I have a lot to say about the Super Bowl, so let’s dispense with the preamble and jump right to it.
How We Got Here
Before we get to the game itself, I think we should take some time to look at how these two teams made it to this point. It’s always an interesting exercise, and it’s even more so this year, because I’m not sure two teams can come from more opposite directions than these two have.
To really put it in perspective, let’s jump backwards three years. In early 2019 the Rams were preparing for a Super Bowl appearance, with a core led by Jared Goff and the young, exciting coach Sean McVay. In two years with McVay they had gone from four wins to thirteen wins, and they looked ready to compete at the highest level for a long time.
Things were a bit bumpier than expected for the Rams over the next three years, but they remained as committed to competing in the immediate-term as any team we have ever seen. The Rams haven’t had a first round pick since 2016, as they have traded away those selections for proven stars Brandin Cooks, Jalen Ramsey, and Matthew Stafford. Ramsey and Stafford are still crucial parts of this team, and they’ve added other impact veterans like Von Miller, Odell Beckham, and Leonard Floyd. Outside of Aaron Donald and Cooper Kupp, basically none of the most important players on this team were drafted by the Rams.
Cincinnati has followed as different a path as possible. Three years ago they were on the verge of starting over, having parted finally ways with Marvin Lewis after sixteen years with him at the helm. At the time they may have internally entertained notions they could still win with a core built around Andy Dalton, AJ Green, and Geno Atkins, but everyone looking from the outside knew they were in store for a major rebuild.
I don’t think anyone expected the rebuild to happen quite this quickly however. They crashed hard in 2019, and they timed it perfectly to end up with the first pick the year the best quarterback prospect in the past decade was available. They got further luck when Joe Burrow went down early in his rookie year, leaving them in position to add Ja’Marr Chase to their offense.
Nailing these two selections was the key to their rebuild, but they weren’t the only crucial selections the Bengals made in this time. Jonah Williams and Tee Higgins aren’t stars, but they are solid contributors on an explosive offense. And the fact that so many of their most important players are on rookie contracts has given them the ability to build depth through free agency.
While the Rams are a top-heavy team supported by expensive superstars, the Bengals are built from a lot of young, cheap players supplemented by a supporting cast of smart veteran additions. Not all of these moves have worked out—Trae Waynes and Riley Reiff have both been stifled by injuries—but they have had the flexibility to make so many moves that they could weather a couple of misses, as they’ve built a defensive core quickly with players like Trey Hendrickson, DJ Reader, Chidobe Awuzie, and Mike Hilton.
If you had told anyone three years ago the Rams would be playing in the Super Bowl in 2022, they would have rolled their eyes and told you that was the most obvious prediction imaginable. If you had told them they’d be facing the Bengals, they would have laughed in your face. The contrast in these two teams is an exciting reminder that there are multiple paths to success in the NFL, and should give other teams plenty of possibilities as they try to map out their futures to reach this point.
Aaron Donald vs No One
The best player on the field on Sunday will be Donald. He has a case for being the best player in the NFL right now, and when you look at his career as a whole, he might be one of the five greatest players in the history of football. This clearly isn’t news, but it bears repeating as much as possible. He can single-handedly destroy an opposing offense, and he’ll have plenty of opportunities to do so against the Bengals.
I honestly struggle to think of a bigger mismatch in the entire NFL than Donald going against Cincinnati’s interior offensive line. The Bengals have one of the worst pass-protecting units in the NFL, and its weakest point is right in the middle, where Donald does his best work. Cincinnati surrendered the third-most sacks of any team in the league this year, and just three weeks ago they gave up nine in a single game to Tennessee. Most of these came up the middle, including three to Jeffrey Simmons playing the same role in the Titans defense that Donald does in the Rams.
I’m not really sure how the Bengals line hopes to do anything to slow down Donald. They can send two blockers his way, but Donald faces more double-teams than any other player in the league, and two competent NFL linemen are usually not enough to stop him, much less what Cincinnati has to offer. They can send three players his way, and hope that their tackles can hold up totally isolated against Miller and Floyd on the edge. And even then, I’m not sure three of Cincinnati’s best will be more than just speedbumps to Donald.
Donald is going to spend most of this game in the backfield. He’ll blow up their running game, and he will harass Burrow from the opening snap to the final whistle. I’d honestly be tempted just to send one blocker his way, because I’m not sure a second or a third really adds that much marginal value. He’s going to get pressure on the quarterback, and Burrow will likely spend another day picking himself up off the ground.
That’s where things could get interesting though. Maybe I am overthinking this, but in a weird way I think there’s a chance Cincinnati’s weakness on the interior of the offensive line may make them the perfect team to face Donald. Because ordinary offenses are completely thrown off when their line breaks down against such a superhuman force. But for Cincinnati, a defensive tackle running untouched into the backfield is pretty much just another day in the office.
The key to all of this is Burrow. Part of the reason an interior pass rush is so effective is the mental strain it places on the quarterback. Edge pressure strikes unexpected, but interior pressure is right there in front of the passer. He sees it the entire way, and after a few series of watching someone like Donald charge into the backfield, most quarterbacks get flustered and begin to make mistakes.
Burrow is great at a lot of things, but where he really separates himself from most NFL quarterbacks is his sheer indifference to pressure. He is the heir to the Brett Favre/Ben Roethlisberger/Andrew Luck mantle of “I’m going to hold the ball as long as I want to, and I don’t care how many players are draped over me”. As the game wore on against Tennessee and the hits piled up on top of him, he really didn’t change his play style at all. He stood in the pocket, he scrambled to buy himself time, and he attacked down the field even as everything was collapsing around him.
Donald and Burrow are going to become well acquainted on Sunday. And Donald might just find one of the few quarterbacks who is not bothered by that at all. The sacks will still disrupt drives and knock the Bengals offense off schedule, but Burrow isn’t going to start throwing the ball into the dirt just to get it out of his hand.
How Healthy Are They
The Super Bowl is the game everyone plays their entire career trying to get to, and no one wants to miss it for any reason. Injuries that would typically sideline a player in the regular season are pushed through, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. Every team enters the Super Bowl banged up, and this year is no exception, as both the Bengals and the Rams have key players who may be limited on Sunday.
Andrew Whitworth
The clearest strength on the Rams roster is their pass protection. After a couple of down years they are back to the elite unit that took them to the Super Bowl three seasons ago, and that more than any change at quarterback or addition of flashy players is why they have found their way back in 2022.
Whitworth has been the rock of this unit that entire time, somehow still holding down his quarterback’s blind side at the age of forty. But he suffered a knee injury in the first round of the playoffs and missed their victory over Tampa Bay the following week. And even though he made it back onto the field against San Francisco, there were moments where he still looked limited by the knee.
An extra couple weeks of rest will help, but going against Trey Hendrickson will not. Stafford is extremely good at attacking blitzing defenses, but he can be thrown off by four-man rushes that don’t open space in the secondary for him to target. The Bengals are one of the least blitz-happy teams in the league, and I expect they will back off from that even more this week, leaning on their front four on almost every play to beat the Rams offensive line. The key matchup will be between the best two players on these units, and anything less than full strength from Whitworth could spell trouble for this offense.
CJ Uzomah
The star head-to-head matchup on the other side of the ball is on the outside, where Chase and Ramsey will likely spend much of the day facing each other down and fighting for balls in the air. It will be a fascinating matchup to watch, as Ramsey is one of the few cornerbacks who has the physicality to bother Chase, while Chase is a rare receiver who may be able to run by Ramsey over the top.
Cincinnati has another good young receiver in Higgins, but like Chase he plays mainly on the perimeter of the field, using his size and his ball skills to work along the sidelines. Unfortunately, this isn’t the best way to attack the Rams. Ramsey controls things on one side of the field, and while they have some vulnerabilities opposite him, the real weakness of this defense is in the middle.
The middle of the Los Angeles defense was an issue even before they lost both their starting safeties at the beginning of the playoffs. Eric Weddle has performed as well as can be expected for someone who hasn’t played football in two years, and Taylor Rapp might make it back from his concussion to play in the Super Bowl. But there are still gaps to be found in the space patrolled by the Rams linebackers and safeties. The question is whether the Bengals have anyone to exploit that.
Normally the answer would be Uzomah. He’s never put up big numbers, but he’s been a reliable target over the middle, and this is the sort of game where he’d be an invaluable relief option when the pocket starts collapsing on Burrow. But he suffered a sprained MCL early in the game against Kansas City, an injury that typically takes at least four weeks to recover from.
I expect he will try to make it onto the field on Sunday, but even if he does he will likely be limited. If he can’t contribute, that puts increased pressure on the other Bengals weapons in this part of the field. The key player may be Tyler Boyd. He’s gotten lost some as the younger receivers have taken over the Bengals offense, but he has a couple of 1000 yard seasons in his career, and he has the skills and savvy needed to exploit the weakest part of the Rams defense.
The Erratic Quarterback
Not long after I started this blog, I wrote a post that tried to draw a line between two groups of quarterbacks, one of which I named “game managers” and the other “erratic quarterbacks”. The basic premise of my argument was that if the goal is to win a Super Bowl, you are in better hands with the high volatility provided by an erratic quarterback than with the steady, middling performance of a game manager. Someone like Alex Smith or Kirk Cousins can carry you to a solid record through the regular season, but to pull off three or four straight wins against playoff caliber teams you need a higher level of play they simply can’t access.
But there are other quarterbacks out there who swing between more extreme outcomes, and if the right pieces align these quarterbacks can run off a string of excellent performances to carry their team to a title. At the time the two examples I named were Eli Manning and Joe Flacco, but at the very end I threw out another name as an example of an erratic quarterback with the upside to win a championship if he ever got a better supporting cast: Matthew Stafford.
Eight years have passed since I wrote that, and I have had time to reevaluate this take. And while it may have been an oversimplification, I think there is still a measure of truth to it. We’ve seen quarterbacks like Cousins, Derek Carr, and Ryan Tannehill regularly flame out early in the postseason, while quarterbacks like Nick Foles and Jimmy Garoppolo have made deep runs. And now we can add Stafford to the list, as he’s finally in a situation where getting hot at the right time actually matters.
The Stafford experience with the Rams has predictably been a roller coaster this year. For the first few weeks his name was front and center in the MVP conversation, as the Rams got off to a strong start to the season and he looked like he was providing the boost they had hoped for when they surrendered two first-round picks to add him. But the Rams hit bumps along the road, going winless in November and dropping out of the running for the top seed in the NFC. And Stafford was just as crucial to these struggles as he was to their early-season successes. After throwing only four interceptions over the first eight games, he three thirteen over the remaining nine, finishing tied for the league lead in that category.
Most people were skeptical of the Rams headed into the playoffs. But the thing is, this is exactly who Stafford has been his entire career. He is capable of sensational, high-level plays, stepping up in the most important situations. He will also make some of the most excruciating mistakes a quarterback can make.
You don’t even have to look outside this postseason to find examples of both. Against the Buccaneers he made maybe the best play of the postseason as he stood his ground in the face of the blitz and found Cooper Kupp down the field in range for the winning field goal. A week later he led a sensational comeback over the 49ers, one that likely would have been dead in the cradle if Jaquiski Tartt hadn’t dropped an interception that was basically a punt.
I’ve seen enough from Stafford to know not to have any expectations in one direction or the other on Sunday. He could play a sensational game and run away with MVP. He could play excellently on 90 percent of snaps and then absolutely kill his team on the other 10 percent. Or he could fall completely flat out of the gate and kill the Rams before they can even get going.
I’m less sure what to make of Burrow at this point. He hasn’t done enough to convince me that he is one of the true elites of the league, but his performance over the past two months certainly has me leaning that way. His stats from this season look like those of an erratic quarterback, but he’s a young player coming off of a serious injury, and there’s an easy excuse to ignore the tumultuous early part of the season.
Either quarterback is capable of putting together a sensational performance on Sunday. Stafford has a better supporting cast and is going against a less dangerous defense, and he has performed better than Burrow so far in the postseason. But the danger with an erratic quarterback is the constantly lurking possibility of getting him on a bad day at the worst time. And of the two, I think Stafford is much more likely to fall flat on his face on the biggest stage.
Who Chokes First
Trying to judge NFL head coaches is a difficult exercise. So much of what they do happens behind the scenes, and the parts we do see often lack very important context. It’s hard to say that either of these coaches is bad at his job, as they both have their teams on the precipice of glory. They clearly are doing some things right to get their teams this far. It just so happens that the parts of their jobs we can directly observe are where they struggle the most.
Let’s start with McVay, since he’s been around for a while and is a more known quantity. For years now he’s been the go-to example of a young offensive genius that is revolutionizing the game, and while this has become a bit of a cliché at this point, there is some truth to it. McVay’s ability to consistently produce good-to-excellent offensive production with a variety of schemes and a rotating cast of players suggests that he really does have a special understanding of what makes offensive football work.
It's just unfortunate then that he doesn’t trust himself or his offense. That’s the only possible interpretation of his consistent non-aggression in crucial fourth-down situations. For years now McVay has been one of the most conservative coaches in the league while also carrying a reputation for being a bold, innovative force. The contradiction is baffling, if not unique, as his division-mates Kliff Kingsbury and Kyle Shanahan also regularly throw opportunities away.
At some point in this game the Rams are going to face a fourth and short. And in all likelihood, McVay will choose to give the ball to the other team. Time will tell how costly a decision that will be, but it’s something that has to be in the back of the mind for every Rams fan headed into the game.
Zac Taylor has some of the same game management issues, but of far bigger concern is his play-calling. He’s managed to build an offense that plays to the strengths of his young stars and to get them up to NFL speed in a hurry, an impressive feat for any coach. But he remains frustratingly conservative when it comes to actually trusting his players to make the plays he knows they are capable of making.
We need only to look back at the AFC Championship Game against Kansas City to see what I’m talking about. In that game, their offense seemed to fall into a frustratingly consistent rhythm:
1st Down: Run the ball for virtually no gain.
2nd Down: Well we don’t want to face third and long, so we have to run the ball again.3rd Down: Burrow does something sensational and crazy to convert.
1st Down, again: Well that was nuts. Let’s calm things down by running the ball for no gain.
It was bad enough that Tony Romo basically pleaded with Taylor on the broadcast to open things up and stop running when there was nothing to be gained. Do you understand how conservative you have to be for an NFL broadcaster to call you out for it? That sort of approach almost got them run off the field by the Chiefs, and it could doom them if they try it again against the Rams. Joe Burrow and Ja’Marr Chase are the ones who got them to this point. It’s time for Taylor to let them take over.
What Will Actually Happen
When the championship round wrapped up and I first started thinking about the two teams that would be facing off in the Super Bowl, my instinct was to pick the Bengals. But the more time that goes by, the more I have begun to question why I felt that way. On paper the Rams are clearly the superior team. They’re better than the Bengals at every position except defensive back and maybe wide receiver and quarterback. They were the better team on both offense and defense during the regular season by most metrics. Just running the numbers, this seems like a game that could be pretty one-sided.
This feels like a case of numbers versus the eye test, but I’m not sure what the eye test is really saying at this point. The Rams have had a slightly ugly path through the playoffs, but Cincinnati’s has been, if anything, uglier. Burrow seems like he has played better than Stafford during this run, but Stafford is way ahead by every statistical measure. At a certain point I have to just toss aside whatever opinion I had coming out of the last round of games and face cold reality.
That isn’t to say there’s no path for the Bengals to win this. Their defense played extraordinarily against Kansas City in the second half, and the formula they used to do so should work well against the Rams too. They dropped back into coverage and let a quarterback with a tendency to get impatient sit in the pocket until he felt he had no choice but to try something superhuman. It worked on Patrick Mahomes, and it’s the exact same sort of strategy I’d use on Stafford.
I don’t think they can win a shootout. I tried to justify Burrow as the perfect quarterback to face down Donald, but a couple times the Rams pass rush is simply going to win. If this Rams team starts firing on all cylinders offensively, the Bengals won’t have the luxury of letting possessions go to waste. And between Burrow’s proclivity for sacks and Taylor’s passive attitude, I don’t think we can count on the Bengals to score every time they have the ball.
But if they can frustrate the Rams offense, Cincinnati has the ability to cause real problems for this defense. The depth of their receiver group will be key, as they attack a Rams secondary that was thin even before it was blasted by injuries. Higgins has had an up-and-down playoffs, and Boyd has been invisible at times. They will need them to play flawless games to take advantage of the opportunities they will find while Ramsey follows Chase.
That’s the tough part about this for Cincinnati. Because while I can definitely see a path to victory for the Bengals, it requires multiple different pieces to align at the same time. If even one of these pieces falls short, the Rams will be in position to take this game even with a middling performance.
Maybe my gut is rebelling because it just feels wrong to align myself with Stafford. I’ve seen him throw away too many crucial games to feel comfortable vouching for him now. But I’ve also seen him try to throw away games this year and still emerge with the victory because this Rams team is good enough to cover up his lapses.
So here’s how I think it will actually play out. The Bengals will jump out to a lead in the first quarter as they get off to a hot start offensively. The Rams will take a series or two to get it going, but once they figure out what the Bengals are doing defensively they will be able to march down the field more-or-less at will. They will have the lead at halftime and will never surrender it from there. Stafford will throw at least one interception and will have a couple more heart-racing moments, but any attempt at a Bengals comeback will fall just short.
Final Score Prediction: Los Angeles Rams 31 – Cincinnati Bengals 27
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