INGLEWOOD, Calif.—So much of sports now is about the future rather than the present. Baseball teams like the Baltimore Orioles tell their fans to wait a full half-decade for a chance to contend; NBA teams fight so hard for draft lottery odds that losing isn’t losing–it’s “tanking,” it’s a “Process.” The major accusation former Dolphins coach Brian Flores leveled at the NFL in his lawsuit last week was that he was essentially offered bribes to lose games so the Dolphins could get a higher draft pick. It’s a neat trick, all told: If your team is losing now, it’s not because you’re doing a bad job, it’s because it’s all part of the plan.
The Los Angeles Rams didn’t do any of that. The Rams were uniquely incentivized to win a Super Bowl, right now, this specific season. They traded away their young franchise quarterback Jared Goff, whom they made the No. 1 overall pick in 2016, for Matthew Stafford, because he was older, more established and ready to win immediately. They brought in aging but still effective stars like Odell Beckham Jr. and Von Miller. They traded away draft picks. It was all geared toward this year, because this was the year the Rams were hosting the Super Bowl, the year they could live the fairy tale that the league so desperately wanted for them. It probably shouldn’t have worked—at several moments on Sunday night, it sure looked like it wasn’t going to—and if it hadn’t, it could have been disastrous in the long-term. The Rams mortgaged much of their future in exchange for the best chance to win in 2022. Their mindset was always clear: In the future we are all dead, so let’s go for it right now.
You can be annoyed by the Rams—not the players, necessarily, but their dreadful owner Stan Kroenke and his nefarious plan to bail on the city of St. Louis (a plan that ended up costing the league $790 million) and the ugliness of all the NFL has moved around to make this Los Angeles night happen. But there has to be some respect for the pure chutzpah of a team, finally, putting all their cards on the table. The Rams acted as if tomorrow didn’t exist. You’ve got to give them credit for actually pulling it off.
It was certainly a rocky road to the 23-20 win over the Cincinnati Bengals. The Rams looked in control early, but the tenor of the game changed when Odell Beckham Jr. seemed to blow out his knee in the second quarter. (He’d caught a touchdown earlier and moonwalked in celebration.) The momentum shifted immediately, and the Bengals—whose fans absolutely took over the city all week and outnumbered Rams fans, in their own stadium, by the thousands—took over, thanks to another gutsy performance from Joe Burrow, their unflappable quarterback who came this close to become the first quarterback in football history to win a Heisman Trophy, a college football championship and a Super Bowl. (He would have won a Super Bowl MVP too.)
But in the end, the Bengals’ signature weakness, their offensive line, failed against Aaron Donald and a Rams defensive front so terrifying it might have forced Tom Brady into retirement. One drive in the fourth quarter that could have given the Bengals an insurmountable lead stalled, allowing a meticulous Stafford drive down the field to win. The plan was simple: Feed the ball to Super Bowl MVP Cooper Kupp, who was so beaten up by the end of the drive, particularly on a ferocious hit that drew an unnecessary roughness penalty, that in the regular season he probably would have been taken out of the game for concussion protocols. Instead he stayed in, and caught the game-winning pass.
The best play of the drive might have come from Stafford, though, who completed a no-look pass to Kupp, in the tensest possible moment, that is more remarkable the more you watch it.
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Burrow had one more chance, but it was anticlimactic. After an odd play call on third-and-1 at midfield, in which the Bengals handed the ball off and got nowhere, Burrow was sacked by all-world monster Aaron Donald, clinching a second Super Bowl for the Rams, and their first in Los Angeles.
The Rams will still be good next year: They still have Donald and Stafford and Kupp and their stars. But they will be hamstrung by some big contracts, and they’ll suffer for having lost some of those future draft picks. Surely, one of the bloodless, efficiency-expert guys who run teams like the Orioles or the Browns or the Trail Blazers would say that they gave up too much down the line, that they took on too much risk, that they hurt themselves in 2026, or something like that. But those people will be wrong, and the Rams have the Super Bowl title, in their big $6 billion stadium, in front of 70,000 home fans (half of whom, uh, might have been Bengals fans), and they get to hold onto that thing forever. The nice thing about going for it is that, sometimes, you get it.
Will Leitch is a contributing editor at New York Magazine, co-host of “The Long Game With LZ and Leitch” podcast, a writer for MLB and Medium and the founder of Deadspin. Subscribe to his free weekly newsletter and buy his novel “How Lucky,” out from Harper Books now.