The Rams' offense flows through ... its run game? Solak on why it's crucial to their playoff run

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The NFL's best rushing offense of the past decade belongs to the 2018 Rams. You remember them, right? Second year under Sean McVay, reigning Offensive Player of the Year Todd Gurley toting the rock, went to a Super Bowl, incited an offensive avalanche? Pretty good group.

The second best now belongs to ... the 2025 Rams.

The metric I'm using to singlehandedly support this bold claim is success rate. Using historical data, we can determine whether any play for an offense made it more or less likely to score on that drive. A 6-yard gain on first-and-10 from the 42-yard line? Positive expected points added, positive play. A 4-yard gain on the same first-and-10? Negative expected points added, negative play. And success rate is a particularly useful stat for running games because run plays aren't called to rip off chunk gains. They're called to keep the offense on schedule and stay ahead of the sticks. There's no such thing as a good rushing attack with a bad success rate, because that attack would be unreliable.

According to NFL Next Gen Stats, those 2018 and 2025 Rams are the only two rushing offenses since 2016 with success rates over 50% on carries by running backs. The 2018 team was at 50.13%, while the 2025 Rams are right behind at 50.12%. No cheeky scrambles, no quarterback keeps on read options -- pure running back handoffs.

Even in 2018, we knew we were watching something special in Los Angeles. The offense that resurrected Jared Goff's career was about to proliferate -- quarterbacks coach Zac Taylor and offensive coordinator Matt LaFleur would be hired as head coaches that offseason -- and even our rosiest hopes for the system could not have predicted how wide and effectively it would spread. But the story of the scheme leaguewide became centralized on the quarterbacks it saved: Goff, Jimmy Garoppolo, Kirk Cousins and Ryan Tannehill. The dominance of the Rams' rushing attack under McVay was quickly forgotten.

In the 2025 season, the Rams' ground game has again been an understandable afterthought. Quarterback Matthew Stafford was named the first-team All-Pro quarterback, often a portent to the MVP award. And wide receiver Puka Nacua had 129 catches for 1,715 yards in a career-best season that might have made him the best receiver in football. The passing game is the story of modern football, and as such, it is the story of the 2025 Rams.

But it is an incomplete story. It is true that the Rams' addition of Davante Adams has healed some of their red zone woes with an elite route runner in short areas. It is true that the Rams' unique 13 personnel packages have put defenses in a bind. But it is also true that the running game is the foundation of this elite Rams offense -- in 2025 with Kyren Williams and Blake Corum as it was in 2018 with Gurley. Everything they do flows from it.

At the surface, this is a cool but unremarkable observation. The ground game was awesome, then not awesome, then awesome again. Where things get exciting is in the weeds. Because the Rams don't run the football at all like they did in 2018. Their scheme has completely changed.

Let's watch a clip of the Rams' running game this season, from back in Week 10 against the 49ers.

This is duo. On duo, defensive tackles are double-teamed and worked vertically down the field. Instead of classic combination blocks, in which one offensive lineman is working to climb to a linebacker further downfield, a duo double-team is patient and prolonged. Both offensive linemen will read through the defensive tackle into the linebacker behind him, waiting for that second-level defender to declare his intentions. Depending on where the linebacker goes and how fast he gets there, one of the offensive linemen will disengage from the double-team accordingly.

We can see this between the two linebackers for San Francisco. Watch how Tatum Bethune (No. 48) is frozen in place in the A-gap, which opens wide as the two defensive tackles are double-teamed in front of him. The downhill path of Williams, the running back, holds Bethune in place while right guard Kevin Dotson (No. 69) calmly walks the double-team right to him, lingering for as long as possible. Meanwhile, another Niners linebacker, Luke Gifford (No. 53), is tighter to the line and steps down immediately, so left guard Steve Avila (No. 73) peels off to meet him right away.

As defensive tackle Jordan Elliott (No. 92) peeks into the A-gap, Williams bounces one gap over, getting skinny and finishing through the nickel corner, who has now been forced to take on Williams flat-footed. Williams bowls him over for a 7-yard gain.

Duo is actually a very hard run to discuss, as it is so malleable to different fronts and so welcoming of schematic wrinkles. You'll see the Rams bring receivers into the formation to climb as second-level blockers; you'll also see them send tight ends across the formation to kick out defensive ends. And duo runs hit in different gaps depending on how the running back wants to play it. With all of the bells and whistles that coaches can attach to them and the different ways defenses can approach them, no two duo runs look alike. What one coaching staff calls duo, another might not.

With that said ... this is duo. The Rams run it more than any other team -- on over 40% of their handoffs -- and they run it better than any other team.

We could have written something similar in 2018, too -- but we wouldn't have been talking about duo. We would have been talking about outside zone. When the Rams ran the ball in 2018, this is how they did it:

Anyone who watched five minutes of Rams football in the late 2010s heard about outside zone (or wide zone, as the terms are generally synonymous). The entire Rams offensive system (and the 49ers system, and several more down the pipe) was based on it.

A simple explanation of outside zone is easy to digest. The entire offensive line will gallop in one direction, looking to overtake defensive linemen and get between them and the path of the ball carrier. In theory, outside zone runs hit far on the outside. But in practice, this rarely happened for L.A. Far more often, the hot pursuit of defensive linemen and linebackers would create easy upfield cutback lanes, as Gurley would slice against the grain of the defensive flow.

Left tackle Andrew Whitworth (No. 77) sets the point of attack here against the Chargers in Week 3, blocking down on the defensive end and displacing him to the sideline. Working from the outside of Whitworth in, Gurley will look for defensive linemen and linebackers getting washed downfield. As left guard Rodger Saffold (No. 76) and center John Sullivan (No. 65) take the defensive tackle for a ride, Gurley can bang this run upfield with tempo.

This is what was so difficult about playing the Rams' offense in the late 2010s: the horizontal defensive flow. The Rams would send receivers sprinting across the formation before the snap, then the tight end the other direction at the snap. The line would go hither, the ball would go thither. Jet handoffs, screens, split zone blocks. The horizontal stretch was almost impossible to parse at speed.

Then, the Rams could fake the give and boot Goff out the other direction. The receivers and tight ends -- previously key blockers -- would be able to climb into voids behind the opponent linebackers, who were hopelessly slamming on the brakes and trying to scramble back into position.

The play-action pass changed the trajectory of Goff's career (and that of many other QBs after him). Goff had 79.6 total EPA on play-action dropbacks in 2018, the most value play-action has generated for any quarterbacking season in the past 10 years. While play-action passing can be and often is effective without an elite running game, there's no question that the Rams' play-action game was made more dangerous by the hard horizontal flow of their dangerous outside zone attack. This was the "illusion of complexity" in McVay's early years of dominant NFL offense: simple plays with matching motions that kept defensive heads spinning.

But this isn't about the play-action passing game; it's about the rushing attack, the engine of the offense. It was the foundation of the mansion. And when the success rate fell from 50.1% to 39.2% in 2019, the offense started to fall apart.

The simplest explanation for why the running game disintegrated was in Gurley's left knee. He missed the last two games of the 2018 regular season because of left knee inflammation. He had torn his left ACL at Georgia in 2014, and his heavy usage was grinding that old injury into new pain. Gurley carried the ball only four times in the NFC Championship Game and had only 10 carries for 35 yards against the Patriots in the Super Bowl.

He didn't have the juice in 2019, and runs that previously climbed through the second level and exploded into the third instead ended in shoestring tackles and failed escapes. Gurley took 223 of the Rams' 298 running back carries, but he dropped a full yard in yards per attempt (4.9 to 3.8). He was released following the season.

Gurley's decline, while critical, is not a complete explanation. Also following the 2018 season, Saffold left in free agency to join the Titans. He spent almost every snap of 2017 and 2018 playing beside Whitworth along the left side, working combo blocks, adjusting plans as fronts changed and identifying blitzing linebackers. Sullivan, the center, saw his contract option declined by the Rams following the 2018 season, and he also left as a free agent.

The left side of that line had perfect chemistry, which is critical for a zone rushing team. Defensive linemen are often exchanged in wide zone runs -- initially contacted by one blocker, only to be handed off to another. Such exchanges take timing and precision, but also recognition. Different defensive tackle techniques and alignments get exchanged in different ways. How the linebacker behind that defensive tackle behaves also changes the nuances of the combination block. Riddling out all of these small adjustments and executing them as one body is not the sort of thing that emerges overnight. It takes precise coaching and hours upon hours of time on task.

So ... Gurley health. Offensive line turnover. And -- because we do have to give the other side credit -- defensive adjustments. Vic Fangio and Bill Belichick famously found success against the Rams' running game in 2018 by loading the defensive front with bodies and preventing those combination blocks from climbing to linebackers. Look at the fronts that Fangio deployed in the regular season that Belichick later cribbed in the Super Bowl.

This defensive adjustment has been written about ad nauseum. It was the first defensive strike against a McVay offense that looked unassailable for almost two whole seasons, and it spread. Defensive structure fundamentally changed after that 2018 season, as more and more defenses copied the loaded fronts that slowed the running game and the two-deep shells that worked well against play-action crossers.

It is fair to say that McVay's offense, and the defensive reaction to it, was the flashpoint of the two-high defensive swing over the past five-plus seasons. It was also a contributing factor to the overall lightening of the linebacker position. You could directly tie the emergence of safeties such as Kyle Hamilton and Nick Emmanwori to this moment. It was an important time.

Sent reeling by this defensive counterpunch, McVay had to adapt or die -- and adapt he did. Not with changes to his running game but rather with a quiet abandonment. Unable to buttress Goff with an effective play-action pass, McVay traded Goff to Detroit, along with some first-round picks, to acquire Stafford. He moved away from under-center alignments in favor of shotgun and dropped back without play-action fakes. Both offensive choices minimized the importance of the running game in the offensive philosophy as a whole.

Over these years, the Rams scraped by with C.J. Anderson, Darrell Henderson Jr. and Sony Michel at running back. The season they won the Super Bowl, they had a league-average rushing success rate of 41.5%, and just 32.9% of their runs gained more yards than expected -- an indictment on their running backs failing to maximize the blocking efforts of the line. (Compare that to 44.1% this season -- the best the Rams' running backs have ever performed in this metric.)

In 2022, the Rams started 3-6 even before Stafford got hurt. Forced to play Baker Mayfield, John Wolford and Bryce Perkins at quarterback, the reckless reliance on Stafford's excellence to drive the offense was laid bare. The Rams had no longer needed the running game, but when they suddenly did need it, the pieces weren't there.

Los Angeles had sold out in the past to be that fine-tuned outside zone running team that featured Whitworth and Saffold and Sullivan and Gurley. So many experienced players working in such smooth concert with one another. In a league with diminishing practice time in the summer, did McVay have the resources to reconstruct that Swiss watch of an offense? Or was there, perhaps, a simpler way?

The Rams' duo revolution did not suddenly dawn in 2025, as if the play had been uncovered on an ancient tablet in an archeological dig. Duo was one of the Rams' most important changeup runs to outside zone going back to 2018, and they've run it with intermittent frequency and success in every season since then.

But the commitment to duo as an identity really began with the 2023 draft. With the 36th pick -- the earliest pick the Rams had used since they drafted Goff first overall in 2016 -- the Rams selected Avila. He represented the first significant investment at the guard position since Saffold's departure in 2019, and it wouldn't be the only one. That August, the Rams traded future fourth- and fifth-round picks to the Steelers for Dotson to fill the right guard spot.

Dotson and Avila were not the svelte zone guards of seasons past. Both tip the scales at 330 pounds. In the 2024 offseason, when the Rams signed Jonah Jackson with designs on kicking Avila to center, they planned to have 1,000 pounds of man along the offensive interior.

Jackson and Avila both got hurt in 2024, so the final form of the Rams' rushing attack was never realized. But Williams, a seventh-round pick in 2022, was coming into his own as a shrewd runner with a low center of gravity and jitterbug quickness. He popped from gap to gap with decisiveness, pulling linebackers like marionettes on strings. Critically, he was reliable. Much like outside zone benefits from offensive line continuity, duo benefits from running back continuity. Does your back make the right decision, time and time again? Does he carry the ball 15-plus times and get a feel for how the opposing linebackers are behaving? Williams does.

Having a truly talented back is a non-negotiable for duo runs. There is no one correct play side of duo. It is the back's responsibility to react to where the double-teams have taken defensive tackles and where the climbing linemen are steering linebackers. And we can see Williams work this out in real time on this duo run against Houston. Texans linebacker Azeez Al-Shaair (No. 0) aggressively shoots the gap the moment it opens, hoping to beat the lineman pulling off the double-team.

Williams does a lovely job staying patient on his path, pulling Al-Shaair towards center Coleman Shelton (No. 65) as he disengages. Al-Shaair takes on the block as if he expects Williams to run to his right. But because this is duo, and the running back's job is to make the linebacker wrong, Williams cuts back and veers to the left instead. Decisive.

The maddening thing about the Rams' running game is that Williams is not the only standout ball carrier. No. 2 running back Blake Corum, who barely saw the field in his rookie year, has seen the lightbulb flare on in his second season. He has earned the staff's trust and developed the same wisdom as a duo runner. More explosive on a straight line than Williams, Corum is prone to bouncing the run and creates some of the chunk plays that Williams' surgical, brutal efficiency leaves unexplored.

Here's a Corum run on duo against the Cardinals. Watch Arizona linebacker Zaven Collins (No. 25) pitter-patter his feet while staring down the double-team. If he shot downhill at the open gap, Avila (No. 73) would peel off the combo to take him. But he tries to play it over the top, and as Corum pulls him to the center of the formation, it becomes Shelton's job to disengage and address Collins.

The moment Collins dips inside, Corum is bouncing this to the boundary, and he outstrips the cornerback to the corner. Big gain.

The skill of the backs. The value of the blocking receivers such as Nacua and Jordan Whittington. The 13 personnel wrinkles that create even more double-teams for Williams and Corum to poke and prod. The bulk of the guards. So much has coalesced in Los Angeles to complete this multiyear reconstruction of the running game.

Then McVay stepped in with the typical McVay fairy dust.

The magic of the 2018 season was how McVay's play-action pass game looked just like the running game. That running game stressed the defense horizontally. Outside zone flowed in one direction, and the play-action boot flowed the other way. But this 2025 running game stresses defenses vertically. Linebackers are not yanked to a sideline but instead yanked downhill, into the line of scrimmage. Defensive tackles are not forced to run gassers to the left and right but instead compelled to drop anchor and hold their water. Instead of moving defenders, McVay's new running game freezes them.

And as such, McVay's play-action passing game has totally changed. As linebackers are pulled downhill by the duo run fake, fewer routes break horizontally, as the old outside zone play-action crossers did. Instead, the stretch is vertical. McVay runs Nacua and Adams on deep-breaking stop routes or digs and benders that hit between the numbers and the hash, as linebackers lack the requisite depth to occupy those throwing lanes. The tight ends also release fast into the flat as the linebackers responsible for chasing them in coverage spend too long in the box, worried about the downhill run.

Watch that duo run against the Texans again, this time focusing on how Nacua digs out safety Jalen Pitre (No. 5) after lining up inside the tight end. Now ask yourself the question that McVay has been asking himself for decades: What wrinkle can we use off this run-action to generate an explosive pass?

Here's the very next snap of that game against the Texans. Watch Nacua.

This is brutal for a defense. What are you supposed to do? Nacua blocks like a tight end, and he will block at the point of attack. Pitre needs to respect the threat of Nacua digging him out of the box and an explosive run hitting right behind. The conflict for Pitre is too great for any one individual player to handle.

Releasing Nacua through the line and into his route has been a devastating arrow in McVay's deep quiver of play-action options. Watch Nacua on this intermediate crosser against Tampa Bay. After he releases through the B-gap, he is running downfield between the hashes against a rookie corner (Jacob Parrish, No. 25). Parrish cannot rely on any safety help at all; he can't funnel Nacua to the middle of the field. He's on the loneliest of islands.

Here's another -- this one against Fangio's Eagles defense and a familiar six-man front. Because Fangio has committed additional bodies to the front, the second level is thin, with easy passing lanes open on either side of lone linebacker Baun. By releasing Nacua through the line, this crosser hits much faster than it would if he were in the slot, and the zone coverage doesn't have nearly enough time to fill the void.

With the reemergence of the running game has come the return of the play-action pass in Los Angeles. McVay never truly abandoned it, but Stafford's first era as the Rams' quarterback was all about the shotgun and the dropback. Now, the run-action has been folded back in. Stafford has 226 play-action dropbacks this season -- the most of any quarterback in the past 10 years, just barely beating out 2018 Goff (218). Stafford's 58.3 total EPA on play-action passes is just below his 60.4 from last season, and both are the highest figures for a Rams quarterback since 2018 Goff.

This is why I say everything flows from the Rams' running game. Even in 2021, when the Rams won the Super Bowl, the flow of offensive ideas, of offensive identity, had flipped. The Rams won games through the air, and the running game existed exclusively as a buttress to that effort. In 2025, the contour of the Rams' offense returned to its 2018 form. The passing game is in total symbiosis with the running game. It's balanced again.