The Rams are putting their season's hopes in a Grupe
· Yahoo Sports
WOODLAND HILLS, Calif. –– Tuesday morning came for Harrison Mevis the way winter comes for the unprepared — suddenly, completely and without a single warm word to soften the landing.
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Less than 24 hours after his 48-yard kick died in Greg Rousseau's outstretched palm, less than a day after he stared at his own locker like it had betrayed him personally, the man they called "The Thiccer Kicker" was blocked from the Rams' practice facility.
Not benched. Not given a week to breathe.
Erased.
The 5-foot-11, 243-pound All-American from Missouri, the folk hero who made all six of his playoff field goals last January, who buried a 42-yard overtime winner in Chicago, who was perfect — 6 of 6 on field goals, 9 of 9 on extra points — during a run to the NFC championship, was handed his walking papers before the cupping marks faded off Puka Nacua's back.
Five of nine this season. Two misses Monday night — a 50-yard shank left in the first half, a potential game-winner swallowed whole in overtime — and a 2-3 record that has the preseason Super Bowl favorites looking up at their own expectations.
How you get it is how you lose it. Mevis took the job from Joshua Karty when Karty couldn't buy a make.
Now Mevis knows the feeling from the other side of the door, the one that locks behind you.
Sean McVay stood at the podium Monday night and didn't dress anything up. He never does. That's the gift and the guillotine of him.
"Not even close to good enough," McVay said of the field-goal and extra-point units. "It cost us the game tonight."
Then came the sentence that should have put every employee at the facility on notice: "I'm going to evaluate everything."
Evaluate everything.
In McVay's world, that's not a process. That's a threat.
He fired special teams coordinator Chase Blackburn midseason last December—his first in-season coaching change ever—and hired Bubba Ventrone to fix it. Ventrone's unit just blocked a game-winning kick. The clock above his desk is ticking loud enough for the whole league to hear.
Fairness demands a footnote, though: McVay blamed himself too. He called a timid run on third and five before the fateful kick, a play that screamed settlement, and he said so. "I wish I would have had a better play call and gone for it, got it tighter," he admitted. "I'm sick right now with myself."
That's the contradiction living at the heart of this — a coach sharp enough to see every failure, including his own, and a franchise that somehow cannot stop stepping on the same rake.
Count the games. Not the highlight reels — the games. This is a bill that keeps arriving.
Week 3 last season, Philadelphia: the Rams lead 26-7 on the road and lose, in part because Karty has two fourth-quarter field goals blocked, the second of which Jordan Davis carries back for a touchdown.
Week 5 last season, San Francisco: Karty misses from 53 and has an extra point blocked. Four points vanish in a game the 49ers take by three in overtime.
Week 16 last season, Seattle: a 58-yard punt return touchdown fuels the Seahawks' comeback, and Mevis — yes, that Mevis — misses a go-ahead kick from, of all distances, 48 yards.
Monday night, Buffalo: 0 for 2, one blocked at the worst possible moment.
And the fifth? Pick your poison from a second straight "Thursday Night Football" collapse, another coin-flip classic that slipped through fingers built for other work.
Over the past two seasons, the Rams own five losses decided by a go-ahead score in the final minute of regulation or overtime, tied for the most in the NFL. Their special teams EPA over that same span: minus-84.3. The next-worst team in the league sits at minus-65.1.
That's not a gap; that's a canyon.
Monday made history in its own way — the Rams became the first team ever to lose a game with 450-plus yards of offense, zero turnovers and 100-plus yards of opponent penalties.
Do everything right, lose anyway. There is a certain dark artistry to that.
Enter Blake Grupe, signed off the Jets' practice squad like a man called in from the bullpen with the bases loaded and nobody warm.
The numbers on the back of his baseball card: 86 of 105 career field goals, an 81.9% conversion rate, a long of 60, 96 of 98 on extra points.
Last season, he went 18-for-26 for the Saints and 11-for-11 for the Colts.
Read that 18-of-26 again.
Grupe isn't arriving on a white horse. He's arriving on the same broken carousel, just a different painted horse. The truth nobody in that building wants to say out loud: the kicker was never the disease. He's been a symptom — recurring, painful, occasionally catastrophic, but a symptom.
The real illness is speed. Simple. Plain.
Quentin Lake, a starting safety, was covering kicks Monday night — starters on special teams are a coach's last prayer. Xavier Smith, one of the few Rams with genuine wheels, is off the roster entirely. Tutu Atwell, the fastest man in the building, collects cobwebs on the sideline while the return game wheezes.
You can fire the kicker every Tuesday from now until January, and it won't manufacture a single burst of acceleration.
They cut Mevis. They cut Smith. The roster is lighter and slower, and the Rams solved nothing because you cannot trim your way to speed.
Zoom out and the picture curdles. For five years this franchise has been a Ferrari with one flat tire — brilliant offense, championship defense, and a third phase playing a different sport entirely.
Kicker after kicker. Coordinator after coordinator.
Blackburn fired, Ventrone hired, Mevis anointed, Mevis discarded.
The personnel carousel spins so fast the Rams can't see that the machine itself is the problem — the scouting, the emphasis, the institutional shrug toward 20% of the game.
The best organizations treat special teams as a weapon. The Rams treat it as a rumor.
Picture it.
The locker room Monday night, music off, the jokes gone quiet.
Mevis at the center of it, crestfallen in a way that had nothing to do with stats, a young man coming to grips with a simple, brutal arithmetic — that he kicked himself out of the job he'd dreamed about, on national television, in overtime, with everything on the line.
That's the part the transaction wire can't capture. The Rams needed a head to roll, and his was closest to the door. Fair enough. That's the league.
But when Grupe trots out Sunday against Arizona, and the coverage unit trots out behind him, and the return game shuffles into place — ask yourself what actually changed. The name on the jersey, the number, the face.
Not the speed. Not the results. Not the story.
And if Ventrone can't conjure both out of thin air, he'll be the next man standing outside a locked door, holding a box, wondering how it all went sideways so fast. In Los Angeles, it turns out, the kicking game isn't a phase of the team.
It's the whole ghost story.