The 2014 Draft didn’t get off to a better start — St. Louis drafted Greg Robinson with the 2nd overall pick, one of the largest draft busts in recent memory.  But Les Snead — the same GM who traded up for Austin, whiffed on the rest of the 2013 draft, and then drafted Robinson — has been on a very hot streak ever since.  An hour after taking Robinson, the team took Aaron Donald with the 13th pick that year.  Then the Rams drafted Todd Gurley with a 1st round pick in 2015, and traded up for Jared Goff with the 1st pick in 2016.  Those are the team’s best three players, but the bulk of the current roster was acquired in 2017.

Seven starters were added in 2017: wide receiver Robert Woods, offensive linemen Austin Blythe, John Sullivan, and Andrew Whitworth were all veteran acquisitions for the team, while the Rams used 3rd and 4th round picks on LB Samson Ebukam, S John Johnson, and wide receivers Cooper Kupp (8 starts) and Josh Reynolds (8 starts as Kupp’s replacement). It was not the star-studded, Kamara-esque class the Saints had that year, but seven starters is still seven starters.

The graph below shows the amount of AV on the 2018 Rams that was added each year, both via the draft and overall:

This past offseason, Los Angeles was short on draft picks, so the team went to the veteran market to make some high-profile acquisitions. In other words, the Rams tried build a dream team.  Los Angeles traded for Brandin Cooks (13 points of AV in 2017), and added three players who had uneven 2017s after strong 2016 campaigns CB Marcus Peters (13 points of AV in 2016), and CB Aqib Talib (14 points of AV in 2016) and DT Ndamukong Suh (12 points of AV in 2016). And during the season, Los Angeles traded for Jaguars pass rusher Dante Fowler. How did those 5 players work out?

Cooks has been great, living up to expectations with 1,204 receiving yards. Suh has been very good, too: he ranks 2nd to Donald on the team in both sacks and quarterback hits. Peters and Talib have been less good, in part because Talib missed 8 games with a broken ankle. Peters was repeatedly torched early in the year, although he’s played better in the back half of the season. Fowler had two sacks and a forced fumble in 8 games, although he did have a sack in the Rams playoff win last week.

Reid looks up at the scoreboard and sees more points

Back then, I wrote about the best regular season matchups ever. And I’ve also written about the worst regular season matchups ever. And to be clear, there’s no right or wrong way to identify the best or worst matchup ever, even if you just base things on record.

You can’t use just winning percentage, because it’s hard to compare teams who have played a different number of games (is a matchup of two 3-0 teams better than a matchup of two 9-1 teams? I don’t think so, but winning percentage says otherwise). One solution is to add 11 games of .500 football to each team; in other words, add 5.5 wins and 5.5 losses to each team. For the Chiefs and Rams, that would make both teams 14.5-6.5, which translates to an adjusted winning percentage for both Kansas City and Los Angeles of 0.690. A game between two 3-0 teams would have an average adjusted winning percentage of only 0.607, which is one reason why I like this formula.

So where does Rams/Chiefs rank? With all due respect to the classic 49ers/Browns games from 1948, I’m limiting today’s post to games since 1950. And tonight’s matchup is the 20th best game during that period. The table below shows the best matchups in the NFL since 1950. Each game is listed from the perspective of the winner, and displays each team’s each team’s adjusted winning percentage and the average of the two adjusted records. Finally, I’ve included a linkable boxscore to each game.

Some other notes:

Is this the best Monday Night Football game ever? The 1990 Giants and 49ers were both 10-1 before their classic matchup); that’s the only game in MNF history with a better average adjusted winning percentage between the two teams. Only a few other games come close: Saints/Seahawks in 2013, Broncos/49ers in 1997, and Bears/Dolphins in 1985 stand out among the rest.

This is also just the 5th game since 1950 between two teams that have won 90% of their games or more and have both played at least 10 games, joining the Packers/Cowboys in 2007, the Giants/49ers in 1990, the Colts and Broncos in 1977, and the Rams/Vikings game from 1969.

Along with the Saints, this game features two of the best three offenses in the NFL, and two pretty uneven defenses. In other words, this game should be not just a classic, but a fun one for all viewers. In fact, it’s arguably more of an extreme game from a shootout perspective than from a powerhouse perspective: the game tonight has an Over/Under of 62.5 points, the second-largest in history behind a 63-point O/U between the Rams and 49ers.