The Rams are Los Angeles' NFL team
The Rams had to start from scratch when they came back to Los Angeles, but if Monday is any indication, they are well on their way to once again being this city’s favorite NFL team.
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1. The Rams defeated the Arizona Cardinals, 34-11, on Monday to advance to the divisional round of the playoffs where they will face Tom Brady and the defending Super Bowl champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
It was the most impressive performance of the season for the NFC West champions.
They took a 28-0 lead in the third quarter as Matthew Stafford completed 13 of 17 passes for 202 yards, two touchdowns and no interceptions and clinched the first postseason victory of his career.
Equally as impressive as what was transpiring on the field was the sold out crowd of over 70,000 Rams fans in attendance to witness the team’s first postseason win at SoFi Stadium.
Rams fans got a lot of grief last week after 49ers supporters took over the stadium and made the team’s final home game of the season feel more like a road game with Stafford being forced to use a silent count.
The issue isn’t that there aren’t Rams fans in Los Angeles. Monday’s turnout, which was over 90% yellow and blue towel waving Rams fans, showed the team can easily fill up SoFi Stadium. The problem is expecting a fan base, which was largely born six years ago when the NFL approved the Rams’ relocation to Los Angeles from St. Louis, to compete with fan bases that have been established in a community for decades.
Many in the team’s front office like to point to the Rams being Los Angeles’ first professional sports team in 1946 and calling the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum their home for over three decades. That’s true, but the Rams left L.A. and the Coliseum to move to Anaheim in 1980. Following their first Super Bowl appearance and at the height of their popularity in the city, the Rams left L.A. and moved to Orange County to share Anaheim Stadium with the Angels.
They opened the door for the Raiders to come in and take over their old home and their old city. When the Raiders and Rams relocated in 1995, the Raiders were the NFL team to leave Los Angeles. The Rams had already left L.A. 15 years earlier. They were now leaving Anaheim for St. Louis.
When the Rams moved back to L.A. and the Coliseum, they were doing so after 36 years and were essentially starting from scratch in a city they once called home before anyone younger than 40 could remember. The Rams have a strong fan base in Los Angeles. I would argue that after the past five seasons, they have once again become Los Angeles’ most popular NFL team.
I see more Rams shirts, jerseys and hats than other NFL team around town and most of my friends have made it out to at least one game this season when tickets, like they were on Monday, are reasonably priced. These people are Rams fans but they’re not mortgaging their future to attend every game like they would, for example, the Lakers or the Dodgers. At least not yet anyway.
There’s a difference between being a fan of a team you’ve been supporting since they arrived in your city six years ago and being a fanatic of a team your family has been supporting for 76 years. The 49ers became San Francisco’s first professional sports team in 1946, the same year the Rams arrived in Los Angeles, and have one of the strongest fan bases in the NFL. The difference is the 49ers never left the Bay Area or moved to St. Louis for 21 years.
The Rams had to start from scratch when they came back to Los Angeles, but if Monday is any indication, they are well on their way to once again being this city’s favorite NFL team.
2. The Rams’ playoff win on Monday night overshadowed the biggest Lakers win of the season, a 101-95 victory over the Utah Jazz. The win snapped the Lakers’ three-game losing streak and could serve as a turning point moment following the Lakers’ embarrassing 37-point loss to the Denver Nuggets. LeBron James led the Lakers with 25 points, 7 rebounds and 7 assists after tweeting out this apology to Lakers fans after the Nuggets loss.
“Our effort and energy wasn’t where it needed to be in the Denver game, second half of Memphis game and the other game,” James said. “We weren’t playing to our capabilities. As the leader of this team. I was taking onus of that and letting Laker Nation know.”
3. The win may have also saved Frank Vogel’s job, according to a report in The Athletic. Vogel, according to Bill Oram and Sam Amick, “is being evaluated on a game-to-game basis and remains at risk of being fired soon if the progress doesn’t continue, sources said. It’s unclear how much Monday’s win relieved the pressure that surrounds him.”
Vogel may have saved his job this week but it’s hard to see him surviving this season under that kind of game-to-game pressure with this mismatched roster that he had no part of constructing. The Lakers front office took a sledgehammer to the squad he coached to a championship in 2020 and a team that had the second-best record in the league last year before losing James and Anthony Davis to injury. He’s making the most of what he has now without Davis and but likely won’t be the head coach of the Lakers when Davis returns this season.
4. Here’s hoping UCLA basketball will be able to welcome fans back to their games after this weekend. The school had announced that “all indoor athletics competitions on campus will be limited to families of team members through January 21.” That’s fine if every other team in the city is doing that but tough if you’re a player or a coach watching the Rams play in front of a sold out crowd at SoFi Stadium.
“I think it’s hugely demoralizing to our guys to play games in empty arenas when there’s 80,000 people at the Rams game yesterday,” UCLA coach Mick Cronin told Ben Bolch. I couldn’t agree more.
5. It’s looking like Omicron is finally retreating as “new Covid-19 cases are plummeting in a growing list of places” and “the percentage of cases causing severe illness is much lower than it was with the Delta variant,” according to the New York Times, which reports cases may have peaked in California.
From a sports standpoint, that means fans will likely be able to return to indoor college games, professional sports leagues like the NHL and UFC will join the NBA and NFL and stop testing asymptomatic individuals, who have been fully vaccinated, and we will learn to live with the virus instead of shutting things down.
No one knows what the “new normal” will look like but this seems like a step in the right direction.
6. Today’s photo of the day is brought to you by Ike’s Sandwiches.
7. Here are some odds if you’re thinking about placing a wager today brought to you by Circa Sports.
8. Here’s the local pro sports schedule today brought to you by Yaamava’.
7:00 p.m. Colorado Avalanche at Anaheim Ducks – TNT
7:00 p.m. Los Angeles Clippers at Denver Nuggets – Bally Sports SoCal, ESPN
7:30 p.m. Indiana Pacers at Los Angeles Lakers – Spectrum SportsNet
9. Here are the “get in” prices for tickets locally on TickPick if you’re thinking about going to a pro sports game on Thursday.
Colorado Avalanche at Anaheim Ducks – $24
Indiana Pacers at Los Angeles Lakers – $24
10. On Tuesday’s The Arash Markazi Show, we talked about the Rams getting their first playoff win at SoFi Stadium and the Lakers getting their biggest win of the season against the Utah Jazz.
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