For the second year in a row, an NFL franchise has won the Super Bowl at home. The Los Angeles Rams also rewarded themselves for an aggressive transfer policy with the sustained 23:20 victory over the Cincinnati Bengals.
On target: The Rams and their star player Aaron Donald celebrate the Superbowl triumph.
Aaron Donald, perhaps the best defensive player in the NFL, could hardly find a word when he gave the first winner’s interview around 7 p.m. local time in the shower of confetti. “I wanted that so much,” he said, one of the match winners, overwhelmed by emotions. After no one in the history of the Superbowl was allowed to crown themselves in their own stadium until the triumph of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers around Tom Brady in 2021, a team succeeded on Sunday with the Los Angeles Rams for the second year in a row. It was a logical win – and not just because Los Angeles was the clear favorite.
The Rams returned to Los Angeles in 2016 after more than two decades in exile from St. Louis. After a disappointing comeback season, they swapped coaches in 2017. And hired the youngest coach in the league, Sean McVay, who was 30 at the time. McVay has earned a reputation as an offensive mastermind – his assistant coaches are regularly recruited, and Superbowl adversary Cincinnati is also headed by a former McVay assistant, Zac Taylor. But in the most important game of his career for a long time, in the 2019 Superbowl, McVay was coached by the old master Bill Belichick according to all the rules of the art. The Rams lost 3:13 to the New England Patriots, their offense was a fiasco, nothing worked. McVay has often emphasized that he has learned a lot from the shame of that time. On Sunday he impressively completed his rehabilitation process.
The coach also benefited from the fact that the Rams positioned themselves as the most aggressive team in the NFL during his era. The team has completed 21 trades in McVay’s five years, a league high, and is pursuing a decidedly different strategy than most of the competition. This guards draft rights as a rule like the treasure in the silver lake. The Rams, on the other hand, have no qualms trading those picks for established players. General Manager Les Snead has put together an impressive star ensemble for McVay, and since the end of last season alone the Rams have added three really big names to their collective with quarterback Matthew Stafford, Odell Beckham Jr. and Von Miller. It’s a strategy that’s not without risk – at some point the Rams will have to pay for it because their roster will be too old and expensive. But Sunday’s triumph makes up for all of tomorrow’s worries – the plan worked out spectacularly.
What is only the second Superbowl triumph in the team’s history – the other dated 1999 and was accomplished while the differently-branded team was in St. Louis – is also enormous satisfaction for the 32-year-old playmaker Stafford. The Rams got him from Detroit, where he produced excellent statistics but didn’t win a single playoff game in more than ten years. The question of whether this was due to Stafford or the Lions had sparked a kind of scholarly dispute. Now the quarterback has won the title with the Rams in the first attempt. There can’t be a clearer statement. Stafford scored the crucial points for the Rams with just under a minute and a half to go when he found his favorite pass receiver, Cooper Kupp, in the end zone. The touchdown put the Rams in the lead in extremis, but Aaron Donald and his fellow defenders then secured the win shortly thereafter.
The defeat had something bitter for the adversary Cincinnati, the Bengals were equal to the favorites. Phenomenon Joe Burrow, this young quarterback, exciting and so confident, can take comfort in the fact that the future is his. The ones the Rams have been selling so consistently for some time.