TNF’s Ryan Fitzpatrick on the Rams’ Super Bowl-or-Bust Expectations This Year

Rich laid out the premise plainly. If everybody stays healthy through training camp, if the Rams are at full strength for that opener against the 49ers in Australia, and certainly if Aaron Donald returns between now and then, anything short of winning it all becomes the conversation of the season. Is that fair?

Ryan Fitzpatrick declined to sign off on the ziggy.

"I just think the NFL is awesome," Fitzpatrick told the show. "It's so much different than the NBA and the super teams because it is so much about the team."

That's the whole of his argument, and it's a better one than it looks at first glance. Fitzpatrick isn't saying the Rams aren't good. He's saying the sport doesn't reward preseason coronations the way the NBA does.

"It's about the health, but it's about guys playing together and it's about the schemes and the coaches," he said. "So I think it's very hard to be the favorite in preseason and to take that all the way through the season."

He offered the most recent evidence available, and it wasn't the team Rich was asking about. "We still have to remember, I know they've made their improvements, but Seattle won the whole thing last year."

So Fitzpatrick will grant the label without granting the outcome. "Yes, I think they should be the favorites. Does that mean they're going to win the whole thing? I think that's a very, very difficult thing to do because it isn't just five guys out there passing the ball around and shooting threes. This is a whole team."

Then he pointed at the thing nobody puts on the preview graphic.

"Special teams, we saw last year was a downfall for them," Fitzpatrick said. "So how do they improve their special teams?" That is the unglamorous question that decides whether a favorite goes wire to wire, and it's telling that a quarterback reached for it before reaching for anything about the passing game.

There is one variable Fitzpatrick did not want to say out loud, and then said out loud anyway.

"The health of Matthew Stafford, right? That was a big question mark going into last season. You never want to put that out into the ether, but that's a huge deal."

His read on Stafford's play is optimistic. Can a quarterback a year older keep performing at the level he's performed at? Fitzpatrick thinks so. The availability is the coin flip.

"Can he stay healthy? That's going to be a big question mark and their season is going to be riding on that," Fitzpatrick said. "If he gets hurt, they obviously have no shot."

Super Bowl or bust is a fun frame for July. Fitzpatrick's version is less fun and more useful. The Rams should be favorites, the favorites usually don't finish it, the special teams have to get fixed, and all of it is downstream of one quarterback staying upright.