playBill BarnwellOct 19, 2026, 08:10 AM ETCloseBill Barnwell is a senior NFL writer for ESPN.com. He analyzes football on and off the field like no one else on the planet, writing about in-season X’s and O’s, offseason transactions and so much more. He is the host of the Bill Barnwell Show podcast, with episodes released weekly. Barnwell joined ESPN in 2011 as a staff writer at Grantland.Multiple AuthorsOpen Extended ReactionsIt was one thing when the Rams could explain away their losses to good teams with excuses.They lost to the 49ers in Melbourne to start the 2026 season because they tried to reimagine jet lag.
They lost to the Broncos in Denver in a close Week 3 game that turned on a pick-six. And they lost to the Bills at home on “Monday Night Football” in Week 5 when their special teams melted down yet again. Losing three games to three of the six best teams in the NFL in terms of win-loss record since the start of 2025 was disappointing … but it wasn’t alarming.Well, the alarms are now going off in Los Angeles. On Sunday, the Rams lost 18-16 at home to a 1-4 Cardinals team, the sort of defeat that inspires soul searching and painful self-reflection.
Any team can lose when the turnovers don’t bounce its way or an injury unexpectedly costs it a key player, but neither of those were the case against Arizona. And while the Rams lost new kicker Blake Grupe to an early-game knee injury, special teams weren’t really to blame for the loss, either.Are the 2-4 Rams, who were the prohibitive favorites to win the Super Bowl after acquiring Myles Garrett and Trent McDuffie and bringing Aaron Donald out of retirement this offseason, just not very good? Do we know enough after six games to say with confidence that the superteam Rams we expected to see heading into the season aren’t ever going to show up on the field in 2026? Is it time to write them off as Super Bowl contenders?Subscribe: ‘The Bill Barnwell Show’One thing I can say for sure: To live up to the preseason hype and win the Super Bowl, the Rams will have to do something no NFL team has ever done before.
If the Rams even make it to the Super Bowl, they would be the first team in NFL history to post a losing record through six weeks and still manage to win its conference in the Super Bowl era. Playing in an era with a 17-game regular season and 14 playoff teams makes a potential turnaround a little easier for the Rams, but they would have to break 60 years of precedent to overcome this slow start.Do they have any hope of making that sort of turnaround? I’m going to take a deep dive into what has gone wrong for the Rams, how it cost them the game against the Cardinals and whether they can expect things to get better in the weeks to come. There’s no single glaring problem, but there are real issues that need to be addressed if the preseason favorites want to get their title chase back on track.
Let’s run through what our expectations were in August and how things have differed through Week 6.Jump to: Quarterback play | Playcalling 13 personnel usage | Run game Pass rush | Special teams Super Bowl favoritesExpectation: The Rams have an MVP-caliber quarterback.After seeing Matthew Stafford light up the league in 2025, it wasn’t difficult to imagine the Rams’ starting QB playing at a high level again in 2026. The Rams were returning everyone who played at least 100 snaps for them on offense a year ago outside of right tackle Rob Havenstein, who retired during the offseason. Stafford was returning as a 38-year-old quarterback, but after sitting out most of the preseason in 2025 with a back issue before delivering the best campaign of his career, there weren’t many people projecting a major step backward.Stafford hasn’t been awful or missed time, but he’s definitely not playing at the level we saw in 2025. He was fourth in Total QBR a year ago; now he sits 14th through six games.
He’s 15th in EPA per dropback and 17th in passer rating among qualifying quarterbacks, ranking one spot below Deshaun Watson by the latter metric. While passer rating is a more flawed metric than QBR or EPA per play, Stafford ranking below Watson in any QB metric wasn’t supposed to be in the cards in 2026.Some elements of what Stafford did in 2025 were always going to be difficult to sustain. He threw interceptions on just 1.3% of his pass attempts — his lowest full-season interception rate as a pro — with eight picks through 17 games last year. Stafford already has six INTs in six games this time around.
While his 2.4% interception rate in 2026 would be on the higher end, it wouldn’t in itself be disqualifying; Stafford posted a 2.8% interception rate in his first season with the Rams, when he led the NFL in picks but also led his team to a championship.I don’t see any marked change in Stafford’s arm strength, which has always been a cornerstone of his success as a pro. Stafford doesn’t look compromised as a thrower on a consistent basis in the way that someone such as Peyton Manning was during his final season with the Broncos or Drew Brees was by the time he made it to the playoffs in his last season with the Saints. There are throws here and there where Stafford doesn’t look like he has the zip of a decade ago, but those plays were present in 2025, too.Calling on that arm strength for consistently accurate throws, however, has been a concern. Stafford’s accuracy wasn’t necessarily his calling card as a pro, but his ball placement has grown more scattershot, even on plays in which he’s operating out of a clean pocket and isn’t under duress.
ESPN tracks a metric called precise pass rate, which measures how often a quarterback delivers throws that hit his target in stride in the torso area. Stafford was 18th in precise pass rate when unpressured in 2025. This season, he’s all the way down at 28th. His off-target rate on those throws has fallen from 20th to 25th.Stafford usually makes up for those misses by creating chunk plays more often than other quarterbacks.
Yet here, again, the Rams are struggling. Stafford averaged 15.5 yards per attempt on his deep pass attempts last season, the fifth-best rate in the league. This year, that’s down to just 9.7 yards per attempt, which is 25th.While the Rams didn’t have Puka Nacua for a stretch, Stafford’s at least partly to blame here. In 2025, his completion percentage over expectation (CPOE) on those deep throws was at plus-5.8%, one of the best marks in the league per NFL Next Gen Stats.
This year, his CPOE on deep pass attempts is at minus-8.5% — a 14.3 percentage point swing. Stafford has already thrown four interceptions on deep shots in 2026 after tossing just one all season in 2025.Misses can feel like turnovers, and Stafford will look back and rue a critical miss against the Cardinals on Sunday. His only deep pass attempt of the game came in the third quarter, when Nacua torched Max Melton with a double-move. Nobody was within 11 yards of Nacua by the time the ball arrived, but Stafford was under pressure and took a hit from Josh Sweat and Roy Lopez as the ball was released.
What should have been a 65-yard touchdown turned into an incompletion, and the drive ended without points.The Rams narrowly miss a long touchdown pass to Puka Nacua pic.twitter.com/UcZSHwkCR0— Bill Barnwell (@billbarnwell) October 19, 2026 Given their playmakers and Stafford’s ability to diagnose blitzes and get the ball out to the right spot, defenses should be terrified of blitzing the Rams. A year ago, Stafford ranked sixth in the NFL in QBR against the blitz. This year, with the quarterback perhaps a step slower and the offense not humming at quite the same level, he’s 22nd. He was even lower in the ranks (26th) before going 12-of-14 for 123 yards with a touchdown against Arizona’s blitzes Sunday.What made Stafford so appealing to coach Sean McVay as an alternative to Jared Goff was his ability to create outside of structure and produce as a dropback passer when defenses weren’t compromised b
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