying in vain to sleep.
And yet there he was, all season long, snapping his chinstrap and lining up as a gunner on the Rams’ punt team, answering the call to cover Stefon Diggs or Tyreek Hill when needed, clacking his helmet against someone else’s a few times each Sunday. With every snap that Shields plays for the Rams, he knows he’s risking the return of the uninterrupted headache he endured every day for fourteen months, whose only hint of relief came “when I was still, calm, and in the dark.”
Yet there he is.
“I haven’t seen anything like it,” says Wade Phillips, L.A.’s 71-year-old defensive coordinator. Phillips got his first NFL coaching job eleven years before Shields was born, and he can’t think of another player who returned to the sport after a 700-day hiatus caused by a hit to the head. “I mean, there’s been guys who have been out for a while, but it’s because they weren’t particularly good players. When they put the pads back on it’s a neat story. But this is a really good player we’re talking about. And he was gone for two years.”
The story of Shields’ return features a renowned medical team that didn’t know what he did for a living. Its soundtrack is the din of two conch shells being pressed to his ears in time with his pulse— the sound of Shields’ 14-month headache. It stars a protagonist who just a few months ago had “given up on football entirely,” but now finds himself in the 2019 playoffs for the NFC’s No. 2 seed.
The story begins with a hit that looked like it shouldn’t have injured anyone.
The Packers were in Jacksonville on Sept. 11, 2016, leading the Jaguars 27-23 late in the fourth quarter, when Jags running back T.J. Yeldon carried off left tackle for a two-yard gain. It’s football’s most common play—picks up one, maybe two, the broadcaster usually says.
Shields had done his duty, as he’d done hundreds of times in his six-year career, advancing from his cornerback position and throwing his shoulder into Yeldon to stop the 218-pound ballcarrier near the line. Only this time Packers D-lineman Letroy Guion had slammed into Yeldon from the other side just as Shields delivered his blow.
It wasn’t the violence of Shields’ impact with Yeldon that hurt him. It was the 320-pound wall that showed up behind Yeldon from out of nowhere. Shields’ 184-pound body—most importantly, his brain—had nowhere to go.
It happened in less than a second, the violent sloshing of Shields’ brain into the left side of his skull, then back to the right, then back to its home position. As everyone else got up from the pile, Shields remained face down on the grass for five seconds. When he rose, Morgan Burnett, Shields’ friend and teammate of six years, sensed something amiss and steered him toward the sideline for a couple of steps before Shields took over and jogged off by himself. He didn’t stumble or swerve on his way to the tunnel.
“Right afterward I was fine,” Shields said a few weeks ago, reclining in the Rams’ special teams room. “I don’t know if it was the adrenaline or what, but as soon as I got in the locker room I almost fell down. Headache. It was like a heartbeat. Constant.”
Shields hid the effect of the blaring conch shells as he greeted his parents and daughters after the win. “He seemed fine,” his dad, Sam Jr., recalls. “We even took some photos with him.”
Father and son hug after the game in Jacksonville in which Shields was knocked out.
Courtesy photo
No one knew that Shields would sit out the next 31 regular-season weekends, pursuing relief from his merciless headache instead of pursuing the game’s swiftest players.
He had done everything right on the Yeldon tackle. Hips low, shoulder first, head to the side. The randomness of the injury—that little white roulette ball hopping around the wheel and settling in the wrong spot, due not to any bad actions on Shields’ part—might have frustrated a less-experienced player. But Shields knew all about fate’s fickle hand. Six years earlier, that same hand had nudged an undrafted rookie into the starting cornerback job in Green Bay and then toward the game-clinching interception in the 2011 NFC Championship Game and a Super Bowl ring.
Shields knew about skinny windows and bad odds. He hardly had a chance to catch the grown-man passes his dad fired at him when he was a kid. Starting at age five, Shields’ dad would place him in their backyard in Sarasota, Fla., turn the boy’s back to him, walk a few paces, then slap a football and unleash a spiral at the spot where the kid’s face would be when he finished a 180-degree spin.
Call up Shields’ career highlights and look at his 19 interceptions. Each one, including the one he snagged against the Cardinals in September of this season (his first pick since 2015) was caught with his arms extended, elbows nearly locked. “My dad would throw it so hard that if I tried to catch it like this,” Shields says, cradling an invisible ball to his chest—“it would hit me in the face.”
“Pain,” Shields adds, “can be a teacher.”
Pain. In the immediate aftermath of Shields’ 2016 injury, every contraction of his heart brought a fresh wave of it to the inside of his skull. Day after day. “The Packers gave me balance tests and computer tests,” he says. “I failed them all. I couldn’t concentrate on the computer for longer than two minutes. I couldn’t balance. They kept sending me home.
“It was winter, I was cold, I wasn’t playing, I was miserable. So I was just going home and—s---, getting high. That was the only way I was gonna cope with it. I could eat better, sleep better [after smoking cannabis] … I’m not saying it’s always good. But it helped me get through some things.”
As the Wisconsin winter deepened, and the 2016 NFL season continued without him, Shields, unmarried and alone, stayed indoors in near darkness. The brightness of his iPhone screen was unbearable. His was the life of a mobster in prison: He had a sweet pad, with every amenity, but not being able to leave is still not being able to leave. So he went home to Sarasota. If he was going to be quarantined, he at least wanted to be near his girls.
“I got three baby mamas,” Shields says with none of the shame that our society expects to accompany such a statement. “After the Atlanta playoff game [January 22, 2017] that’s when they cut me. That’s when I went in the tank. I just had my family and my kids to keep me going.”
His daughters, Sammyla, 11, and Sanii and Emme, both nine, didn’t care about his decision to quit football. “They were just happy I was home,” he says. “‘Daddy’s home! Can you take me to school tomorrow?’
“I was able to do all those things that I missed. Birthday parties for my little nieces, for my mom, for my daughters, I was there for all of it. Family graduations. I loved the s--- out of it. I wasn’t even thinking about football.”
Scott Varley/Digital First Media/Torrance Daily Breeze via Getty Images
“He spent most of his time with his mom,” says Shields’ dad. “They’d go shopping together, do things together … When he was with me he had his chest out. It’s like that with dads, you know. His chest was out. ‘I’m doing good, I’m doing fine.’ ”
But at home, drawn blinds and silence remained the rule. “A lot of people don’t understand—being in the house, just mentally, I could have lost it.” Shields manages a laugh. “Seriously! That s--- is real! … I didn’t know what to do because [the headaches] wasn’t stopping. The pills weren’t working.”
Asked about his son’s lowest point, Sam Jr. pauses 30 seconds before answering. The sounds of a proud man trying not to let his emotions overtake him leaks through the phone line. “The night he asked his mom to come over,” he says.
“It was three o’clock in the morning on some night in January 2017,” Shields wrote for the Players’ Tribune earlier this season. “It felt like my brain was cramping, or like it was trying to break out of my skull or something. I was rolling around in my bed, whipping my body back and forth, trying to escape the pounding inside my head. Next thing I know, I’m curled up in the fetal position, shaking and crying.”
So he called his mom. Michelle Shields, Sam Jr.’s wife of 33 years, came over, made soup, and rode it out with him. But Shields knew that more nights like that one lay ahead.
It had been a good run. Seven years. A ring. A trip to Hawaii for the ’15 Pro Bowl. He’d earned more than $30 million. The end of his career was no tragedy. Letroy Guion beat his man and hit T.J. Yeldon at the same time Shields did, the white roulette ball stopped in the wrong little square, and now Shields was paying up on a bet he had made willingly, years earlier, when he first suited up for the Ringling Redskins Pop Warner team.
Harry How/Getty Images
But then, not long after the night his mother brought him back from the brink, he found himself on the phone with a friend in Los Angeles. “She said, ‘You need to come to UCLA, they’ve got the best neurology rehab thing going on,’ ” Shields recalls. “This was the time, in my mind, I was done. I was like, f--- football, I just wanna be with my family.”
When Shields booked his flight to L.A., he didn’t do it because of football, he says. “It was them headaches, man.” Was his brain going to pound like this forever? Would he watch his daughters grow up through eyes squinted in pain?
Dr. Christopher Giza, director of UCLA’s Steve Tisch Brain Sports program, declined to discuss Shields’ case, citing patient confidentiality, unless Shields agreed in writing to waive his right to privacy. Shields signed the documents as soon as a Rams PR staffer passed them along to him. “I want people to know what happened,” Shields says.
Freed up to talk, Dr. Giza explains that most concussion treatments “are focused on the first four weeks after the injury: monitoring symptoms, avoiding re-injury, engaging in a modest level of activity, and just letting time pass. That kind of management doesn’t tend to work when you are outside that four-week gap.”
Shields walked into UCLA 26 weeks after he tackled T.J. Yeldon. He had hardly exercised at all during that time. Which is why it’s important to note, as Giza does, that a normal adult’s response to exercise “can overlap with the symptoms of concussion. Headache, fatigue, dizziness.”
In other words, when you’re as far removed from the concussion-causing incident as Shields was, and you’ve hardly broken a sweat during those six months, you have to discern whether the discomfort you feel when exercising is related to your head injury or simple lethargy. When athletes don’t make this distinction, Giza says, “they can become unduly worried that the concussion is ‘coming back.’ We don’t want patients to sort all this out on their own. But that’s what was happening with Sam.”
The first thing Giza’s team did, after evaluating Shields and conducting introductory interviews, was put him on a stationary bike, with wires reporting his vitals. As Shields pedaled, a member of Giza’s team, which included a sports neuropsychologist and a cognitive behavioral therapist, sat next to him “and asked me a thousand questions,” Shields recalls. The questions weren’t about how Shields was feeling as much as how he felt about how he was feeling.
“They asked me, ‘Sam, what if your headaches were gone [and] what if you go out on the field again and you ding your head, would you automatically assume it was a concussion?’ ”
Another query: When your headache intensifies during exercise, does that frighten you?
Asking Shields to consider these questions about his brain had the added benefit of knocking the cobwebs out of its corners with a broom. Giza told him, “Your brain is like a muscle—you gotta work it,” Shields says. “He said by sitting in the dark, I was killing my brain. Not challenging it. Not talking to anybody. Just making it worse.”
“One of the biggest challenges that the public and media face right now [regarding concussions],” says Giza, “is kind of a microcosm of our political world. People listen to the extreme … so you hear that everybody who gets a concussion is doomed and has a risk of developing CTE or dementia.
Or the opposite side, which is the more traditional side from 20 years ago: ‘Well these injuries are just bonks on the head, they’re not really something to worry about.’ It seems like people take up their camp on either side, and then they sort of interpret the research to conform to what their pre-existing ideas are.
Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images
“In reality, the truth is in between. I often refer to concussion and traumatic brain injury as the most complex injury to the most complex organ. To think that there’s a little checklist or formula that’s going to work for everybody—it doesn’t do justice to how complicated and individualized this injury can be.”
When Shields began his treatment at UCLA, hardly anyone on Giza’s team knew what Shields used to do for a living. Giza only knew that “the patient had a history of head injuries [whose] main symptoms were intractable headaches that affected him on a daily basis.” (“We didn’t know he had chosen to go back to football until you reached out to us,” Giza told SI in November.)
Treating Shields was a novel experience. “Some athletes come in, and their thing is, ‘I need to return by this date, because this is when tryouts are,’ ” says Giza. “That isn’t the impression we got from Sam. He just wanted to get healthy.”
When Shields wasn’t at UCLA, “he was doing homework,” Giza says—riding a bike or an elliptical machine at his AirBnB, nearby. When Shields returned to the clinic, Giza increased, ever so slightly, the volume and intensity of his exercise. “Meanwhile, some of the interventions we’d made with the headaches were kicking in,” Giza says. Like taking Shields off the Tylenol he’d been popping like TicTacs since the end of the Obama administration.
Football?
“The doctors said, We don’t care about that,” Shields recalls. “They were loving the situation that they was in. Because they was learning from me. It was an enjoyment to them. We became like a family, damn near.”
Knowing when an athlete has completed his treatment, Giza says, “is very individualized.” Giza tells a quick story about a pro basketball player who went through a process similar to Shields’ and “thought he was ready,” until he went to a gymnasium for the first time and “nearly had a panic attack.”
At this point, Shields still wasn’t interested in returning to football. But then the headaches became intermittent instead of constant. A couple per week instead of one unrelenting one. He was a few weeks shy of 30. He started to think about what he could give a team, just on special teams.
He thought about the feeling in an NFL locker room, the post-practice smell of sod and sweat. The jokes, the art of playing them off when they’re aimed at you, and the way the sharks circle when vets discover a teammate with thin skin. And yes, he thought about the money.
“I can still run,” he thought. “Why not?”
Whether it was wise for Shields to drop that white pebble onto the black and red wheel again—only one man can make that call. Shields makes a strong argument that what football provides his family in terms of financial stability is worth the 14-month headache he endured, and any medical problems he might incur down the line, too.
In the middle of the 2017 NFL season, as Shields’ six-month treatment at UCLA wrapped up, he decided to consult three more experts. “I said to my homeboys, if I ask my kids if they want daddy to go back [to football] and they say yeah, I’m going back. If they say no, I’m not.”
To his surprise, his daughters screamed in delight at the mention of it. Shields didn’t ask the younger two to explain their reasons, but he probed deeper with his oldest, 11-year-old Sammyla. “She said, ‘Because I like watching you play, Daddy.’
“That’s real.”
The Rams expressed immediate interest, along with the Browns. “Since I’ve been coaching we’ve had our eye on Sam,” says head coach Sean McVay. “Our safeties coach, Ejiro Evero, coached him in Green Bay. Couldn’t say enough good things about him.”
“He was one of the best, if not the best, man-to-man players in the league a couple years ago,” says Phillips, the white-haired defensive coordinator. “Everybody knew about him.”
In the spring of ’18, the Rams invited Shields to a one-man tryout in Los Angeles. Cornerbacks coach Aubrey Pleasant, who usually likes to throw unexpected drills and demands at free agents to see how they adapt to discomfort, says he handled Shields differently. “I wanted to give Sam respect and say, Hey we’re gonna put you through some movements, see what you have, but we’re not gonna kill you.”
Shields’ cleats tapped the turf, planting and cutting on command. Footballs whistled at him. His elbows straightened and his hands stopped them cold and cradled them to his ribs.
“Man, he looked exactly like he always did!” McVay recalls with his trademark intensity. A contract was drawn up that afternoon.
Now Shields just needed to make the team.
“If you’re good at running punt [coverage], you can make all 32 teams if you want to,” Shields says. “So I went to the special teams coach [John Fassel] and I said, ‘Listen, whatever you need me to do, I’m willing to do it, I’m ready. I appreciate this opportunity.’ ”
“What he’s been doing on special teams,” says Pleasant, “to me that is the ultimate show of selflessness. For him to play in a Pro Bowl, be the best of the best, and then come back and start as our gunner, I think that says a lot.”
Re-mastering his main craft, though—covering people—“that part was tough,” Shields admits. “I was off. I’m talking about off.” Working against the Rams’ offense didn’t make things easier.
Jevone Moore/CSM/REX/Shutterstock
“I was from the NFC North, where there’s a lot of West Coast offense. Then this?” As quarterback Jared Goff ran through a training-camp script of fake jet sweeps, elaborate route combinations and sneaky pitchouts to the reigning MVP, Todd Gurley—sometimes all on the same play—Shields responded, “Oh, shit, what the hell is going on here?
“But each day I was getting better. I wasn’t getting worse.”
Shields was thrust into a more prominent role when starting corner Aqib Talib underwent ankle surgery three weeks into the season. Shields ended up playing an unexpected number of snaps at corner this year—343—which also increased his odds of taking a shot to the head. McVay and his staff kept close tabs. “You care about all these guys,” says McVay, “but with him you’re a little more sensitive. He banged his shoulder against Seattle [in Week 5], and he was down, just holding it, and our immediate reaction was, ‘Oh gosh.’ ”
Shields, who was recently named the Rams’ recipient of the Ed Block Courage award, has played in 96 NFL games in his career and made 265 tackles. How long does he want to keep doing this?
“Three years,” he says without pause. “I wrote on a piece of paper when I was in high school: 10 years in the league. That has always been my goal … I got a few Dunkin Donuts franchises with my partner, [Lions defensive lineman] Ricky Jean Francois. I’ve been putting my money in the right spots. I played in Green Bay so I haven’t spent s---,” he says with a laugh. “You can’t spend any money in Green Bay.
“I just know that around that time—10, 11 years—my kids’ kids will be good.”
His dad, when asked if there’s a moral to this story, says, “Time does heal. And I think a lot of guys that play this game—you do need to take some time off.” Then Mr. Shields gets to talking about his granddaughters again, which makes him tear up a little again, and reminds him of that scene in the backyard, 25 years ago, with his namesake.
“I remember having him run around the house. I’d be on one side of the house, and when he comes around the corner he doesn’t know the ball is coming. He’d hear my voice—I’d say, Come, and he’d come and I’d throw it—”
He claps for effect, mimicking the sound of a child’s hands ending a football’s flight just inches from his forehead. (Pain can be a teacher.)
I imagine you didn’t lob it to him either, someone says.
“No. No, I didn’t.”
The Rams Need Only One Personnel Grouping to Destroy You
- By Prime Time
- RAMS / NFL TALK
- 11 Replies
Very long but the most in-depth article on the Rams offense I've ever read. Enjoy.
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https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/1/10/18177030/rams-sean-mcvay-jared-goff-todd-gurley-11-personnel
The Rams Need Only One Personnel Grouping to Destroy You
How did Sean McVay turn Jared Goff, Todd Gurley, and Co. into an offensive juggernaut? The coach stumbled into an approach that worked—and then stuck with it
By Robert Mays
:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/62823504/mcvay_offense_getty_ringer.0.jpg)
Getty Images/Ringer illustration
As an offensive revolution has taken over the NFL in recent years, the league’s most dominant units have shared a through line: variation. The Patriots, for instance, have become known for mixing up their personnel packages and formations to keep defenses off-balance.
This season, New England used 21 personnel (a grouping with two running backs, one tight end, and two wide receivers) on 31 percent of its offensive plays, the second-highest mark in the league.
The only team to use that grouping more often was the 49ers, whose head coach, Kyle Shanahan, has relied on dizzying combinations of personnel groupings throughout his decade as an NFL play-caller.
Look at the data on teams’ personnel groupings this season, and it’s clear that the Saints and Eagles—both led by progressive play-calling head coaches—are also outliers. No team used 12 personnel (a grouping with one running back and two tight ends) more often than the Eagles, at 44 percent of their offensive plays. The high-flying Chiefs ranked third, at 27 percent.
Coach Asshole Face and the Saints are all over the map with their personnel packages, ranking 30th in their usage of 11 personnel (one running back, one tight end, three wide receivers), the league’s most popular grouping. The lesson from those numbers is that most of the NFL’s top creative minds use every method available to make their offenses look different from snap to snap. That’s what makes the Rams’ strategy this season so fascinating.
In 2018, coach Sean McVay’s team used 11 personnel on an astounding 96 percent of its offensive plays. No other team finished higher than 90 percent, and only five used 11 personnel on more than 80 percent of their snaps. That discrepancy is stunning. The Rams ran 25 plays out of other personnel packages all season. By comparison, Philadelphia ran 30 plays out of 12 personnel in a 32-30 Week 16 win over the Texans alone.
McVay has embraced the most extreme offensive method of any coach in the NFL—working almost exclusively out of the simplest personnel package—and has thrived because of the way he’s done it. Traditionally, coaches have gotten roasted for an overreliance on 11 personnel. In 2016, then–Giants head coach Ben McAdoo used 11 personnel on 92 percent of his team’s offensive snaps, making New York’s unit equal parts basic and predictable.
These Rams, on the other hand, trot out the same 11 guys for seemingly every offensive play, and they’re successful because that’s the only thing that remains consistent from snap to snap. McVay’s attack features a barrage of motion and wonky uses of players at different positions. Defenses know what they’re going to get—they just don’t know how they’re going to get it.
Whereas some NFL teams have playbooks as thick as phone books, the Rams have assembled one of the league’s most dangerous offenses primarily by going the other way. Their approach is streamlined. In some ways, McVay will trot out the most predictable scheme in the NFL in Saturday’s divisional round matchup with the Cowboys. Look closer, though, and it’s clear that even if the players don’t change, this Rams offense is anything but simple.
The Rams arrived at this strategy sort of by accident. McVay spent his early days in the league working under Jay Gruden and Kyle Shanahan in Washington, where the offenses featured a variety of personnel groupings. When McVay accepted the head job in Los Angeles in 2017, his plan was to implement an array of personnel packages that would make the Rams offense difficult to prepare for. After all, that’s what he knew.
Part of any new staff’s acclimation process includes learning the ins and outs of its players, and all of the changes to the Rams’ roster that offseason only exacerbated the challenge. Namely, general manager Les Snead revamped the team’s entire receiving corps. He signed former Bills wideout Robert Woods to a five-year, $34 million deal in free agency.
A month later, the Rams snagged prolific Eastern Washington receiver Cooper Kupp in the third round of the draft. And the group wouldn’t be complete until Snead pulled off a trade with the Bills to acquire former top-10 pick Sammy Watkins that August.
When McVay and his staff originally devised their plan, they did so without knowing the sort of upgrades that were coming across the offense. “Until you play a game, you don’t really know who you have,” Rams run game coordinator Aaron Kromer says. “Shoot, you’re trying to put the players in the best position to win. You use what you know, and as you develop throughout the year, you’re saying, ‘All right, this guy’s good at this, this guy’s good at that.’”
The shift to this version of the 11 personnel strategy didn’t happen right away. Over their first three games of the 2017 campaign, the Rams used the grouping on just 58 percent of their snaps. But during weeks 4 and 5, that figure jumped to 74 percent. From weeks 6 through 10, it climbed to 78 percent. And finally, from Week 10 on, it jumped to 94 percent, completing the unit’s transformation into the offense we see now.
Rather than being forced into using this grouping because of injury or necessity, the Rams settled on this approach because it repeatedly got results. The staff slowly learned that despite McVay’s intentions to field an offense with multiple groupings, the team would be doing itself a disservice by not keeping Woods, Kupp, and Watkins on the field with star running back Todd Gurley and a single tight end. “As a [staff],” Kromer says, “we’ve decided that’s the best group we have. The fastest way to move fast is to use your fastest guys. And those are our fastest guys.”
After fully committing to such a drastic concept, the challenge became mastering how to manipulate opposing defenses with the same 11 players on the field. For most NFL teams, swapping personnel groupings helps to extract information about the defense and avoid establishing obvious tendencies. Eschewing that strategy means the Rams have had to devise creative ways to do both.
One of their methods is to use jet motion more than just about any team in the NFL. The Rams use many different types of pre-snap movement, but the frequency with which receivers tear across the formation is distinct. Los Angeles used jet motion on 17 percent of its offensive plays this season, the highest mark in the league, according to Sports Info Solutions.
Sending receivers in jet motion accomplishes several objectives for McVay’s offense. In some cases, it allows the Rams to put an opponent’s linebackers on a string, getting them to shift directly before the snap—creating running lanes and improving blocking angles. L.A.’s pre-snap chaos has other applications, too. The constant onslaught of motion is undeniably disorienting for defenders. “It’s a lot of eye candy for them to see,” Woods says. “They don’t know if they have to knife downhill, play the sweep, play pass.”
Defenders need to sort through all of those options in an instant, while also accounting for a player barreling full speed toward the perimeter. That can create moments of ever-so-slight hesitation on the part of the defender, and those moments can make all the difference. “It makes our job blocking the linebackers and blocking the ends a whole lot easier because they have to respect everything that our offense does,” Woods says.
Along with the pre-snap movement, McVay’s team also presents defenses with an assortment of alignments. Every skill-position player on the Rams roster—from Woods to Gurley to tight end Gerald Everett—can line up at virtually every spot within the formation. For the receivers, that can mean spreading out wide or bunching in tight to the formation in some type of stack.
By shifting their pass catchers around, the Rams uncover different facets of the defense. “Gurley could be outside, in the backfield, anywhere on the field,” Kromer says. “I think that’s where it’s a little bit more advanced as well. You never know where the guys are going to line up. So if you’re trying to double a guy or take a guy out of a game plan, it’s difficult to do because they’re everywhere.”
Take quarterback Jared Goff’s game-winning touchdown pass from the Rams’ thrilling 54-51 win over the Chiefs in Week 11. Facing a first-and-10 from Kansas City’s 40-yard line, Los Angeles came out in a shotgun formation that resembled most of the sets it uses. Wide receivers Brandin Cooks and Josh Reynolds were both aligned in a tight stack to the left, with Woods alone in the slot on the right.
But there was a twist. Rather than setting up camp near one of the offensive tackles, tight end Everett split wide right as a receiver. Chiefs safety Daniel Sorensen followed Everett to the sideline, signaling to Goff that the defense was in man coverage. After taking the shotgun snap, Goff immediately lofted a deep throw down the sideline that resulted in a 40-yard touchdown for Everett.
“People get information in different ways,” Rams backup quarterback Sean Mannion says. “Some people might have a lot of variety in personnel. We use one personnel grouping, for the most part, but a lot of [the offense] is based on different formations and motions and shifts. There’s different ways to add variety, even if it’s not personnel groupings.”
The Rams’ approach requires more window dressing than those of other teams, but their steadfast commitment to 11 personnel also comes with a few inherent advantages. By keeping three receivers on the field, L.A. has an easier time forcing opposing defensive backs to honor every inch of the gridiron.
Kromer served as an assistant to Payton in New Orleans from 2008 to 2012, and says those Saints teams would often use stacks packed tight to the formation to create two-way releases for receivers. The Rams use a similar tactic on nearly every one of their pass plays. “We force [the defense] to communicate,” Woods says. “They do take away something, but they do give something. … I know that we’re condensed, but they still have to respect every single cut.”
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Those tight alignments also allow the Rams to resemble heavier personnel packages in the running game without taking any speed off the field. And it helps that all of L.A.’s receivers—Woods, in particular—are willing and able blockers.
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Some opposing teams have attempted to combat the Rams offense by staying in base defense, despite the mismatches that might create in the passing game. By doing this, teams avoid getting locked into a nickel package (featuring three cornerbacks and two linebackers), which would allow Gurley to gash the defense all game long. Gurley faced eight or more men in the box on just 8.2 percent of his carries this season, according to NFL Next Gen Stats; that’s the third-lowest rate in the league, behind 5-foot-6 Bears flash of lightning Tarik Cohen and 200-pound Eagles running back Wendell Smallwood.
Gurley is a 230-pound battering ram who sees more rushing volume than any player aside from Ezekiel Elliott. Countering him with light boxes makes no sense, but given the Rams’ three speedy receivers to worry about, opposing teams are often left with no choice. “What we’ve learned is that when teams play base against us,” Kromer says, “we get them out of it pretty quick.”
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The real strength of the Rams offense is that all of their plays look identical for the first few steps. Trying to decipher how a plan is going to unfold can cause nightmares for defenses. And having the same players on the field for nearly every play gives Los Angeles a leg up when it comes to play-action. Only Baltimore’s Lamar Jackson used play-action on a higher percentage of his throws in 2018 than Goff (34.6 percent of dropbacks), whose 10.0 yards per attempt on those throws ranked fourth out of 37 qualified quarterbacks.
Compare that to the 7.5 yards per attempt Goff averaged on non-play-action throws, and it’s easy to see why the Rams lean so heavily on that concept. The team’s dedication to 11 personnel has keyed his turnaround from rookie disappointment to pilot of one of the league’s most devastating offenses.
In McVay’s offense, the running game works for the passing game, and vice versa. And all of that is made possible by formations that don’t tip his hand. “Whether or not we’re running the ball or passing the ball, it looks the same,” center John Sullivan says. “We don’t switch personnel groups to do things, so [defenses] can’t figure out tendencies. We do it all out of one, so you have to prepare for everything all the time.”
Over the past two seasons, the Rams have faced just about every defensive tactic in the book. Some teams have thrown three linebackers at them, in an attempt to slow down Gurley. Others have been content to play nickel, hoping to match the Rams’ offensive speed.
Sullivan says that recently, they’ve seen teams use some 5-1 jam alignments, in which a defense stays in nickel while putting more bodies on the interior of the line of scrimmage. Despite all of this experimentation, though, few defenses have succeeded.
The Rams did hit a minor skid in early December, sputtering early in a 30-16 win against the Lions before putting up just six points against the Bears the following week and then losing 30-23 to the Eagles. Kromer claims that nothing any of those defenses did was revolutionary. But given the team’s prolific standards this season, any drop-off is glaring.
“People didn’t have this expectation of our offense last year,” Kromer says. “So everything good we did was above and beyond. And if something bad happened, that was supposed to happen. Now we’re supposed to score 50 points a game, so the pressure’s on to keep going.”
On Sunday at the Coliseum, the Rams will face a Cowboys defense that has been scorching hot over the second half of the season. Aside from a meaningless Week 17 game against the Giants, the Cowboys haven’t given up more than 23 points in a contest since November 5. As Dallas has prepared to face the L.A. offense this week, defensive players have recognized just how rare the Rams’ methods are. “They really get your eye to wander,” safety Jeff Heath said.
This weekend, that unit will face a challenge unlike any in football. The Rams are at the forefront of the NFL’s offensive explosion, and they’re doing it via an approach all their own. “I think what people find is they’re gonna need to do something a little bit different,” Kromer says. “People every week are going to try to change their coverage a little bit or change the way they get to their plan. As the game goes, we roll, we figure it out, and we keep going.”
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https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/1/10/18177030/rams-sean-mcvay-jared-goff-todd-gurley-11-personnel
The Rams Need Only One Personnel Grouping to Destroy You
How did Sean McVay turn Jared Goff, Todd Gurley, and Co. into an offensive juggernaut? The coach stumbled into an approach that worked—and then stuck with it
By Robert Mays
Getty Images/Ringer illustration
As an offensive revolution has taken over the NFL in recent years, the league’s most dominant units have shared a through line: variation. The Patriots, for instance, have become known for mixing up their personnel packages and formations to keep defenses off-balance.
This season, New England used 21 personnel (a grouping with two running backs, one tight end, and two wide receivers) on 31 percent of its offensive plays, the second-highest mark in the league.
The only team to use that grouping more often was the 49ers, whose head coach, Kyle Shanahan, has relied on dizzying combinations of personnel groupings throughout his decade as an NFL play-caller.
Look at the data on teams’ personnel groupings this season, and it’s clear that the Saints and Eagles—both led by progressive play-calling head coaches—are also outliers. No team used 12 personnel (a grouping with one running back and two tight ends) more often than the Eagles, at 44 percent of their offensive plays. The high-flying Chiefs ranked third, at 27 percent.
Coach Asshole Face and the Saints are all over the map with their personnel packages, ranking 30th in their usage of 11 personnel (one running back, one tight end, three wide receivers), the league’s most popular grouping. The lesson from those numbers is that most of the NFL’s top creative minds use every method available to make their offenses look different from snap to snap. That’s what makes the Rams’ strategy this season so fascinating.
In 2018, coach Sean McVay’s team used 11 personnel on an astounding 96 percent of its offensive plays. No other team finished higher than 90 percent, and only five used 11 personnel on more than 80 percent of their snaps. That discrepancy is stunning. The Rams ran 25 plays out of other personnel packages all season. By comparison, Philadelphia ran 30 plays out of 12 personnel in a 32-30 Week 16 win over the Texans alone.
McVay has embraced the most extreme offensive method of any coach in the NFL—working almost exclusively out of the simplest personnel package—and has thrived because of the way he’s done it. Traditionally, coaches have gotten roasted for an overreliance on 11 personnel. In 2016, then–Giants head coach Ben McAdoo used 11 personnel on 92 percent of his team’s offensive snaps, making New York’s unit equal parts basic and predictable.
These Rams, on the other hand, trot out the same 11 guys for seemingly every offensive play, and they’re successful because that’s the only thing that remains consistent from snap to snap. McVay’s attack features a barrage of motion and wonky uses of players at different positions. Defenses know what they’re going to get—they just don’t know how they’re going to get it.
Whereas some NFL teams have playbooks as thick as phone books, the Rams have assembled one of the league’s most dangerous offenses primarily by going the other way. Their approach is streamlined. In some ways, McVay will trot out the most predictable scheme in the NFL in Saturday’s divisional round matchup with the Cowboys. Look closer, though, and it’s clear that even if the players don’t change, this Rams offense is anything but simple.
The Rams arrived at this strategy sort of by accident. McVay spent his early days in the league working under Jay Gruden and Kyle Shanahan in Washington, where the offenses featured a variety of personnel groupings. When McVay accepted the head job in Los Angeles in 2017, his plan was to implement an array of personnel packages that would make the Rams offense difficult to prepare for. After all, that’s what he knew.
Part of any new staff’s acclimation process includes learning the ins and outs of its players, and all of the changes to the Rams’ roster that offseason only exacerbated the challenge. Namely, general manager Les Snead revamped the team’s entire receiving corps. He signed former Bills wideout Robert Woods to a five-year, $34 million deal in free agency.
A month later, the Rams snagged prolific Eastern Washington receiver Cooper Kupp in the third round of the draft. And the group wouldn’t be complete until Snead pulled off a trade with the Bills to acquire former top-10 pick Sammy Watkins that August.
When McVay and his staff originally devised their plan, they did so without knowing the sort of upgrades that were coming across the offense. “Until you play a game, you don’t really know who you have,” Rams run game coordinator Aaron Kromer says. “Shoot, you’re trying to put the players in the best position to win. You use what you know, and as you develop throughout the year, you’re saying, ‘All right, this guy’s good at this, this guy’s good at that.’”
The shift to this version of the 11 personnel strategy didn’t happen right away. Over their first three games of the 2017 campaign, the Rams used the grouping on just 58 percent of their snaps. But during weeks 4 and 5, that figure jumped to 74 percent. From weeks 6 through 10, it climbed to 78 percent. And finally, from Week 10 on, it jumped to 94 percent, completing the unit’s transformation into the offense we see now.
Rather than being forced into using this grouping because of injury or necessity, the Rams settled on this approach because it repeatedly got results. The staff slowly learned that despite McVay’s intentions to field an offense with multiple groupings, the team would be doing itself a disservice by not keeping Woods, Kupp, and Watkins on the field with star running back Todd Gurley and a single tight end. “As a [staff],” Kromer says, “we’ve decided that’s the best group we have. The fastest way to move fast is to use your fastest guys. And those are our fastest guys.”
After fully committing to such a drastic concept, the challenge became mastering how to manipulate opposing defenses with the same 11 players on the field. For most NFL teams, swapping personnel groupings helps to extract information about the defense and avoid establishing obvious tendencies. Eschewing that strategy means the Rams have had to devise creative ways to do both.
One of their methods is to use jet motion more than just about any team in the NFL. The Rams use many different types of pre-snap movement, but the frequency with which receivers tear across the formation is distinct. Los Angeles used jet motion on 17 percent of its offensive plays this season, the highest mark in the league, according to Sports Info Solutions.
Sending receivers in jet motion accomplishes several objectives for McVay’s offense. In some cases, it allows the Rams to put an opponent’s linebackers on a string, getting them to shift directly before the snap—creating running lanes and improving blocking angles. L.A.’s pre-snap chaos has other applications, too. The constant onslaught of motion is undeniably disorienting for defenders. “It’s a lot of eye candy for them to see,” Woods says. “They don’t know if they have to knife downhill, play the sweep, play pass.”
Defenders need to sort through all of those options in an instant, while also accounting for a player barreling full speed toward the perimeter. That can create moments of ever-so-slight hesitation on the part of the defender, and those moments can make all the difference. “It makes our job blocking the linebackers and blocking the ends a whole lot easier because they have to respect everything that our offense does,” Woods says.
Along with the pre-snap movement, McVay’s team also presents defenses with an assortment of alignments. Every skill-position player on the Rams roster—from Woods to Gurley to tight end Gerald Everett—can line up at virtually every spot within the formation. For the receivers, that can mean spreading out wide or bunching in tight to the formation in some type of stack.
By shifting their pass catchers around, the Rams uncover different facets of the defense. “Gurley could be outside, in the backfield, anywhere on the field,” Kromer says. “I think that’s where it’s a little bit more advanced as well. You never know where the guys are going to line up. So if you’re trying to double a guy or take a guy out of a game plan, it’s difficult to do because they’re everywhere.”
Take quarterback Jared Goff’s game-winning touchdown pass from the Rams’ thrilling 54-51 win over the Chiefs in Week 11. Facing a first-and-10 from Kansas City’s 40-yard line, Los Angeles came out in a shotgun formation that resembled most of the sets it uses. Wide receivers Brandin Cooks and Josh Reynolds were both aligned in a tight stack to the left, with Woods alone in the slot on the right.
But there was a twist. Rather than setting up camp near one of the offensive tackles, tight end Everett split wide right as a receiver. Chiefs safety Daniel Sorensen followed Everett to the sideline, signaling to Goff that the defense was in man coverage. After taking the shotgun snap, Goff immediately lofted a deep throw down the sideline that resulted in a 40-yard touchdown for Everett.
“People get information in different ways,” Rams backup quarterback Sean Mannion says. “Some people might have a lot of variety in personnel. We use one personnel grouping, for the most part, but a lot of [the offense] is based on different formations and motions and shifts. There’s different ways to add variety, even if it’s not personnel groupings.”
The Rams’ approach requires more window dressing than those of other teams, but their steadfast commitment to 11 personnel also comes with a few inherent advantages. By keeping three receivers on the field, L.A. has an easier time forcing opposing defensive backs to honor every inch of the gridiron.
Kromer served as an assistant to Payton in New Orleans from 2008 to 2012, and says those Saints teams would often use stacks packed tight to the formation to create two-way releases for receivers. The Rams use a similar tactic on nearly every one of their pass plays. “We force [the defense] to communicate,” Woods says. “They do take away something, but they do give something. … I know that we’re condensed, but they still have to respect every single cut.”
Those tight alignments also allow the Rams to resemble heavier personnel packages in the running game without taking any speed off the field. And it helps that all of L.A.’s receivers—Woods, in particular—are willing and able blockers.
Some opposing teams have attempted to combat the Rams offense by staying in base defense, despite the mismatches that might create in the passing game. By doing this, teams avoid getting locked into a nickel package (featuring three cornerbacks and two linebackers), which would allow Gurley to gash the defense all game long. Gurley faced eight or more men in the box on just 8.2 percent of his carries this season, according to NFL Next Gen Stats; that’s the third-lowest rate in the league, behind 5-foot-6 Bears flash of lightning Tarik Cohen and 200-pound Eagles running back Wendell Smallwood.
Gurley is a 230-pound battering ram who sees more rushing volume than any player aside from Ezekiel Elliott. Countering him with light boxes makes no sense, but given the Rams’ three speedy receivers to worry about, opposing teams are often left with no choice. “What we’ve learned is that when teams play base against us,” Kromer says, “we get them out of it pretty quick.”
The real strength of the Rams offense is that all of their plays look identical for the first few steps. Trying to decipher how a plan is going to unfold can cause nightmares for defenses. And having the same players on the field for nearly every play gives Los Angeles a leg up when it comes to play-action. Only Baltimore’s Lamar Jackson used play-action on a higher percentage of his throws in 2018 than Goff (34.6 percent of dropbacks), whose 10.0 yards per attempt on those throws ranked fourth out of 37 qualified quarterbacks.
Compare that to the 7.5 yards per attempt Goff averaged on non-play-action throws, and it’s easy to see why the Rams lean so heavily on that concept. The team’s dedication to 11 personnel has keyed his turnaround from rookie disappointment to pilot of one of the league’s most devastating offenses.
In McVay’s offense, the running game works for the passing game, and vice versa. And all of that is made possible by formations that don’t tip his hand. “Whether or not we’re running the ball or passing the ball, it looks the same,” center John Sullivan says. “We don’t switch personnel groups to do things, so [defenses] can’t figure out tendencies. We do it all out of one, so you have to prepare for everything all the time.”
Over the past two seasons, the Rams have faced just about every defensive tactic in the book. Some teams have thrown three linebackers at them, in an attempt to slow down Gurley. Others have been content to play nickel, hoping to match the Rams’ offensive speed.
Sullivan says that recently, they’ve seen teams use some 5-1 jam alignments, in which a defense stays in nickel while putting more bodies on the interior of the line of scrimmage. Despite all of this experimentation, though, few defenses have succeeded.
The Rams did hit a minor skid in early December, sputtering early in a 30-16 win against the Lions before putting up just six points against the Bears the following week and then losing 30-23 to the Eagles. Kromer claims that nothing any of those defenses did was revolutionary. But given the team’s prolific standards this season, any drop-off is glaring.
“People didn’t have this expectation of our offense last year,” Kromer says. “So everything good we did was above and beyond. And if something bad happened, that was supposed to happen. Now we’re supposed to score 50 points a game, so the pressure’s on to keep going.”
On Sunday at the Coliseum, the Rams will face a Cowboys defense that has been scorching hot over the second half of the season. Aside from a meaningless Week 17 game against the Giants, the Cowboys haven’t given up more than 23 points in a contest since November 5. As Dallas has prepared to face the L.A. offense this week, defensive players have recognized just how rare the Rams’ methods are. “They really get your eye to wander,” safety Jeff Heath said.
This weekend, that unit will face a challenge unlike any in football. The Rams are at the forefront of the NFL’s offensive explosion, and they’re doing it via an approach all their own. “I think what people find is they’re gonna need to do something a little bit different,” Kromer says. “People every week are going to try to change their coverage a little bit or change the way they get to their plan. As the game goes, we roll, we figure it out, and we keep going.”
Crane collapse at new stadium
- By whitedk57
- RAMS / NFL TALK
- 12 Replies
Apparently, there was a crane crash at the new LA Stadium build site. Not much else out there about it...
Jeff Fisher Is More Than Your 7–9 Jokes
- By Prime Time
- RAMS / NFL TALK
- 45 Replies
This is more than an article, it's a novel. If you're interested then pour yourself a cup of coffee or whatever and enjoy the read. If it's too long of an article for you then skip it.
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https://www.si.com/nfl/2019/01/10/jeff-fisher-nfl-head-coach-nashville-farm
Jeff Fisher Is More Than Your 7–9 Jokes
As the NFL coaching carousel continues to aggressively spin—only two head coaching spots of eight remain open—one longtime NFL coach’s name hasn’t been part of the conversation. Some people might think it’s for good reason that Jeff Fisher hasn’t been considered (a .512 career coaching record over more than 20 years) but Fisher wants to be. What has the former Oilers/Titans and Rams head coach been up to lately? We travel to his farm in Nashville to find out.
By CHARLOTTE WILDER
Harry How/Getty Images
Jeff Fisher is careening down the side of a very steep hill on his ATV in the middle of the Tennessee woods. I’m sitting on the back, holding onto the machine for dear life. He’s probably only going about fifteen miles per hour, but that feels pretty fast when you’re rolling down a muddy path about four feet wide, ducking to avoid low-hanging tree branches and heading straight for a sizable stream. The 20 foot-wide body of water we’re hurtling towards is one of two creeks that intersect on Fisher’s farm about 20 miles outside of Nashville.
“Feet up, Char!” Fisher yells. The tires and footbed plunge in three feet of water, so I do as I’m told and lift my legs off of the four-wheeler’s floor to avoid getting soaked. Fisher plows through and rumbles up the bank on the other side. A hunk of Copenhagen chewing tobacco is lodged between Fisher’s teeth and lower lip.
He leans off the side of the ATV and spits, then looks back at me and launches into a story. All day he’s been telling me about players he’s kept in touch with, about parachuting out of a plane onto a practice field to surprise his team, about the rare fish he caught in Mexico, about his friendship with the late Bears great Walter Payton.
“It’s nice telling you my stories,” he says. “No one wants to hear my stories anymore. There’s a book in here somewhere, maybe. I wanted to wait until I was finished. Maybe I am finished.”
Eight NFL head coaches lost their jobs after the 2018 season, and there are currently two openings left. A few years ago—say, 2014—if Fisher weren’t with a team, his name would have come up when general managers were thinking of who to hire to lead their teams. Even as recently as last year, it was reported that Fisher was interested in a handful of head-coach openings.
But this year is different; franchises are looking for young offensive gurus, hoping to copy the success that the Los Angeles Rams have seen with the 32-year-old Sean McVay, the head coach they hired after firing Fisher midseason in 2016. The 60-year-old Fisher has lots of experience, but his mediocre season records have become a running joke among football fans.
Fisher adjusts his backwards camo baseball hat and revs the engine, lurching forward up a hill as steep as the one he just shot down. He’s showing me all 300 acres of his farm, which he wants to start renting out as a wedding venue. There were rumors that Fisher had a 9,000 square-foot cabin in the hills outside Nashville, but the truth is that everyone was off by a zero: It’s 900. If he rents the property out for weddings, he’ll have to put up a tent.
Fisher has largely disappeared from the public sphere in the last two years. As you watch the players he once coached who are now in the playoffs—Rams QB Jared Goff, Rams RB Todd Gurley, Eagles QB Nick Foles—you might think to yourself, “What’s Jeff Fisher up to?” Well, he’s driving ATVs through the woods, but he’s mostly hunting and fishing in Tennessee and Montana, traveling to Alaska and Argentina to hunt and fish more, and consulting for the new league Alliance of American Football. He knows he’s become a punch line.
He heard Booger McFarland say on SportsCenter, “Shame on you, Jeff Fisher, because you had America thinking Jared Goff was a bust.” He’s heard your jokes about his 7–9 and 8–8 seasons, his .512 career record, about Aug. 8 being known as “Jeff Fisher Day”. He knows you use numbers to make fun of him, and he believes there’s a story behind them that you don’t see.
“You want to know if I’m sitting here waiting for my phone to ring, to have an NFL team call me?” Fisher asked. “Maybe I’ll be hunting and fishing the rest of my life. I’ve made my peace with it. But yeah, I’d love to coach again. I miss the players. I just want to get back to the players. I go back to what Bum Phillips said. ‘There are two kinds of coaches: Those who got fired and those who are going to get fired.’ You’re all going to get fired at some point. Not all, but 99%. It’s rare for a player or a coach to walk away on his own terms.”
But Fisher hopes to one day get another chance to try.
Jessica Smetana
It’s 9:30 a.m. on Jan. 3, and Fisher is driving out to his farm in his huge black Chevy Silverado. He’s wearing a sporty Patagonia hoodie, down vest and jeans that fit well. He’s been taking better care of himself since he got fired; he gave up drinking a year ago—even though he still has a huge collection of red wine—and lost 30 pounds.
He still has his signature mustache, and there’s a pair of reading glasses hanging around his neck, the kind with magnets between the nose bridge so he can easily pull them on and off. Raiders coach Jon Gruden wears them, too. Fisher says he’s the one who told Gruden about them.
Dirk, a six-month-old reddish Golden Retriever, wiggles in the backseat. Fisher picked him up from a breeder in Wyoming and sat with the dog for about half an hour in the front seat before he took him home, the two of them just staring at each other. Fisher doesn’t really know why he named him Dirk.
“I just looked at him and I thought, ‘Man, he looks like a Dirk,’” Fisher says, spitting tobacco into an empty coffee cup. He’s gotten healthier, yes, but the multiple tins of Copenhagen in his center console show a vice that remains.
He asks if people call me Char, and I tell him some do. “Okay, Char,” he says. He gives off a Big Lebowski vibe, an easy familiarity extends to everyone he encounters; servers at restaurants, the baristas at Starbucks, the guy fixing the tires on his son’s truck.
Fisher pulls up to the wrought-iron gate that sits at the top of the driveway. He squeezes the truck through, waving to his friend Jody who manages the farm, and parks the huge truck by the front porch of his tiny cabin. He enjoys helping people, figuring out what they need, giving it to them. He recently flew back to Montana for a day to take his parents to a wedding, which was outside in the cold, because he didn’t want them slipping on the ice.
He once suggested that one of his players, Joe Barksdale, take up guitar; two years later, Barksdale sent Fisher two pictures, one of his daughter and one of his album cover. When Fisher’s neighbor evicted Jody from the house he lived in on the property, Fisher bought the land back with the house on it. Jody lives there again.
“I loved playing for Jeff,” says Eddie George, a former Titans running back. “He’s the consummate players coach. He gave us range and freedom to be men, but held us accountable inside the locker room to get our job done. He knew how to coach the person, not just the player. And it was more like he was really interested in our lives, our families lives, what made us tick. He knew how to inspire, mentor, nourish and cultivate guys. He’s a people’s person for sure.”
Keith Bulluck, a linebacker for the Titans from 2000-09, agrees. “Depending on who you were, he would handle things differently. He treated Eddie differently than Frank, and Frank differently than Steve, you know? He just had a good gauge on his players' personalities and what not, that made him an effective coach by knowing his players. Not just as what they could do on the field but who they are as a person.”
Fisher lets Dirk out of the truck and the dog takes off across the field. He walks into the house; it’s a small but intricately designed and carefully considered space made of pine from the property, with details like a deer carved into the back of the door. A rack of wine Fisher won’t drink anytime soon is fixed to the wall, and a hunting bow hangs off it. He likes bows more than rifles, because the hunt feels like an even match between him and the animal. There’s something spiritual about it.
“It’s not the shooting or the killing,” he says. “I’m not into that. But I enjoy the sport of getting close.”
Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images
Fisher’s a charming, fun guy to be around, which might be a part of why he’s, well, been around so long. Born in Culver City, Calif., Fisher went to USC on a football scholarship and was picked by the Bears in the seventh round of the 1981 NFL draft. He wasn’t a great player, but Chicago defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan recognized that Fisher had a mind for defense and asked him to serve as another set of eyes.
“It was a blast, I got to see [that defense] come together,” Fisher says. “I witnessed every moment of every game. … The ’85 Bears were the ’85 Bears. It was a bunch of tough, tough guys. I mean, I’ll say this: it was a bunch of badasses.”
After Chicago crushed New England in Super Bowl XX, Fisher took a box of beer from the party in the hotel and shipped it back to Chicago. He was selling software on his one day off; he made more money slinging floppy disks than he did playing in the NFL, even when you factor in his Super Bowl bonus. So he wasn’t about to pass up free booze. When he got home and unpacked it, he realized the brand was Dos Equis. XX. Super Bowl 20.
Ryan was offered the head-coaching job in Philadelphia after the Bears’ championship and he wanted Fisher to coach the defensive backs, despite the fact that Fisher had one year left on his contract with Chicago. According to Fisher, Ryan wouldn’t take no for an answer. “[Ryan] goes, ‘You aren’t going to try to play again, are you? … Talk to your fiancé and tell her you’re going to get into coaching because you can’t freakin’ play anymore. You’re not any good.’”
Fisher was promoted to the Eagles’ defensive coordinator in 1988, and he coached for the Rams and the 49ers before the Houston Oilers announced they were hiring him midseason to be their new head coach in 1994.
A year later, Oilers owner Bud Adams announced he was moving the team to Nashville for the 1998 season. It would be the first of two moves Fisher would oversee as head coach, and it subjected the team to a handful of nomad seasons, during which they played in Memphis and at Vanderbilt. Fisher says the year in Memphis,—which is two-and-a-half hours from Nashville, where the players practiced and lived—was like playing 16 road games. The team went 8–8 both seasons.
“The single worst thing you can have for winning and losing is distractions,” Fisher says. “Moving is a distraction. I kept preaching we have to keep the players first. In Houston we had an 800 number on the wall and told players when we were leaving, we said ‘Call the mover, he’ll get you there.’ Players were like, where’s camp? And we didn’t know yet, so we just had to tell them to move to Nashville. But we’re gonna play in Memphis. Players would be like, ‘How far is Memphis from Nashville?’ And we’d say ‘…never mind.’”
Once the team finally got into Adelphia Coliseum (which is now Nissan Stadium) Fisher started to cook. In 1999 the Titans, led by QB Steve McNair, came a yard short of winning Super Bowl XXXIV against the Rams.
“I have eight bottles of [the 1985 Dos Equis] left,” Fisher says. “That have survived move after move after move. I’ve been saving those to consume after I won a Super Bowl. So those eight bottles are lucky, cause they got about a yard away from being opened. I came a yard short. And I would not have gone for two.
I would not have potentially robbed my team or taken a Super Bowl championship away from them because of a decision that I made. I felt like the Rams were absolutely done on defense and we would win the game in overtime, so I would’ve gone for an extra point. But I came a yard short.”
John Rivera/Icon SMI
Fisher says everyone thinks he was fired, but he left Tennessee voluntarily. The Titans front office confirms his story: with one year left on Fisher’s contract and a lot of big decisions to make, it made more sense for both sides to walk away. In 2012 Fisher took the head-coaching job in St. Louis because he liked the owner, Stan Kroenke, and the promising quarterback Sam Bradford. It seemed like a great set up, but Fisher had no idea what challenges he was about to face.
After going 7-8-1 in his first year as head coach in St. Louis, Fisher lost his QB when Bradford tore his ACL in Week 7 of the 2013 season. In a cruel twist of fate, Bradford re-tore his ACL in the ’14 preseason. Then Kroenke announced that he was moving the team to Los Angeles. Fisher says he had a hard time holding onto coaches and hiring new ones with a huge change looming over the franchise. And having once dealt with the distractions, logistics, and complications that come with relocating a franchise, he didn’t blame them.
“The Raiders are … in for an experience. And don’t call me,” he says with a laugh when talking about Oakland’s impending move to Las Vegas. “You know, I’ll help you Jon [Gruden], I offered to help you, but I’ve been through that before.” He turns to me. “I mean, have you moved and relocated?
“Yeah,” I say, “It’s miserable.”
“It’s miserable, OK. Well have 150 people who work for you doing the same thing. And when they have problems, they come to you. Or plan it for all of them. Good luck, Jon Gruden.”
Fisher traded up to draft Goff with the No. 1 pick in 2016. He says he initially didn’t make Goff the starter so the rookie could adjust to the NFL, but his decision to start Case Keenum at quarterback instead drew plenty of criticism.
After a 3–1 start that season, things began to fall apart until, after a particularly embarrassing loss to Atlanta, the team sat 4-9. Rams COO and EVP Kevin Demoff (who declined to comment for this story) told Fisher they were going in a different direction, which surprised the head coach—he had an idea he’d be fired but he thought he’d finish out the season.
Fisher tears up describing how he watched the bus pull away from the stadium on a Wednesday as the Rams set off to play Seattle before he packed up his office and left. “It’s a tough memory,” Fisher says, collecting himself. “Rejection is hard.”
“I think it’s really disrespectful in terms of what people are saying about him in terms of being the losing-est coach,” says George. “You flip that statistic on its ear, he’s only a couple wins away from being one of the top ten winningest coaches. Compare him to a Jon Gruden. You know, it’s the same thing. It’s just a matter of perspective—the only thing about Jeff is he fell a yard shy of tying for the Super Bowl and probably would’ve won it.”
The problem is that Fisher didn’t win it, and he’s tied with Dan Reeves for the most losses by a head coach. He and Gruden do have similar records. But Gruden has a Super Bowl and Fisher came a yard short. So Gruden has a coaching job, and Jeff Fisher has become synonymous with seven and nine.
“I think the 7–9 thing came from my comments on Hard Knocks when I was pissed at the team,” Fisher says. “I mean, that’s fine. I know that 7–9 or 8–8, that’s not good enough. I’m not a social media person, but how many positive comments do you see under anything that happens anymore? But you choose to get into this business, you know what comes along with it. I could read every little thing people write about me online, but I’d rather listen to Don Henley on the radio.”
Simon Bruty
Fisher is a numbers guy; ten years later, he still remembers the phone number that George called him from when he found out McNair had been murdered in Nashville (Fisher says he thinks about and misses McNair everyday). Fisher can recall the exact number of yards one of his running backs rushed for when he coached the Tennessee Oilers. He knows the length of every fish he caught in Alaska and Mexico and Montana.
Numbers tell a story, but different people decode them in different ways. Sometimes the takeaway is obvious, but in Fisher’s case, you can decide what to see. You might view Fisher’s first season with the Rams as a laughable “Jeff Fisher Day” 8–8, but he views it an improvement over the 2–14 team he inherited. You might look at his St. Louis team that never got above .500, but Fisher sees one ACL tear, several lost coaches, and moving 150 people across state lines to an uncertain future.
You might see the Rams’ 13–3 record under McVay as evidence that Fisher couldn’t get it done, but Fisher sees the No. 1 pick he drafted blossoming into the player he knew he’d be. You might laugh at Fisher’s career .512 average, but Fisher sees the two teams, five different cities and six different stadiums, and wonders how you expected him to do any better given the circumstances.
Many will think Fisher is making excuses or asking for opportunities he doesn’t deserve. Others might see his side. But he was a head coach in the NFL for over 20 years; no matter the results, he couldn’t have done it without being fiercely competitive. He had to have some level of blind faith in himself.
Fisher knows that 90% of the public perception of him is negative, but the only thing he can do to change that is get another job, win, and tip the scales in his favor so that there’s no debate as to how his story is told. A lasting legacy isn’t the only thing that’s driving Fisher, though. Yes, he wants to drink those ancient Dos Equis, but he genuinely does love taking care of people and misses working with players and a coaching staff. And to them, he’s much more than a one-dimensional Twitter joke.
“We all loved Coach Fish. A guy that looks out for players, and keeps it special, and takes all the sh** like he used to, and all of our struggles?” says Rodger Saffold, who played for Fisher in St. Louis and Los Angeles, and plays for McVay now. “You can’t do anything but fight for a guy like that.”
Gregg Williams, who was relieved of his duties as the Browns interim head coach on Wednesday, worked with Fisher in St. Louis and Los Angeles as his defensive coordinator in 2012 (Williams was suspended indefinitely that season for his role in the Saints’ Bountygate scandal) and from 2014-16. If Fisher were to get a head coaching offer, Williams would work for him as his defensive coordinator in a heartbeat.
“Fisher is the best I’ve ever been with on understanding all the different areas of football operations, on how coordinated they have to be to be able to win on a National Football League level,” Williams says. It’s not just about coaching, not just about players, not just about facilities. All those things have to go hand-in-hand, and he’s the best I’ve ever seen on understanding all of that.”
Fisher knows that people sarcastically call him the Quarterback Whisperer. He heard McFarland accuse him of ruining Goff during the broadcast of the high-scoring Chiefs-Rams game on Monday Night Football.
“When people say that I ‘ruin quarterbacks’?” Fisher says, doing air quotes with his hands. “I had a co-MVP in the National Football League as one of my quarterbacks. I had a rookie of the year as one of my quarterbacks. I had a really good quarterback when I took the job with the Rams who tore his ACL twice. ... And yes, I was deficient. I probably could’ve done a better job surrounding the quarterback with better people, better players, maybe better coaches. But it doesn’t mean to say that I’m a bad quarterback coach. I’m not a quarterback coach, I’m a head coach.”
That’s part of Fisher’s problem right now, given this coaching market: He’s not a quarterback coach. He holds up his success with the Titans and McNair, and his brief period of time where things worked with quarterback Vince Young before their relationship fell apart, as evidence that he can win. He points to his 10–0 start in Tennessee with journeyman Kerry Collins, as proof of what he can do.
“I wouldn’t say he ruins quarterbacks,” Saffold says. “But you know, he’s a defensive-minded coach, so you can only go as far as you can. But you never know what type of complication you’re going to get in a season, so I wouldn’t say he’s quarterback killer. It’s more about having the right combination of people around, the right combination of coaches.”
With a number of NFL offenses performing at historic rates, there’s little patience when a team isn’t producing. GMs are afforded more slack, but coaches who don’t win are fired. Steve Wilkes only had one year to try to turn around a sinking ship in Arizona with a roster that Bruce Arians let deteriorate.
Arians recently secured the Tampa Bay Buccaneers job, and the 39-year-old Kliff Kingsbury, the former USC offensive coordinator and Texas Tech head coach, is the new head coach in Arizona. Guys like Kingsbury, McVay and Matt Nagy, who took over a promising Bears roster from John Fox, are what teams want most.
“It doesn’t help that the Rams are successful now, because it’s a, ‘See, I told you so!’” George says. “You look at the Rams success now and you think, ‘What was Jeff Fisher doing?’ But they’re winning with his roster, the bulk of his guys he drafted. He knows how to build a team. We’ll see how it pans out down the line. But I think that Jeff’s a hell of a coach and I think he deserves an opportunity.”
Fisher wants one. He’s consulting for the Alliance of American Football, a new football league that will start up after the Super Bowl, but he turned down a job coaching one of the teams because he’s holding out hope he’ll get back into the NFL. When I ask him if a team’s reached out, he says, “maybe.” No NFL reporter has leaked his name yet. But he really thinks if he got a team with a quarterback and a good owner that he didn’t have to move, he could make something happen.
“I had a good run here in ‘99, in the stadium here, until 2010,” Fisher says. “When we got into a stadium and had a run. So you know, I stand behind my work.”
Jessica Smetana
Fisher and I leave the farm and drive to the famous Loveless Café for a late lunch. The walls are plastered with famous people from Nashville—mostly country singers, but there are some Titans are up there.
“Are you on the wall?” I ask him as we walk in.
“I don’t know,” Fisher says. “I used to be. They might’ve taken me down.”
We approach the hostess. Fisher asks if the owner is there (he knows him), but she isn’t sure. She says she can check, but Fisher tells her not to worry about it. He asks how long it’ll be for a table, and she says about 35 minutes.
“Let’s go somewhere else,” he says to me. “The wait is too long.”
Fisher thanks her and we turn to leave. He looks at the wall one more time, where a picture of the Music City Miracle is hanging. Fisher points to it and starts telling me how his son Brandon was just 10 years old, jumping up and down on the sidelines, when that happened. Now Brandon has a son of his own and has coached for his dad.
As Fisher walks back to the car where Dirk is waiting, wagging his tail, he relives the play. Per usual, he knows all the numbers: how many yards, how many seconds, how many years ago. But there’s no way to quantify how much he misses the game.
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https://www.si.com/nfl/2019/01/10/jeff-fisher-nfl-head-coach-nashville-farm
Jeff Fisher Is More Than Your 7–9 Jokes
As the NFL coaching carousel continues to aggressively spin—only two head coaching spots of eight remain open—one longtime NFL coach’s name hasn’t been part of the conversation. Some people might think it’s for good reason that Jeff Fisher hasn’t been considered (a .512 career coaching record over more than 20 years) but Fisher wants to be. What has the former Oilers/Titans and Rams head coach been up to lately? We travel to his farm in Nashville to find out.
By CHARLOTTE WILDER
Harry How/Getty Images
Jeff Fisher is careening down the side of a very steep hill on his ATV in the middle of the Tennessee woods. I’m sitting on the back, holding onto the machine for dear life. He’s probably only going about fifteen miles per hour, but that feels pretty fast when you’re rolling down a muddy path about four feet wide, ducking to avoid low-hanging tree branches and heading straight for a sizable stream. The 20 foot-wide body of water we’re hurtling towards is one of two creeks that intersect on Fisher’s farm about 20 miles outside of Nashville.
“Feet up, Char!” Fisher yells. The tires and footbed plunge in three feet of water, so I do as I’m told and lift my legs off of the four-wheeler’s floor to avoid getting soaked. Fisher plows through and rumbles up the bank on the other side. A hunk of Copenhagen chewing tobacco is lodged between Fisher’s teeth and lower lip.
He leans off the side of the ATV and spits, then looks back at me and launches into a story. All day he’s been telling me about players he’s kept in touch with, about parachuting out of a plane onto a practice field to surprise his team, about the rare fish he caught in Mexico, about his friendship with the late Bears great Walter Payton.
“It’s nice telling you my stories,” he says. “No one wants to hear my stories anymore. There’s a book in here somewhere, maybe. I wanted to wait until I was finished. Maybe I am finished.”
Eight NFL head coaches lost their jobs after the 2018 season, and there are currently two openings left. A few years ago—say, 2014—if Fisher weren’t with a team, his name would have come up when general managers were thinking of who to hire to lead their teams. Even as recently as last year, it was reported that Fisher was interested in a handful of head-coach openings.
But this year is different; franchises are looking for young offensive gurus, hoping to copy the success that the Los Angeles Rams have seen with the 32-year-old Sean McVay, the head coach they hired after firing Fisher midseason in 2016. The 60-year-old Fisher has lots of experience, but his mediocre season records have become a running joke among football fans.
Fisher adjusts his backwards camo baseball hat and revs the engine, lurching forward up a hill as steep as the one he just shot down. He’s showing me all 300 acres of his farm, which he wants to start renting out as a wedding venue. There were rumors that Fisher had a 9,000 square-foot cabin in the hills outside Nashville, but the truth is that everyone was off by a zero: It’s 900. If he rents the property out for weddings, he’ll have to put up a tent.
Fisher has largely disappeared from the public sphere in the last two years. As you watch the players he once coached who are now in the playoffs—Rams QB Jared Goff, Rams RB Todd Gurley, Eagles QB Nick Foles—you might think to yourself, “What’s Jeff Fisher up to?” Well, he’s driving ATVs through the woods, but he’s mostly hunting and fishing in Tennessee and Montana, traveling to Alaska and Argentina to hunt and fish more, and consulting for the new league Alliance of American Football. He knows he’s become a punch line.
He heard Booger McFarland say on SportsCenter, “Shame on you, Jeff Fisher, because you had America thinking Jared Goff was a bust.” He’s heard your jokes about his 7–9 and 8–8 seasons, his .512 career record, about Aug. 8 being known as “Jeff Fisher Day”. He knows you use numbers to make fun of him, and he believes there’s a story behind them that you don’t see.
“You want to know if I’m sitting here waiting for my phone to ring, to have an NFL team call me?” Fisher asked. “Maybe I’ll be hunting and fishing the rest of my life. I’ve made my peace with it. But yeah, I’d love to coach again. I miss the players. I just want to get back to the players. I go back to what Bum Phillips said. ‘There are two kinds of coaches: Those who got fired and those who are going to get fired.’ You’re all going to get fired at some point. Not all, but 99%. It’s rare for a player or a coach to walk away on his own terms.”
But Fisher hopes to one day get another chance to try.
Jessica Smetana
It’s 9:30 a.m. on Jan. 3, and Fisher is driving out to his farm in his huge black Chevy Silverado. He’s wearing a sporty Patagonia hoodie, down vest and jeans that fit well. He’s been taking better care of himself since he got fired; he gave up drinking a year ago—even though he still has a huge collection of red wine—and lost 30 pounds.
He still has his signature mustache, and there’s a pair of reading glasses hanging around his neck, the kind with magnets between the nose bridge so he can easily pull them on and off. Raiders coach Jon Gruden wears them, too. Fisher says he’s the one who told Gruden about them.
Dirk, a six-month-old reddish Golden Retriever, wiggles in the backseat. Fisher picked him up from a breeder in Wyoming and sat with the dog for about half an hour in the front seat before he took him home, the two of them just staring at each other. Fisher doesn’t really know why he named him Dirk.
“I just looked at him and I thought, ‘Man, he looks like a Dirk,’” Fisher says, spitting tobacco into an empty coffee cup. He’s gotten healthier, yes, but the multiple tins of Copenhagen in his center console show a vice that remains.
He asks if people call me Char, and I tell him some do. “Okay, Char,” he says. He gives off a Big Lebowski vibe, an easy familiarity extends to everyone he encounters; servers at restaurants, the baristas at Starbucks, the guy fixing the tires on his son’s truck.
Fisher pulls up to the wrought-iron gate that sits at the top of the driveway. He squeezes the truck through, waving to his friend Jody who manages the farm, and parks the huge truck by the front porch of his tiny cabin. He enjoys helping people, figuring out what they need, giving it to them. He recently flew back to Montana for a day to take his parents to a wedding, which was outside in the cold, because he didn’t want them slipping on the ice.
He once suggested that one of his players, Joe Barksdale, take up guitar; two years later, Barksdale sent Fisher two pictures, one of his daughter and one of his album cover. When Fisher’s neighbor evicted Jody from the house he lived in on the property, Fisher bought the land back with the house on it. Jody lives there again.
“I loved playing for Jeff,” says Eddie George, a former Titans running back. “He’s the consummate players coach. He gave us range and freedom to be men, but held us accountable inside the locker room to get our job done. He knew how to coach the person, not just the player. And it was more like he was really interested in our lives, our families lives, what made us tick. He knew how to inspire, mentor, nourish and cultivate guys. He’s a people’s person for sure.”
Keith Bulluck, a linebacker for the Titans from 2000-09, agrees. “Depending on who you were, he would handle things differently. He treated Eddie differently than Frank, and Frank differently than Steve, you know? He just had a good gauge on his players' personalities and what not, that made him an effective coach by knowing his players. Not just as what they could do on the field but who they are as a person.”
Fisher lets Dirk out of the truck and the dog takes off across the field. He walks into the house; it’s a small but intricately designed and carefully considered space made of pine from the property, with details like a deer carved into the back of the door. A rack of wine Fisher won’t drink anytime soon is fixed to the wall, and a hunting bow hangs off it. He likes bows more than rifles, because the hunt feels like an even match between him and the animal. There’s something spiritual about it.
“It’s not the shooting or the killing,” he says. “I’m not into that. But I enjoy the sport of getting close.”
Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images
Fisher’s a charming, fun guy to be around, which might be a part of why he’s, well, been around so long. Born in Culver City, Calif., Fisher went to USC on a football scholarship and was picked by the Bears in the seventh round of the 1981 NFL draft. He wasn’t a great player, but Chicago defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan recognized that Fisher had a mind for defense and asked him to serve as another set of eyes.
“It was a blast, I got to see [that defense] come together,” Fisher says. “I witnessed every moment of every game. … The ’85 Bears were the ’85 Bears. It was a bunch of tough, tough guys. I mean, I’ll say this: it was a bunch of badasses.”
After Chicago crushed New England in Super Bowl XX, Fisher took a box of beer from the party in the hotel and shipped it back to Chicago. He was selling software on his one day off; he made more money slinging floppy disks than he did playing in the NFL, even when you factor in his Super Bowl bonus. So he wasn’t about to pass up free booze. When he got home and unpacked it, he realized the brand was Dos Equis. XX. Super Bowl 20.
Ryan was offered the head-coaching job in Philadelphia after the Bears’ championship and he wanted Fisher to coach the defensive backs, despite the fact that Fisher had one year left on his contract with Chicago. According to Fisher, Ryan wouldn’t take no for an answer. “[Ryan] goes, ‘You aren’t going to try to play again, are you? … Talk to your fiancé and tell her you’re going to get into coaching because you can’t freakin’ play anymore. You’re not any good.’”
Fisher was promoted to the Eagles’ defensive coordinator in 1988, and he coached for the Rams and the 49ers before the Houston Oilers announced they were hiring him midseason to be their new head coach in 1994.
A year later, Oilers owner Bud Adams announced he was moving the team to Nashville for the 1998 season. It would be the first of two moves Fisher would oversee as head coach, and it subjected the team to a handful of nomad seasons, during which they played in Memphis and at Vanderbilt. Fisher says the year in Memphis,—which is two-and-a-half hours from Nashville, where the players practiced and lived—was like playing 16 road games. The team went 8–8 both seasons.
“The single worst thing you can have for winning and losing is distractions,” Fisher says. “Moving is a distraction. I kept preaching we have to keep the players first. In Houston we had an 800 number on the wall and told players when we were leaving, we said ‘Call the mover, he’ll get you there.’ Players were like, where’s camp? And we didn’t know yet, so we just had to tell them to move to Nashville. But we’re gonna play in Memphis. Players would be like, ‘How far is Memphis from Nashville?’ And we’d say ‘…never mind.’”
Once the team finally got into Adelphia Coliseum (which is now Nissan Stadium) Fisher started to cook. In 1999 the Titans, led by QB Steve McNair, came a yard short of winning Super Bowl XXXIV against the Rams.
“I have eight bottles of [the 1985 Dos Equis] left,” Fisher says. “That have survived move after move after move. I’ve been saving those to consume after I won a Super Bowl. So those eight bottles are lucky, cause they got about a yard away from being opened. I came a yard short. And I would not have gone for two.
I would not have potentially robbed my team or taken a Super Bowl championship away from them because of a decision that I made. I felt like the Rams were absolutely done on defense and we would win the game in overtime, so I would’ve gone for an extra point. But I came a yard short.”
John Rivera/Icon SMI
Fisher says everyone thinks he was fired, but he left Tennessee voluntarily. The Titans front office confirms his story: with one year left on Fisher’s contract and a lot of big decisions to make, it made more sense for both sides to walk away. In 2012 Fisher took the head-coaching job in St. Louis because he liked the owner, Stan Kroenke, and the promising quarterback Sam Bradford. It seemed like a great set up, but Fisher had no idea what challenges he was about to face.
After going 7-8-1 in his first year as head coach in St. Louis, Fisher lost his QB when Bradford tore his ACL in Week 7 of the 2013 season. In a cruel twist of fate, Bradford re-tore his ACL in the ’14 preseason. Then Kroenke announced that he was moving the team to Los Angeles. Fisher says he had a hard time holding onto coaches and hiring new ones with a huge change looming over the franchise. And having once dealt with the distractions, logistics, and complications that come with relocating a franchise, he didn’t blame them.
“The Raiders are … in for an experience. And don’t call me,” he says with a laugh when talking about Oakland’s impending move to Las Vegas. “You know, I’ll help you Jon [Gruden], I offered to help you, but I’ve been through that before.” He turns to me. “I mean, have you moved and relocated?
“Yeah,” I say, “It’s miserable.”
“It’s miserable, OK. Well have 150 people who work for you doing the same thing. And when they have problems, they come to you. Or plan it for all of them. Good luck, Jon Gruden.”
Fisher traded up to draft Goff with the No. 1 pick in 2016. He says he initially didn’t make Goff the starter so the rookie could adjust to the NFL, but his decision to start Case Keenum at quarterback instead drew plenty of criticism.
After a 3–1 start that season, things began to fall apart until, after a particularly embarrassing loss to Atlanta, the team sat 4-9. Rams COO and EVP Kevin Demoff (who declined to comment for this story) told Fisher they were going in a different direction, which surprised the head coach—he had an idea he’d be fired but he thought he’d finish out the season.
Fisher tears up describing how he watched the bus pull away from the stadium on a Wednesday as the Rams set off to play Seattle before he packed up his office and left. “It’s a tough memory,” Fisher says, collecting himself. “Rejection is hard.”
“I think it’s really disrespectful in terms of what people are saying about him in terms of being the losing-est coach,” says George. “You flip that statistic on its ear, he’s only a couple wins away from being one of the top ten winningest coaches. Compare him to a Jon Gruden. You know, it’s the same thing. It’s just a matter of perspective—the only thing about Jeff is he fell a yard shy of tying for the Super Bowl and probably would’ve won it.”
The problem is that Fisher didn’t win it, and he’s tied with Dan Reeves for the most losses by a head coach. He and Gruden do have similar records. But Gruden has a Super Bowl and Fisher came a yard short. So Gruden has a coaching job, and Jeff Fisher has become synonymous with seven and nine.
“I think the 7–9 thing came from my comments on Hard Knocks when I was pissed at the team,” Fisher says. “I mean, that’s fine. I know that 7–9 or 8–8, that’s not good enough. I’m not a social media person, but how many positive comments do you see under anything that happens anymore? But you choose to get into this business, you know what comes along with it. I could read every little thing people write about me online, but I’d rather listen to Don Henley on the radio.”
Simon Bruty
Fisher is a numbers guy; ten years later, he still remembers the phone number that George called him from when he found out McNair had been murdered in Nashville (Fisher says he thinks about and misses McNair everyday). Fisher can recall the exact number of yards one of his running backs rushed for when he coached the Tennessee Oilers. He knows the length of every fish he caught in Alaska and Mexico and Montana.
Numbers tell a story, but different people decode them in different ways. Sometimes the takeaway is obvious, but in Fisher’s case, you can decide what to see. You might view Fisher’s first season with the Rams as a laughable “Jeff Fisher Day” 8–8, but he views it an improvement over the 2–14 team he inherited. You might look at his St. Louis team that never got above .500, but Fisher sees one ACL tear, several lost coaches, and moving 150 people across state lines to an uncertain future.
You might see the Rams’ 13–3 record under McVay as evidence that Fisher couldn’t get it done, but Fisher sees the No. 1 pick he drafted blossoming into the player he knew he’d be. You might laugh at Fisher’s career .512 average, but Fisher sees the two teams, five different cities and six different stadiums, and wonders how you expected him to do any better given the circumstances.
Many will think Fisher is making excuses or asking for opportunities he doesn’t deserve. Others might see his side. But he was a head coach in the NFL for over 20 years; no matter the results, he couldn’t have done it without being fiercely competitive. He had to have some level of blind faith in himself.
Fisher knows that 90% of the public perception of him is negative, but the only thing he can do to change that is get another job, win, and tip the scales in his favor so that there’s no debate as to how his story is told. A lasting legacy isn’t the only thing that’s driving Fisher, though. Yes, he wants to drink those ancient Dos Equis, but he genuinely does love taking care of people and misses working with players and a coaching staff. And to them, he’s much more than a one-dimensional Twitter joke.
“We all loved Coach Fish. A guy that looks out for players, and keeps it special, and takes all the sh** like he used to, and all of our struggles?” says Rodger Saffold, who played for Fisher in St. Louis and Los Angeles, and plays for McVay now. “You can’t do anything but fight for a guy like that.”
Gregg Williams, who was relieved of his duties as the Browns interim head coach on Wednesday, worked with Fisher in St. Louis and Los Angeles as his defensive coordinator in 2012 (Williams was suspended indefinitely that season for his role in the Saints’ Bountygate scandal) and from 2014-16. If Fisher were to get a head coaching offer, Williams would work for him as his defensive coordinator in a heartbeat.
“Fisher is the best I’ve ever been with on understanding all the different areas of football operations, on how coordinated they have to be to be able to win on a National Football League level,” Williams says. It’s not just about coaching, not just about players, not just about facilities. All those things have to go hand-in-hand, and he’s the best I’ve ever seen on understanding all of that.”
Fisher knows that people sarcastically call him the Quarterback Whisperer. He heard McFarland accuse him of ruining Goff during the broadcast of the high-scoring Chiefs-Rams game on Monday Night Football.
“When people say that I ‘ruin quarterbacks’?” Fisher says, doing air quotes with his hands. “I had a co-MVP in the National Football League as one of my quarterbacks. I had a rookie of the year as one of my quarterbacks. I had a really good quarterback when I took the job with the Rams who tore his ACL twice. ... And yes, I was deficient. I probably could’ve done a better job surrounding the quarterback with better people, better players, maybe better coaches. But it doesn’t mean to say that I’m a bad quarterback coach. I’m not a quarterback coach, I’m a head coach.”
That’s part of Fisher’s problem right now, given this coaching market: He’s not a quarterback coach. He holds up his success with the Titans and McNair, and his brief period of time where things worked with quarterback Vince Young before their relationship fell apart, as evidence that he can win. He points to his 10–0 start in Tennessee with journeyman Kerry Collins, as proof of what he can do.
“I wouldn’t say he ruins quarterbacks,” Saffold says. “But you know, he’s a defensive-minded coach, so you can only go as far as you can. But you never know what type of complication you’re going to get in a season, so I wouldn’t say he’s quarterback killer. It’s more about having the right combination of people around, the right combination of coaches.”
With a number of NFL offenses performing at historic rates, there’s little patience when a team isn’t producing. GMs are afforded more slack, but coaches who don’t win are fired. Steve Wilkes only had one year to try to turn around a sinking ship in Arizona with a roster that Bruce Arians let deteriorate.
Arians recently secured the Tampa Bay Buccaneers job, and the 39-year-old Kliff Kingsbury, the former USC offensive coordinator and Texas Tech head coach, is the new head coach in Arizona. Guys like Kingsbury, McVay and Matt Nagy, who took over a promising Bears roster from John Fox, are what teams want most.
“It doesn’t help that the Rams are successful now, because it’s a, ‘See, I told you so!’” George says. “You look at the Rams success now and you think, ‘What was Jeff Fisher doing?’ But they’re winning with his roster, the bulk of his guys he drafted. He knows how to build a team. We’ll see how it pans out down the line. But I think that Jeff’s a hell of a coach and I think he deserves an opportunity.”
Fisher wants one. He’s consulting for the Alliance of American Football, a new football league that will start up after the Super Bowl, but he turned down a job coaching one of the teams because he’s holding out hope he’ll get back into the NFL. When I ask him if a team’s reached out, he says, “maybe.” No NFL reporter has leaked his name yet. But he really thinks if he got a team with a quarterback and a good owner that he didn’t have to move, he could make something happen.
“I had a good run here in ‘99, in the stadium here, until 2010,” Fisher says. “When we got into a stadium and had a run. So you know, I stand behind my work.”
Jessica Smetana
Fisher and I leave the farm and drive to the famous Loveless Café for a late lunch. The walls are plastered with famous people from Nashville—mostly country singers, but there are some Titans are up there.
“Are you on the wall?” I ask him as we walk in.
“I don’t know,” Fisher says. “I used to be. They might’ve taken me down.”
We approach the hostess. Fisher asks if the owner is there (he knows him), but she isn’t sure. She says she can check, but Fisher tells her not to worry about it. He asks how long it’ll be for a table, and she says about 35 minutes.
“Let’s go somewhere else,” he says to me. “The wait is too long.”
Fisher thanks her and we turn to leave. He looks at the wall one more time, where a picture of the Music City Miracle is hanging. Fisher points to it and starts telling me how his son Brandon was just 10 years old, jumping up and down on the sidelines, when that happened. Now Brandon has a son of his own and has coached for his dad.
As Fisher walks back to the car where Dirk is waiting, wagging his tail, he relives the play. Per usual, he knows all the numbers: how many yards, how many seconds, how many years ago. But there’s no way to quantify how much he misses the game.
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Locked
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Poll
Rams vs Cowgurlz Edition
- By RamFan503
- RAMS / NFL TALK
- 15 Replies
I will try to keep up on these. It may not be daily and I will also probably be posting some trivia from the NFL as a whole. Good luck and have fun.
Note: These questions may change almost daily. I will lock them as soon as I post the answer and then unsticky them a day or so later.
OK so here is the deal. Years ago I found an LA Rams Trivia Game in a Goodwill. I pretty much bought it as a piece of memorabilia. Now with the Rams moving back, I thought it might make for a fun game for some of us old timers. Odd thing is that about 70% of the questions have nothing to do with the Rams.
So here is what I will do. I will post the questions that are Rams related and let you guys answer. I will then post the answers the next day. These are not easy questions as far as I can tell but maybe the memory function of my brain has been compromised.
.
There is only basically one rule. No search engines or internet sites to look up answers that you will post later. I realize some will still look up the answers. I know I would if I didn't have the cards. But I want to see how many out there actually know the answers. So if you do feel like looking them up on the internet, feel free.
And if you know the answer, don't post it. Comment all you want.
Now - keep in mind. I said the internet is off limits. But if you have books, magazines, football cards, etc... feel free to use them. That may seem hypocritical but it's about time some of us got some use out of all that stuff we've bought over the years.
Cheers.
Note: These questions may change almost daily. I will lock them as soon as I post the answer and then unsticky them a day or so later.
OK so here is the deal. Years ago I found an LA Rams Trivia Game in a Goodwill. I pretty much bought it as a piece of memorabilia. Now with the Rams moving back, I thought it might make for a fun game for some of us old timers. Odd thing is that about 70% of the questions have nothing to do with the Rams.
So here is what I will do. I will post the questions that are Rams related and let you guys answer. I will then post the answers the next day. These are not easy questions as far as I can tell but maybe the memory function of my brain has been compromised.
.
There is only basically one rule. No search engines or internet sites to look up answers that you will post later. I realize some will still look up the answers. I know I would if I didn't have the cards. But I want to see how many out there actually know the answers. So if you do feel like looking them up on the internet, feel free.
And if you know the answer, don't post it. Comment all you want.
Now - keep in mind. I said the internet is off limits. But if you have books, magazines, football cards, etc... feel free to use them. That may seem hypocritical but it's about time some of us got some use out of all that stuff we've bought over the years.
Cheers.
Todd Gurley's gloves
- By whitedk57
- RAMS / NFL TALK
- 6 Replies
Can somebody explain what Todd has written inside his gloves?
Rams Entrance Song Saturday Night
- RAMS / NFL TALK
- 83 Replies
I think this can be a well it has potential to be....a hot ROD topic to mix it up. I know some of the Mods have connections to Kevin Demoff. So if I had a choice or I won some prestigous NFL.com contest to request an entrance song of our Los Angeles Rams into the LA Coliseum field it would be this... Feel free to include yours. I'm still expecting to see results. Hands down. Please share yours! Btw FUCK U MEDIA!
Login to view embedded media View: https://youtu.be/7m7njvwB-Ks
:rockon:
Dimebagdarrell Darrell Akways
Login to view embedded media View: https://youtu.be/7m7njvwB-Ks
:rockon:
Dimebagdarrell Darrell Akways
