THE CLAIM
The Los Angeles Rams coach Sean McVay said that special teams play cost them the win against the Buffalo Bills on Monday Night Football, and some others think it might cost them their season. Many NFL pundits are also convinced that the Rams’ underperformance in this phase of the game is due to their own negligence.
The NFL Daily’s Gregg Rosenthal thinks the Rams special teams unit has been consistently bad because McVay doesn’t take the function seriously.
Take-master Colin Cowherd also believes the Rams don’t care about roster building with special teams.
Brett Kollmann believes you can’t take the Rams seriously as a Super Bowl contender as long as they have the worst special teams unit.
And media “Power Rankings” posts are citing the Rams special teams play as a factor in their lower position.
I’m going to bucket these claims in two categories: 1) The Rams don’t take special teams seriously, and 2) The Rams can’t seriously contend for the Super Bowl due to their special teams.
THE VERDICT - TRUE (BUT DOES IT MATTER) & FALSE
Yes, there is ample evidence that McVay and the Rams don’t value special teams play, at least in terms of objective metrics like capital spend on specialists. But the question then becomes how much that matters: it’s not very predictive of special teams performance. I’ll dig into all this below.
The idea that we should materially lower the Rams in rankings and their Super Bowl chances beyond what’s implied by their offensive and defensive play is a big mistake. The instability of special teams performance is well-established, and even teams with multi-year streaks of bad special teams play haven’t been significantly worse going forward.
THE EVIDENCE
The reason that the focus on the Rams’ special teams has reached a crescendo is their island game woes against the Bills (two missed field goals, in particular) and the fact that they’re a great team in the other two phases of the game. The Los Angeles Chargers have been even worse in special teams value by my methodology, but they’re bad enough on offense to take the focus away.
It’s also a longer-running focus on the Rams being bad at special teams play for a long time. Their last good special teams season was 2017 (fifth), the first year McVay was head coach. The slump started in 2019 (29th). Since 2022 they’ve been bottom-8 four years in a row: 28th, 32nd, 28th, 26th. Through Week 5 of 2026 they’re 31st at about −5 EPA per game. Coordinator hasn’t mattered much, moving from John Fassel (2017-2019) to John Bonamego (2020) to Joe DeCamillis (2021-2022) to Chase Blackburn (2023 and fired mid-2025) to Bubba Ventrone (2026).
It is true that the Rams’ recent poor special teams play has coincided with smaller specialist spending, as far as we can measure it. According to Spotrac, their 2026 specialist cash (kicker, punter, long snapper) ranks 32nd at $2.81M, or 0.79% of team cash. For comparison, the Dallas Cowboys led all teams at $14.4M, and the median spending is $5.3M. The Rams have been bottom-4 in spending every year since 2023, after releasing Johnny Hekker.
But when we get to the ultimate question of how much spending on specialists matters, the evidence is weak. There’s a 0.07 correlation between spending and performance, though the low-spending Rams have been on the wrong side of special teams value consistently.
