The Los Angeles Rams did what they set out to do and conquered the NFC, beating the San Francisco 49ers in what turned out to be a thriller.
The Rams went into the fourth quarter trailing 17-7, but met the challenge head on as the team played perfect complementary football. Los Angeles ended up winning 20-17 to punch their ticket to Super Bowl LVI.
Head coach Sean McVay was proud of how the Rams responded, but did put them in a stressful situation when he challenged two questionable plays that left them without timeouts for basically the entire fourth quarter. McVay made sure to take full responsibility for the challenge situation, via Cameron DaSilva of USA Today:
“So, the accountability lies with me,” he said. “The first one with the quarterback sneak, it was not a great decision by me. It was kind of one of those you’re hopeful, you see the side shot of it. Going back to Arizona, where we ended up challenging the one on the QB sneak, you’re kind of hopeful that if they give you the top-down shot that maybe it goes through. But that one was totally on me. And then the other one, it looked like it was kind of a bang-bang play. In the flow of the game, there was a possibility that we thought there was a fumble there. (I would) do that one a little bit differently, but ultimately those decisions are my responsibility.
I’ve gotten great information all year. Those guys do a great job. In those instances yesterday, didn’t work out, but there’s nobody that’s responsible other than myself. And like we talked about kind of earlier in this conversation, you got to be able to learn from it. Fortunately, it didn’t hurt us. But it is important to be able to have those timeouts in your back pocket if you need those and being a little bit smarter with those challenges that was something I didn’t do a great job for us with yesterday.”
Not having any timeouts when trying to comeback is far from ideal, but fortunately the Rams ended up not needing them. However, that kind of circumstance can not happen in the Super Bowl and hopefully McVay learned his lesson.
