Rams hit rock bottom with loss to Arizona Cardinals

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INGLEWOOD – Even if the Rams had made a final stop. Even if Chad Ryland’s sixth field goal hadn’t gone through the uprights. Even if the Rams had found some way to pull out a win on Sunday against the Arizona Cardinals instead of the stunning 18-16 defeat they suffered, Sean McVay wouldn’t have gone home feeling like his team had turned a corner.

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“Collectively, even if we had come away with the result, it’s not good enough,” the head coach said. “There’s just so many things that aren’t in alignment with what we need to be able to do and we gotta be able to figure it out.”

But instead of a win to sweeten up the medicine of Monday’s film review, the Rams have fallen to an unthinkable 2-4 start to the season. And instead of wondering if this could be a turning point, the Rams were left with questions that McVay and the players did not know how to answer in another dumbstruck locker room.

Like why the team keeps beating itself. You can forgive Josh Wallace’s unnecessary roughness that led to Ryland’s buzzer-beating field goal. It was a bang-bang play that could have gone without a flag.

But a Byron Young offside led to another Arizona (2-4) field goal. Warren McClendon’s false start turned a fourth-quarter fourth down into 4th-and-8, leading to an incomplete screen pass and a turnover on downs.

“I don’t have those answers right now, otherwise, it would have gotten fixed,” McVay said. “That’s what our narrative has been for this year. And we can’t keep saying, ‘Oh, that we haven’t done that before.’ Well, this year we are doing it. So we have to be able to fix it, and it’s my job to do that.”

“We can’t hurt ourselves. It’s the NFL, everybody’s good,” added center Coleman Shelton. “You don’t want to play against two teams out there, them and yourself.”

Or why special teams continues to be an issue. You could hear the exhale in the cheers from the 72,573 fans at SoFi Stadium. A week after two missed field goals sank the Rams and led to Harrison Mevis’ release, new kicker Blake Grupe was true on his first attempt.

But bad coverage on the ensuing kickoff return left Grupe as one of the last lines of defense. He made the tackle, but stayed down. He tried to limp across to the Rams’ sideline, but went down at midfield before trainers came to his aid.

Grupe soon headed to the locker room with a knee injury. Punter Ethan Evans began practicing place kicking with receiver Jordan Whittington holding for him.

That absence quickly trickled down to the rest of the game. The Rams went for two after their only touchdown of the day, only for quarterback Matthew Stafford to get pummeled from behind. McVay called timeouts at the end of the second quarter to give his offense a chance to score, only to hand the ball off twice with 46 seconds left without the chance at a field goal, drawing boos from the disgruntled home crowd as the team went into halftime.

But Grupe’s absence doesn’t explain how lifelessly the offense played for much of the game. Halfway through the fourth quarter, the team only had 162 yards of total offense.

The unit had one first down and zero third-down conversions in its first three possessions. Even after a Quentin Lake interception at the Arizona 32, the Rams couldn’t get more than a field goal.

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Then there were the head-scratching decisions, like fourth-and-inches, down three, struggling to string anything positive together all day. McVay trotted out his 13-personnel, with heavy hitters Kyren Williams and Puka Nacua ready and available.

Instead, the Rams handed the ball to tight end Davis Allen for his first career carry. Colby Parkinson crashed down to double-team a defensive lineman, as linebackers Mack Wilson and Jack Gibbens crashed down to tackle Allen for no gain and a turnover on downs.

The play – simultaneously trying too hard in its design and lifeless in its execution – was the perfect summary of everything wrong with the Rams.

“I thought the defense did enough to keep us in the game but any time that we’d string a little bit of momentum, we’d turn it over, we’d take a negative, we’d jump offsides,” McVay said. “And so we have to look at ourselves and we have to be able to go back to the drawing board and figure out how they improve. We have to be able to not beat ourselves before we figure out how to even come away with some of the results.”

Before the year, the Rams were prohibitive Super Bowl favorites. A team that came a couple plays short of winning the NFC the year before adding Myles Garrett, Aaron Donald and Trent McDuffie, the expectations couldn’t have been higher.

McVay warned his players publicly and privately that teams aren’t crowned in August. And yet those expectations seem to have weighed down this team that played with such joy in 2025.

Players denied that noise had impacted them. McVay couldn’t say definitively, though.

“I’m not really sure,” he said. “I don’t worry about that, I just know that we’re not playing good enough football in general.”

In years past, McVay has used the bye week to reset and determine how to connect with his team. But the team isn’t off until Week 11, and even that break will be cut short due to the Wednesday night game the following week.

There’s no built-in chance to regroup. The Rams will have to figure it out on the fly before next week’s game against the Las Vegas Raiders, or dig themselves a deeper hole.

“We are what our record is,” Stafford said, “and we gotta obviously try to find a way to be better.”

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This story was originally published October 18, 2026 at 4:39 PM.