It can be hard to find clear, obvious paths for improvement when your offense was the best in the NFL the prior season. That’s what the Los Angeles Rams are facing going into 2026.
Last season, no matter how you slice it, the Rams were the cream of the crop when it came to NFL offense. The Rams finished the year first in total offense, scoring offense and success rate, plus second in EPA/play. Whether you prefer the classic stats or more advanced metrics, this offense was a wagon.
So where can the
Rams show improvement next season? It’s hard to get better than “literally the best and the stats prove it,” especially when the odds are your quarterback probably won’t post the best season of his career for the second straight season in his late 30s (it’s not impossible, just not likely, even if he has another objectively great season).
The answer could simply be getting a league-average amount of luck.
It seems a little ridiculous to talk about luck being a major factor when the offense was already dominant, but there are a few stats that show the Rams actually drew the short end of the stick in a couple toss-up areas last season.
Analyst Ben Baldwin’s site RBSDM.com has become arguably the best hub for free, public advanced NFL stats in recent years. Those four-quadrant graphs you see all over the football internet comparing teams, quarterbacks, etc? A huge number of them emanate from RBSDM.com. The site includes a “Luck” tab, featuring a handful of less predictable and more volatile stats, and it’s a rare webpage that doesn’t show the Rams universally near the top of any given offensive category.
Let’s start with fumble luck, something the great college football writer Bill Connelly wrote about extensively back in the day at a now-defunct sister site to TST. While there are obvious differences between the NFL and the college game, getting fortunate with the way the leather-bound prolapsed spheroid we call the football bounces is crucial at both levels. How did this affect the Rams in 2025? Negatively, it turns out.
Los Angeles only fumbled 11 times all of last season, but only recovered four of them. A 36.4% recovery rate was tied for the fifth-worst rate in the league. Every fumble is different, but recovering such a low percentage of your own fumbles is generally attributable to bad luck given the unorthodox nature of how the ball bounces.
There’s another stat on Baldwin’s site called 3rd-down conversions over expected, essentially using an array of factors (time, score, type of play, etc.) to determine how much more or less often a team converted on third downs than those factors would indicate. The Rams finished 26th in the league in that metric, converting at a 2.8% lower rate than expected on third downs. When you consider the talent and coaching involved, it’s easy to consider this more of a series of bad breaks than a broken team.
Injury luck also always plays a role in a team’s success, but it was a fairly neutral factor for the Rams compared to the rest of the NFL last season. FTN Fantasy (the spiritual successor to the dearly departed Football Outsiders) keeps track of adjusted games lost every year, which uses a few factors to weight the impact of injuries as opposed to simply total games missed. Los Angeles finished 10th best in terms of overall injury luck in 2025, but the offense was right in the middle of the pack at No. 14.
There are plenty of stats out there that try to determine the luck involved in a particular play or game, and you can probably find one or two that would argue the Rams were incredibly lucky on offense, if you look hard enough. But the fact of the matter is a few basic, classically volatile parts of the game went against L.A. last season; getting back to league average in those categories could help spur on even more potency for the NFL’s best offense.
