4 lessons the Eagles need to remember from their early season win over the Rams

The Philadelphia Eagles divisional game is yet another rematch of a game earlier this season, but this time it’s different. The wild card game was against the Packers, and that was a rematch from Week 1, and this week’s game is a rematch of the Week 12 game.

That game was so long ago, the Eagles' offense and defense had changed so much, and the field that game was played on was so terrible, that you could almost throw out what happened back in September.

Week 12 was the weekend before Thanksgiving. That’s recent enough that there are real and valuable takeaways.

The Rams have gotten better, but the Eagles can repeat their Week 12 game plan

The Rams' offense isn’t very different now than it was in Week 18. It’s still Sean McVay, Matt Stafford, Puka Nacua, Kyren Williams, and Cooper Kupp. These guys are still struggling in the same ways they did before.

Sean McVay's brain wrinkles are in the shape of Vic Fangio’s face

Vic Fangio’s defense ruined Sean McVay’s brain for a while after the 2018 season. I wrote about this when I did my bold predictions for the Week 12 game:

“Vic Fangio has only played Sean McVay’s Rams one time: Week 14 of the 2018 season. This was the season where the Rams and Chiefs scored a combined 105 points in the Week 11 Monday night game. This was the season where Sean McVay made a name for himself as a head coach. Going into that game, the Rams were averaging 34.5 points per game.

“In Week 14, Fangio and the Bears’ defense held the Rams to just SIX points. Bill Belichick ended up using that same defensive scheme in the most boring Super Bowl ever when the Patriots won 13-3.

“That kind of changed the way McVay ran his offense, and it made him go out and find a defensive coordinator who could run a bastardized version of the Fangio scheme, Brandon Staley.

“The point is that Fangio is McVay’s sleep-paralysis demon. The Eagles are going to need Fangio to stay in demon mode against McVay, because the Rams’ quarterback this time is Matt Stafford, whereas in 2018 it was a 24-year-old Jared Goff.”

All of that is still true. At the beginning of the Week 12 game, the Rams' offense moved the ball pretty well on their first two drives. But after that? Wooo buddy ... It was a whole bunch of nothing. Sean McVay thought that maybe he was putting something together that could beat his personal Baba Yaga, only to get crushed once again.

It's going to be important for the Eagles to weather the Rams' early storm like they did before. It'll either be Oren Burks or Jeremiah Trotter Jr. who starts at linebacker for the injured Nakobe Dean, and you better bet that McVay is going come after whoever it is early and often.

Fangio will figure out a way to deal with it because that's what he does ... and he does it at an incredibly high level against this specific head coach.

It’s great that a wrinkly old curmudgeon like Vic can so consistently dominate a quintessential L.A., and quite frankly, beautiful guy like Sean McVay.

If you’re interested in a more in-depth look at this whole thing (not so much the juxtaposition in their physical appearances part), Jourdan Rodrigue of The Athletic did a podcast series called The Playcallers, and the third episode focuses on this.

The Rams can’t do third downs

The Rams' offense doesn’t want to get to third down because they’re straight-up terrible at converting them. In Week 12, they didn’t convert a single one of their eight third downs.

That’s been the thing with them this season: They ranked 25th in third-down conversion rate (36%). That’s the lowest of any team in the playoffs. 

It all falls in line too. Their average third-down yards-to-go was 6.6 yards, and they averaged 4.5 yards on third downs. Next Gen Stats says that on third downs, the Rams were ranked 28th in yards per play and 24th in EPA per play.

If the Eagles defense can get to third down and perform even 75% as well as they did in their first meeting, this game is going to be yet another 2024 postseason blowout.

The first game wasn’t that close

The Eagles beat the Rams 37-20 in Week 12. That game was on November 24, 2024. When a game happens that long ago, you can forget about the context of the final score. 

There was 1:36 left in the fourth quarter and the Eagles were up 37-14 when the Rams started their final drive from their own 32-yard line. The game was all but over and the Eagles put in a backup defense. The Rams went down the field and scored in eight plays.

It was just about as garbagey of a garbage-time touchdown as you’ll ever see. If you take that drive out, Matthew Stafford was 20-of-29 for 186 yards and one touchdown.

I guess this one isn’t really a lesson for the Eagles to remember, but you should remember this whenever you hear people talking about how the Rams’ offense played in the first game. Don’t let them juice up a juiceless offense.

The Rams’ defense won’t play as bad as they did

The Eagles’ offense put on a show in Week 12. Saquon Barkley and the offensive line looked like the Harlem Globetrotters mixed with The Monstars from Space Jam, and the Rams' defense looked like the Little Giants at the beginning of the movie. 

The Eagles' 314 total rushing yards were spearheaded by Saquon, who put up 255 rushing yards (the most rushing yards in a single game since Jamaal Charles in 2010) and two touchdowns. 

In their seven games since then, the Rams’ defense has allowed an average of 104.1 yards per game and in four of their last six games, they’ve allowed just 14 points or fewer. 

That being said, the Rams only played one game against a team that’s actually good in that span. It was against the Bills when Josh Allen threw the ball 37 times for 342 yards for three touchdowns and ran the ball for three touchdowns. Buffalo only called 13 designed runs and six of them were QB sneaks, so the low rushing yardage in that game was a little bit of an anomaly.

Regardless, the Rams’ defense has been playing much, MUCH better lately. Will that play hold up against the Eagles this week? Probably not. It’s safe to assume Saquon and the gang won’t rush for over 300 yards like they did before, but 200+ yards is still on the table.

Just because the Saints, the 49ers, and the Jets weren’t able to run the ball against the Rams recently doesn’t mean the Eagles won’t be able to. Saquon sat out in Week 18 so he could be healthy for games like this. Use him and run until the Rams show they can stop it because they probably won’t.

This next part doesn’t have much to do with the Eagles/Rams, but it does have to do with the Eagles’ effect on other teams:

Seeing how the Rams turned things around made me look into how other teams’ seasons ended after they played the Eagles. The interesting thing is that the Rams weren’t the only team whose season changed.

It looks like the Eagles exposed teams for what they actually were in the regular season. In general: if a good team was playing poorly and then played the Eagles, it started to win more. If a bad team was playing well and then played the Eagles, it started to lose.

Here’s a table showing each team’s record before they played the Eagles and after:

The most notable changes here are the Saints, the Bengals, the Rams, the Ravens, the Panthers, and the Steelers. 

The Saints started their season with a +62 point differential through just two games. That was impressive. After they played the Eagles, the wheels fell off and the car crashed into a bomb factory.

The Bengals were arguably a good team, but they just had a terrible defense. Their 3-4 record to start the season was pretty surprising to just about everyone. They certainly weren’t a sub-.500 team, and after the game in Week 8, their 6-3 record reflected who they really were. 

The Rams turned a corner after their Week 12 loss. They went from a 5-5 record to finishing with a 5-1 record (their only loss was in Week 18 when they weren’t playing their starters, so we won’t count that).

The Ravens are definitely a powerhouse. Hell, they’re favorites to win in a divisional-round game IN Buffalo. Their offense got shut down and embarrassed in Week 13. That game was on December 1, 2024. They haven’t lost since.

The Steelers are a weird one here because their offense was never really good, but they had a good record. They went the opposite way of the Ravens because the loss to the Eagles was the beginning of their season-ending five-game losing streak.