Ben SolakJan 15, 2026, 06:25 AM ETCloseBen Solak joined ESPN in 2024 as a national NFL analyst. He previously covered the NFL at The Ringer, Bleeding Green Nation and The Draft Network.
The NFL’s best rushing offense of the past decade belongs to the 2018 Rams. You remember them, right? Second year under Sean McVay, reigning Offensive Player of the Year Todd Gurley toting the rock, went to a Super Bowl, incited an offensive avalanche? Pretty good group.
According to NFL Next Gen Stats, those 2018 and 2025 Rams are the only two rushing offenses since 2016 with success rates over 50% on carries by running backs. The 2018 team was at 50.13%, while the 2025 Rams are right behind at 50.12%. No cheeky scrambles, no quarterback keeps on read options — pure running back handoffs.
In the 2025 season, the Rams’ ground game has again been an understandable afterthought. Quarterback Matthew Stafford was named the first-team All-Pro quarterback, often a portent to the MVP award. And wide receiver Puka Nacua had 129 catches for 1,715 yards in a career-best season that might have made him the best receiver in football. The passing game is the story of modern football, and as such, it is the story of the 2025 Rams.
But it is an incomplete story. It is true that the Rams’ addition of Davante Adams has healed some of their red zone woes with an elite route runner in short areas. It is true that the Rams’ unique 13 personnel packages have put defenses in a bind. But it is also true that the running game is the foundation of this elite Rams offense — in 2025 with Kyren Williams and Blake Corum as it was in 2018 with Gurley. Everything they do flows from it.
At the surface, this is a cool but unremarkable observation. The ground game was awesome, then not awesome, then awesome again. Where things get exciting is in the weeds. Because the Rams don’t run the football at all like they did in 2018. Their scheme has completely changed.
As defensive tackle Jordan Elliott (No. 92) peeks into the A-gap, Williams bounces one gap over, getting skinny and finishing through the nickel corner, who has now been forced to take on Williams flat-footed. Williams bowls him over for a 7-yard gain.
With that said … this is duo. The Rams run it more than any other team — on over 40% of their handoffs — and they run it better than any other team.
A simple explanation of outside zone is easy to digest. The entire offensive line will gallop in one direction, looking to overtake defensive linemen and get between them and the path of the ball carrier. In theory, outside zone runs hit far on the outside. But in practice, this rarely happened for L.A. Far more often, the hot pursuit of defensive linemen and linebackers would create easy upfield cutback lanes, as Gurley would slice against the grain of the defensive flow.
Left tackle Andrew Whitworth (No. 77) sets the point of attack here against the Chargers in Week 3, blocking down on the defensive end and displacing him to the sideline. Working from the outside of Whitworth in, Gurley will look for defensive linemen and linebackers getting washed downfield. As left guard Rodger Saffold (No. 76) and center John Sullivan (No. 65) take the defensive tackle for a ride, Gurley can bang this run upfield with tempo.
Then, the Rams could fake the give and boot Goff out the other direction. The receivers and tight ends — previously key blockers — would be able to climb into voids behind the opponent linebackers, who were hopelessly slamming on the brakes and trying to scramble back into position.
The simplest explanation for why the running game disintegrated was in Gurley’s left knee. He missed the last two games of the 2018 regular season because of left knee inflammation. He had torn his left ACL at Georgia in 2014, and his heavy usage was grinding that old injury into new pain. Gurley carried the ball only four times in the NFC Championship Game and had only 10 carries for 35 yards against the Patriots in the Super Bowl.
He didn’t have the juice in 2019, and runs that previously climbed through the second level and exploded into the third instead ended in shoestring tackles and failed escapes. Gurley took 223 of the Rams’ 298 running back carries, but he dropped a full yard in yards per attempt (4.9 to 3.8). He was released following the season.
Gurley’s decline, while critical, is not a complete explanation. Also following the 2018 season, Saffold left in free agency to join the Titans. He spent almost every snap of 2017 and 2018 playing beside Whitworth along the left side, working combo blocks, adjusting plans as fronts changed and identifying blitzing linebackers. Sullivan, the center, saw his contract option declined by the Rams following the 2018 season, and he also left as a free agent.
So … Gurley health. Offensive line turnover. And — because we do have to give the other side credit — defensive adjustments. Vic Fangio and Bill Belichick famously found success against the Rams’ running game in 2018 by loading the defensive front with bodies and preventing those combination blocks from climbing to linebackers. Look at the fronts that Fangio deployed in the regular season that Belichick later cribbed in the Super Bowl.
It is fair to say that McVay’s offense, and the defensive reaction to it, was the flashpoint of the two-high defensive swing over the past five-plus seasons. It was also a contributing factor to the overall lightening of the linebacker position. You could directly tie the emergence of safeties such as Kyle Hamilton and Nick Emmanwori to this moment. It was an important time.
Over these years, the Rams scraped by with C.J. Anderson, Darrell Henderson Jr. and Sony Michel at running back. The season they won the Super Bowl, they had a league-average rushing success rate of 41.5%, and just 32.9% of their runs gained more yards than expected — an indictment on their running backs failing to maximize the blocking efforts of the line. (Compare that to 44.1% this season — the best the Rams’ running backs have ever performed in this metric.)
In 2022, the Rams started 3-6 even before Stafford got hurt. Forced to play Baker Mayfield, John Wolford and Bryce Perkins at quarterback, the reckless reliance on Stafford’s excellence to drive the offense was laid bare. The Rams had no longer needed the running game, but when they suddenly did need it, the pieces weren’t there.
Los Angeles had sold out in the past to be that fine-tuned outside zone running team that featured Whitworth and Saffold and Sullivan and Gurley. So many experienced players working in such smooth concert with one another. In a league with diminishing practice time in the summer, did McVay have the resources to reconstruct that Swiss watch of an offense? Or was there, perhaps, a simpler way?
The Rams’ duo revolution did not suddenly dawn in 2025, as if the play had been uncovered on an ancient tablet in an archeological dig. Duo was one of the Rams’ most important changeup runs to outside zone going back to 2018, and they’ve run it with intermittent frequency and success in every season since then.
But the commitment to duo as an identity really began with the 2023 draft. With the 36th pick — the earliest pick the Rams had used since they drafted Goff first overall in 2016 — the Rams selected Avila. He represented the first significant investment at the guard position since Saffold’s departure in 2019, and it wouldn’t be the only one. That August, the Rams traded future fourth- and fifth-round picks to the Steelers for Dotson to fill the right guard spot.
Dotson and Avila were not the svelte zone guards of seasons past. Both tip the scales at 330 pounds. In the 2024 offseason, when the Rams signed Jonah Jackson with designs on kicking Avila to center, they planned to have 1,000 pounds of man along the offensive interior.
Having a truly talented back is a non-negotiable for duo runs. There is no one correct play side of duo. It is the back’s responsibility to react to where the double-teams have taken defensive tackles and where the climbing linemen are steering linebackers. And we can see Williams work this out in real time on this duo run against Houston. Texans linebacker Azeez Al-Shaair (No. 0) aggressively shoots the gap the moment it opens, hoping to beat the lineman pulling off the double-team.
Williams does a lovely job staying patient on his path, pulling Al-Shaair towards center Coleman Shelton (No. 65) as he disengages. Al-Shaair takes on the block as if he expects Williams to run to his right. But because this is duo, and the running back’s job is to make the linebacker wrong, Williams cuts back and veers to the left instead. Decisive.
Here’s a Corum run on duo against the Cardinals. Watch Arizona linebacker Zaven Collins (No. 25) pitter-patter his feet while staring down the double-team. If he shot downhill at the open gap, Avila (No. 73) would peel off the combo to take him. But he tries to play it over the top, and as Corum pulls him to the center of the formation, it becomes Shelton’s job to disengage and address Collins.
The moment Collins dips inside, Corum is bouncing this to the boundary, and he outstrips the cornerback to the corner. Big gain.
The skill of the backs. The value of the blocking receivers such as Nacua and Jordan Whittington. The 13 personnel wrinkles that create even more double-teams for Williams and Corum to poke and prod. The bulk of the guards. So much has coalesced in Los Angeles to complete this multiyear reconstruction of the running game.
Watch that duo run against the Texans again, this time focusing on how Nacua digs out safety Jalen Pitre (No. 5) after lining up inside the tight end. Now ask yourself the question that McVay has been asking himself for decades: What wrinkle can we use off this run-action to generate an explosive pass?
This is brutal for a defense. What are you supposed to do? Nacua blocks like a tight end, and he will block at the point of attack. Pitre needs to respect the threat of Nacua digging him out of the box and an explosive run hitting right behind. The conflict for Pitre is too great for any one individual player to handle.