The Los Angeles Rams have a lot of young star talent on the roster on both sides of the field, but are also fortunate to still have pillars like Cooper Kupp and Matthew Stafford to lean on during the upcoming 2024 season.
Los Angeles surprised the league in 2023 as they rebounded from losing several of their high-priced veterans to earn a Wild Card spot. Although their playoff run was cut short by the Detroit Lions, there’s a lot of optimism in the organization and among the fanbase that they can build on that momentum and make a serious postseason push.
One area that’s been the Achilles heel of the Rams is their special teams play as they routinely find ways to set themselves back in games. The placekicking struggles were apparent in 2023 as missed field goals and extra points came back to bite Los Angeles, but there was a bright spot in punter Ethan Evans who proved to be a legitimate weapon flipping the field back in the Rams’ favor.
Evans is set to resume his role as the team’s punter and he showed off his strong leg in an offseason workout video, via IsaacPunts:
I present to you with no Comment a set of 7 @ethanevans2019 rolling film punts all above 5.0 pic.twitter.com/BVuIsQSMeE
— IsaacPunts (@IsaacPunts) July 2, 2024
In the clip, Evans takes a set of seven punts and manages to get them to all hang in the air for over five seconds. Evans takes all of these punts from the 50-yard line, a spot that he’ll likely be teeing off from a lot during the 2024 season.
The second-year punter shows good technique and makes great contact with the football to get it to roll through the air and land just before the end zone. The hang time, though, is the most impressive part of this drill as those sorts of punts will give the special teams unit enough to recover and force opposing teams to field the catch instead of running it back.
In the NFL, winning on the margins can be the difference between a win or a loss and in the Rams’ case they’ve cost themselves games by not doing the little things. Special teams can seem like an afterthought, but a player like Evans can change the course of a game with a single kick.
Rams re-sign John Johnson III in free agency
The Rams did well to replenish their secondary in free agency and they continued to build on it after re-signing John Johnson III.
