INGLEWOOD, Calif. — Exhausted, elated, and admittedly a little bewildered, Rams head coach Sean McVay walked to the lectern after a 17-16 win over Las Vegas on Thursday night.
“Just like we drew it up,” he said, drily.
The Rams acquired fallen-from-football-grace quarterback Baker Mayfield off waivers on Tuesday afternoon. Two days later, Mayfield executed a 98-yard touchdown drive with 1:45 to play, which tied the Raiders at 16 points with 15 seconds to play. Kicker Matt Gay hit the extra point, and safety Taylor Rapp intercepted Las Vegas quarterback Derek Carr as time expired to seal the game-winning effort.
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It was, frankly, unbelievable considering the circumstances.
“I’m still kind of like, ‘what the hell is going on right now?'” McVay said.
Mayfield arrived in Los Angeles on Tuesday night, and it’s about an hour commute from the airport to the team practice facilities in Thousand Oaks, Calif.
The Rams’ Wednesday practice (a “Friday” because of the short week), was mostly red zone work and throw-and-catch drills. Mayfield threw to a group of receivers that is currently without Nos. 1 and 2 Cooper Kupp (ankle) and Allen Robinson (foot), and shook hands with a group of offensive linemen who have been through 12 different combinations in 13 games. McVay and his coaching staff put together two 10-play periods for Mayfield, run and pass, so he could at least start to get his feet wet in their offense. That’s it. They also had to get him a crash course in their silent count, because not only was Mayfield dropping into their plan mid-week, the Rams also knew they’d be host to a loud and heavily-populated Raiders crowd in their home stadium.
“What a quick study,” said McVay, “I mean, he got here like five minutes ago. … I’m really happy for these players, these coaches. It’s a great testament to the resilience of this group. Man, you forget what winning is like (after six consecutive losses), and it sure is fun.”
All told, Mayfield maybe, maybe had about 50 throws in his first 40 hours with his new team before he took the field in the first quarter Thursday night, a series after backup John Wolford (dealing with a neck injury) started the game and went three-and-out.
“I’ve kind of never seen anything like what Baker did,” said right tackle and team captain Rob Havenstein. “He got here, what, Tuesday? Just unbelievable. The work and the effort and the mindset of the boys, the offense and defense and special teams actually putting together a complete performance there down the stretch. … Couldn’t be happier for my boys. No matter what was happening, everybody had each others’ backs.”
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Most of the game was ugly. The ending was pure madness. But in the fourth quarter, the Rams played a brand of complementary football hardly seen from them this season.
The Rams defense allowed one touchdown throughout, which was helped quite a bit by a 32-yard explosive pass play on that drive. Receiver Davante Adams made one of two 30-plus-yard catches against cornerback Jalen Ramsey, the first a remarkable one-handed effort. Outside of those two plays, Adams (three catches, 71 yards, no touchdowns) was not able to break the game open. Nor technically was running back Josh Jacobs, who has run all over teams the last couple of weeks. Thursday, Jacobs did have 99 yards — but on 27 carries, averaging 3.7 yards per carry. Inside linebacker Bobby Wagner said the Rams defense didn’t want to allow quite so many overall yards (302), but were stingy in the red zone and even took the ball away once there, courtesy of an end zone interception by second-year linebacker Ernest Jones.
After a Cam Akers touchdown run with 3:25 left to play, the Rams defense forced a three-and-out on the other side. Wagner made the run stop on third-and-1 and finished with a team-high 14 tackles. That set up Mayfield and the offense’s go-ahead effort.
“To be able to call on (the) defense, it came down to that third-and-1 stop — the defense did a hell of a job making that stop and getting us the ball back,” Mayfield said.
Then, chaos. In a historically troubled Rams season, it was finally the good kind.
On third-and-2 with 1:37 to play, receiver Van Jefferson drew a pass interference flag on a ball that would have otherwise been intercepted. Still alive. Mayfield was then sacked for a 9-yard loss, but Raiders defensive tackle Jerry Tillery drew an unsportsmanlike penalty and the Rams crept forward. Then, Mayfield hit second-year receiver Ben Skowronek on a 32-yard ball over the middle, which Skowronek stretched and (notably) hung onto as the other 11 players surged toward the new line of scrimmage with the clock ticking away. Mayfield hit Malcolm Brown (elevated from the practice squad) and Skowronek again for a combined 17 yards, then spiked the ball to stop the clock with 16 seconds left.
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On the next snap, Mayfield unfurled a beautiful throw to Jefferson, whose man was stuck tight with him in press coverage. Jefferson hauled in the touchdown catch, which had just a 30.4 percent completion probability, according to Next Gen Stats — making it Mayfield’s lowest-probability completion of the night.
Mayfield’s throw to Jefferson was also the third-year receiver’s first game-winning touchdown of his career, at any level. The 98-yard drive was the longest go-ahead touchdown drive in a two-minute situation in the last 45 years, according to Elias Sports.
Why the hell not?
The Rams made a “why the hell not?” move when they acquired Mayfield this week, and they played a “why the hell not” kind of game. They let go, leaned into it. They ran an informal walk-through in Thousand Oaks, Calif., just before loading up on the team buses Thursday early afternoon, specifically to go through a two-minute situation just in case they might need it. They had a short — Mayfield laughed, very short — list of calls for him that they knew he was comfortable with in case he did enter the game (he wasn’t totally sure he would until after it started). They threw it out (“we dipped out of that list and got into some other things,” Mayfield said, chuckling). Center Brian Allen barked in Mayfield’s ear constantly — reminders of the language, the rules of the offense within that language. McVay chattered at hyper-speed into Mayfield’s headset snap after snap. When I asked Havenstein what the communication was like in-game, he just laughed.
“Some of it we were kinda learning on the fly,” he said. “We’d give him a little synopsis, and he was like, ‘all right, f—- it.'”
Down six with 1:41 to go backed up your own two-yard line? @bakermayfield was feeling dangerous. 😤 pic.twitter.com/gDuUL1QsZH
— NFL (@NFL) December 9, 2022
But in the end, during a hurry-up situation without any remaining timeouts, running a clock-the-ball cadence only previously taught in a training camp he wasn’t present for, when he quite literally had nothing left to lose, Mayfield was at his most alive.
“Ball is ball,” added Mayfield. It didn’t hurt, of course, that the Raiders were called for two penalties on the drive, or that they aligned in a tight coverage in crunch time when a prevent shell that contained the Rams inbounds would have killed the rest of their clock and perhaps suffocated a touchdown look.
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“I was truly shocked they were pressing with like, 15 seconds left, knowing we didn’t have any timeouts left,” said Mayfield. Add it to the list for him, this week.
As Mayfield walked out of his press conference and back through the locker room, he turned to the public relations staffer next to him.
“All right,” he said, grinning. “Where the hell do I go?”
Next: Learn everybody’s names, a few more pages in the playbook. A coffee spot on the way to work, the correct way to turn when exiting the elevator, even what the schedule is for the rest of the year.
Mayfield has four more weeks to put the best tape he can out there, because he’ll be hunting up a job in 2023. The Rams signed him with the hope that he’d do enough to turn into a compensatory pick for them, if he earned a new contract elsewhere. They gave little to no thought to what a future with Mayfield as a potential backup quarterback would look like for them, multiple people with knowledge of their discussions said. They wanted to avoid being further mortified on the field through the end of their season and it cost only $1.3 million to acquire him. After this, who knows?
“To be honest with you, I’m just looking to be the best version of me possible,” Mayfield said. “Learn, improve in this system, try to take away from a great group of guys (who) have had a lot of success … Just try to learn from everybody here. Take in as much as I can, and let the pieces fall where they may. I can’t control the future. I know I have the next four games here. I’m trying to build on that, and just be the best version of me.”
Mayfield doesn’t need that question answered right now, and neither do the Rams. They need to live here, in this most improbable of moments in an otherwise lost season on Thursday night. Let them.
“I don’t know if you could write it any better than that,” said Mayfield, with an exhale. “Obviously we’d like to be a little bit more stress-free, but it’s a pretty damn good story, I’ll be honest with you. It’s special.”
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So I won’t try to write it better, and they won’t try to tell it better. There’s time to figure the rest out later. We’ll all leave this moment here where it is — frozen in all of its absurdly fantastical chaos, preserved so the players who never quit on each other, who needed it most, can live inside it just a little longer.
(Top photo of Baker Mayfield and Brian Allen: Brian Rothmuller / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)