THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. — Football can be cruel, and often is to those who encapsulate the best of its qualities.
Rams receiver and team captain Robert Woods tore his left ACL on Friday during practice, a “freak accident” as described Saturday morning by coach Sean McVay. Woods was running a route on air during the workout and pulled up with an odd feeling in his knee. Inspection of his knee by team doctors later that day revealed the tear. Woods’ 2021 season is over, the sport continues its merciless churn as we — teammates, coaches, fans and even the media to whom Woods has always been so great — reel with the unfairness of it all.
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“Really don’t have a whole lot of words,” Cooper Kupp, one of Woods’ best friends and his running mate in the Rams offense, said after Saturday’s practice.
“You play this game with a sense of freedom; you try to play this game as free as possible. You just take what God gave you, the passions He gave you, and just do your best to accentuate those and let it all hang out on the field because at the end of the day, you just don’t know what’s going to happen out there. I’m sick for Rob. But he played the game that way, that’s how he played. That’s Rob’s M.O. … he played free. He played hard. He left everything on the field. If something like this is going to happen, you want to be under those circumstances, where you’re going.
“Obviously not having him is going to be felt, and we’re going to miss him out there. Our room is going to miss him. And he’s a fighter, he’s going to come back and he’s going to be great. Just sick for him, right now.”
Woods has been the Rams’ No. 2 receiver this season behind Kupp, accounting for 45 catches and 556 yards, with 12.4 yards per catch and four touchdowns. He and Kupp perennially are among the NFL’s top yards-after-catch receivers, and ESPN recently found that when Matthew Stafford targeted him, those throws held a nearly 50 percent first-down conversion rate.
It’s not even just about replacing Woods’ stats, either. Despite speculation on Twitter from week to week, people on site know that Woods isn’t one to fixate on that part of his game more so than the effort by the group as a whole.
Don’t be mistaken: Woods loves to get the ball. He and McVay even had a conversation earlier this season about his surprising lack of targets relative to Kupp’s, before Woods’ 14-target, 12-catch, 150-yard game at Seattle in Week 5. But where other players — even recently — have also lobbied for more targets, escalating that conversation to the point where trade or release were ultimately the only options, Woods would never allow such a conversation to get close to that point. That’s the difference. He wanted the ball more because it makes the team better when he gets it. (Prior to his injury, Woods was also averaging just one less catch per game than his career-high in 2019).
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“I think it’s very rare that you see receivers with ‘C’ on their chests,” McVay said of Woods and Kupp just this week. “And both of those guys have it. I think it’s a reflection of who they are as people, No. 1. They are great competitors. But they’re all about the right stuff. We talk about this ‘We, not me’ being a part of how we want to operate and I think those two guys epitomize it as good as anybody. Being with those guys is one of the best parts about coaching.”
So much of the Rams’ offense runs through Woods, with Kupp as his running mate, dear friend and trusted teammate. He is a backbone of sorts for McVay’s system in all of its adaptations and evolutions, from the down-and-dirty blocking work in the run and the pass game that most receivers avoid, to his particular brand of route running that combines total physical fearlessness with delicate precision. He is both a ballet dancer and a bulldozer.
Woods unlocks layers of this offense that others simply cannot. He is a motion player. A misdirection, pre-snap artist. A high-low concept perfectionist who can sell poor, unassuming safeties on the “low” route and then shimmy downfield to secure the “high” route a few plays later while Kupp sells the “low.” A total, all-around player who releases off the line in the pass game like a defensive end sheds a block and then lines right back up to block defensive ends out of a run play. When Stafford first arrived in Los Angeles in the spring, the level of detail and intentionality — and time — that Woods put into helping him onboard into the offense alongside Kupp and McVay is a big part of the reason the Rams are producing the highest overall play and passing EPAs in the NFL right now.
The Rams have little proven depth at receiver behind Kupp and blossoming talent Van Jefferson. They lost Tutu Atwell and Jacob Harris to season-ending injuries in the last two weeks (two non-contributors who had a shot to hit their learning curve after DeSean Jackson parted ways with the Rams in late October), and now feature promising rookie Ben Skowronek and former undrafted free agent J.J. Koski on their two-deep.
They are also luckier than they previously could have imagined, considering the circumstances, after agreeing to terms with star receiver Odell Beckham Jr. just Thursday.
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Beckham, who passed his physical Friday and practiced for the first time Saturday, should project as a great addition to this type of offense and his presence is especially timely now. He’s looking to prove something after asking for his release from the Browns just days ago. That attitude is a good thing, particularly when it comes to the more ferocious concepts designed into McVay’s passing game. But this team can’t replace Woods simply. Instead of getting slowly phased in, as was the intent of Beckham’s first few weeks with the Rams, he’ll have a more stressful onboarding period and more on his shoulders, too. It will test him; it will test all of the receivers in ways they’ve never been tested before because Woods has just been so damn steady for all of these seasons.
Woods was a part of the player-driven recruiting effort for Beckham, by the way, offering his enthusiastic invite personally to Beckham via phone call Thursday morning, even as he understood bringing in another set of hands to catch Stafford’s passes would undoubtedly affect his own targets as well as others’.
“Everything felt right about me coming here, except for that,” Beckham said Saturday of Woods’ injury. “This is a guy who called me on the phone, on FaceTime (to encourage me to join the team). We shared words and just how excited we were to work together, for me to be able to learn from him.”
Talk about unselfish. Once again, as steady and on time as ever, Woods showed everybody who he is. He deserved to make a Super Bowl run in his hometown, wearing the No. 2 jersey he played in while at his hometown college.
And it just feels wrong, that football’s cruel and unpredictable calculus took that chance away from one of its own brightest stars.
(Photo: Ronald Martinez / Getty Images)
