NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Matthew Stafford slammed his helmet in anger.
The Los Angeles Rams quarterback knew he couldn’t make this mistake, not right now. With his team tied against the Tennessee Titans and less than a minute until halftime, the 17th-year veteran floated a pass up the left sideline and into the arms of Titans linebacker Cody Barton as he dropped back into zone coverage.
With one toss, he handed the momentum over to the No. 1 pick playing quarterback on the opposite team. As a lead disappeared, a normally calm and collected Stafford gripped his blue and gold helmet and spiked it into the turf at Nissan Stadium.
By the time Davante Adams got over to him to talk it through, a metamorphosis had begun.
“I told him during the game: ‘Bro, you are the coolest dude I’ve been around,’” Adams said. “He’s not cussing. He’s not blaming anybody. It was like it happened in practice.”
For the rest of the game, Stafford stopped forcing the ball into tight windows. He peppered Adams and Puka Nacua for 22 targets, rotating based on the coverages each drew. When both were covered, he found tight end Tyler Higbee for first downs, Davis Allen for a touchdown and Jordan Whittington for a 40-yard gain up the right sideline.
Stafford finished 23-of-33 for 298 yards, two touchdowns and an interception.
More importantly, he turned a three-point halftime deficit into an easy 33-19 victory to propel the Rams to 2-0. Now, they stare down a battle with the Eagles in Philadelphia next week, the site where his 16th season ended in the NFC divisional round.
On Sunday, his team played the second half with the demeanor he displayed in that first conversation after the pick and the helmet slam — as cool as an early fall breeze in Los Angeles.
This is the Rams’ commander in chief, playing out the string the only way he knows how. But could this be the best version of him, too?
The unwavering nature of Stafford
A narrative once formed about Stafford nationally, back when he was in Cam Ward’s shoes as the quarterback drafted No. 1 overall to rebuild the worst team in football. People called him Stat Padder for the way he racked up 4,000-yard passing seasons but saw just three playoff games and zero postseason wins in 12 years in Detroit before the trade that sent him to Los Angeles for Jared Goff.
But the reality of mid-career Stafford was that, for as much of a care-free gunslinger as he can be on plays that lead to interceptions like the one to Barton on Sunday, those moments almost always come in the heart of games rather than in the clutch. He’s sometimes the man who leads his team back from his own pick six. By the time Sunday arrived, he was the owner of 38 career fourth-quarter comebacks and 49 career game-winning drives.
There’s something about this quarterback that lets him go from carelessly tossing an interception to furiously spiking his helmet to diagnosing the path forward with the tone of a man ordering a pizza delivery on a Sunday afternoon.
“Mental toughness, resilience, experience — all the things that lead to great players being great,” Rams coach Sean McVay said.
If being drafted No. 1 and serving as the face of a franchise and being traded for a bounty of draft picks to engineer an all-in run to a championship created a weight, it’s been hard to tell when hoisted on the back of this 6-foot-3, 214-pound passer.
That’s still true now, even as that back has a degenerative disorder that led to weeks missed in training camp and has this 37-year-old dirting the ball in the face of rushers and passing up lanes to rush for touchdowns. One week after he became the 10th quarterback in history to pass for 60,000 career yards, he is living to see another down.
Nobody knows this truth better than the coach who led his position meetings every day back in 2016 and 2017 in Detroit and was now tasked with finding a way to make Sunday’s second-quarter interception snowball.
“Today, Matthew Stafford, Hall of Fame-caliber quarterback,” Titans coach Brian Callahan said after the game. “We didn’t do enough to disrupt him.”
That’s because the Stafford that exists now is in a different place. For one, he’s never had a duo of outside receivers like this.
In Nacua, he has a third-year budding superstar who averages 90 receiving yards a game for his career and catches everything in sight. Through two games this season — including Sunday’s eight-catch, 91-yard performance — Nacua has a 90 percent catch rate on 20 targets. That figure would be extreme for a running back catching checkdowns against Cover 2, let alone a wide receiver zipping across the middle and into traffic so much that he needed stitches last week to check back into the game.
In Adams, he has a 12th-year player with three first-team All-Pro seasons who is making the same push Stafford is, to reach the Hall of Fame and to win a championship before the sands in the hourglass run out. And that receiver, now 33, is likewise performing as if age is just another number. On Sunday, he saw 13 targets and reeled in six of them for 106 yards and scored his first touchdown as a Ram.
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In Nacua, he has an easy answer to zone coverage in a rugged player who is gaining the experience to settle between defenders and gain yards after the ball arrives, like he did as a runner on a jet sweep that he took 45 yards for the game’s first touchdown on Sunday.
In Adams, he has a solution to man coverage in one of the best route technicians the sport has seen, as he showed by toasting L’Jarius Sneed with a stutter step on a fade route to reel in a 16-yard touchdown catch. And when that player has the pedigree on the perimeter to force opposing No. 1 cornerbacks to travel to either side with him, as the Titans did with Snead and as the Houston Texans did with All-Pro Derek Stingley last week, it allows McVay to motion Nacua between the outside and the slot to create favorable matchups.
“It gives a lot of indicators to No. 9, and the more information he has, the better our offense is going to operate,” Nacua said. “There’s an opportunity I get in the mornings to be able to go out there and watch film with him. I know he’s there before I am. The iPad’s open, he’s writing things down and I’m watching the clips for the first time. He’s like, ‘Do you see that up top?’ And I’m like, ‘No, I was watching something else.’”
How far can a 37-year-old QB take the Rams?
This is what 17 seasons and 224 games produce in a man whose mind moves at the same velocity as his arm. It’s the way he has to win right now, when his back faces the risk of taking a hit he can’t return from.
But it’s a model that can work in his conference. After all, just two seasons ago, the NFC Championship Game featured Goff against Brock Purdy. It’s a step below the ceiling in the AFC, where the only quarterbacks to reach the conference title game since the 2020 season are Patrick Mahomes, Joe Burrow, Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson.
It’s why the Titans took the swing they did on Ward, who showed a glimmer of that upside when he scrambled for eight seconds to the sideline in the second quarter and launched a pass back across his body for a touchdown.
Through two games, this is working for the Rams. They made Stafford the third-quickest passer in the league in Week 1, according to TruMedia, where he attempted a league-low three passes that took more than 3 seconds. They are deploying more two-tight end looks to draw run-down personnel and isolate Adams and Nacua.
Through two weeks, Stafford is completing 71 percent of passes for 8.8 yards per attempt and a quarterback rating of 107.1. It’s a tiny sample, but all three are career bests.
“I put time and effort into making sure that when we break the huddle, man, everybody is locked and loaded and understanding my plan if we end up changing something,” Stafford said.
He has never had a duo quite like Adams and Nacua. Cooper Kupp was battling injuries to stay on the field to play with Nacua the past two seasons. Calvin Johnson was doing the same in his final two seasons when Golden Tate arrived in Detroit in 2014.
Adams and Nacua are the keys to the engine, and the Rams know who they want steering this ride.
“This is greatness right here,” Whittington said, pointing to the No. 9 Stafford jersey he wore out of the locker room after Sunday’s win. “He’s just in total command. When you’ve got somebody who is so in tune with the process and the game looks so slow to him, it’s really cool to see.”
(Photo: Justin Ford / Getty Images)
