All 32 teams are officially in off-season mode after the Los Angeles Rams won Super Bowl LVI champions following a hard-fought game. Now every team will be studying what the Rams did in an attempt to push for the Super Bowl in 2022.
The NFL is famously a copycat league with an evolve-or-die mentality. Teams steal concepts, players, and coaches in an attempt to emulate the top teams. Many teams will learn the wrong lessons as they try to emulate winners without understanding context. Some will improve and make a playoff push.
However, there honestly isn’t much to learn from this Super Bowl for a team like the Green Bay Packers. Sure, the team has some self-scouting to do after yet another heartbreaking playoff loss, and they’ll surely study the tape from Sunday’s big game. But there isn’t much Green Bay can copy from these teams unless the Super Bowl film has a magic way to increase player execution. Or not have star players get injured. Or it tells them not to let a terrible special teams unit fester to an unfortunate breaking point.
The Rams were a textbook definition of going all in to maximize their team’s Super Bowl window. LA had been a contender every season since signing Sean McVay, even making the big game in 2018. General manager Les Snead has taken a controversial approach to eschew draft-and-develop in favor of spending draft capital on well-established players.
The Rams swapped quarterbacks to bring in long-tenured Detroit Lions QB Matthew Stafford. They made big in-season acquisitions with Von Miller and Odell Beckham Jr. At one point, they had more Jacksonville Jaguars first-round picks on their roster than Jacksonville does — including Jalen Ramsey, their star cornerback who can’t defend Davante Adams.
In many ways, the Rams were able to buy a Super Bowl, and many will look to copy that approach. But the Packers will never take that path. Green Bay is adamantly against sacrificing the future of its franchise for immediate short-term success. However, they did their own version of all in.
The Packers signed David Bakhtiari, Kenny Clark, and Aaron Jones to massive contracts before this season. They spent big money in free agency. But instead of flashy names from other teams, they re-signed their own star free agents to big deals.
Many thought Green Bay would make significant cap sacrifices, expecting players like Preston Smith and Dean Lowry to depart. Instead, Russ Ball worked cap magic to keep the core of the 2020 team intact, and Green Bay got great mileage out of those players.
Gutekunst signed De’Vondre Campbell off the street and plucked Rasul Douglas from the Arizona Cardinals practice squad, and the two of them turned the defense around. Just because they weren’t marquee names doesn’t mean this wasn’t the team going all in to create a Super Bowl-caliber team.
The Packers came up short in the end, but you can’t fault their approach. They went all in to surround Aaron Rodgers with the talent needed to win a Super Bowl and did so without mortgaging the future. In return, Rodgers won the NFL MVP, and Green Bay was the No. 1 seed in the NFC. Unless the Rams have a magic strategy to not have a playoff meltdown against an inferior team, there isn’t much of a lesson to be learned.
And here’s the thing, the Rams marketed their acquisitions with a poker metaphor, and that metaphor is appropriate because they took a massive gamble. The NFL isn’t Madden. You can’t just throw big-name players together to create a super team and it instantly works. A lot had to go right for the Rams, who didn’t finish first in the NFC West until the end of the season. One thing that went their way? They didn’t have to face the Packers, who handily defeated them in the regular season.
The Rams are a fantastic team that won the Super Bowl. But how will they look next year? The team doesn’t have first-round picks, and there are rumors about many star players and even their head coach retiring this offseason. The cupboard could be bare.
The Leap’s Peter Bukowski reiterates that the Rams’ all-in style isn’t worth replicating. LA’s big-money, big-draft-capital players often got beat by the Cincinnati Bengals’ young, drafted talent. Stafford was much better than Goff, but he also didn’t play particularly well. Los Angeles’ best receiver and key to their victory was Cooper Kupp, who they drafted.
The Rams had a capable special teams unit, something the Packers could learn from. Although, they could learn about special teams from literally any team since they were the worst in the league.
Many teams will seek to emulate the Rams’ approach to the postseason. They may gamble draft picks away in hopes of catching lightning in a bottle. But the Packers will never adopt that strategy, for better or worse, and I don’t think they should. It doesn’t mean much with the team watching from the bench, but Green Bay would have been able to hang in there with both Super Bowl teams, each of whom they beat once in the regular season. The Packers need to find a way to get over the hump, but emulating the Rams isn’t the way.
