ESPN Says the Rams Missing the Playoffs Is 'Not an Overreaction.' Their Own Beat Writer Disagrees.
Dan Graziano put the Rams third in their division after one game. Blaine Grisak, who covers them daily, answered plainly: one game doesn't make a season.
Los Angeles lost 27-7 in its opener, and within a day the take had hardened into something bigger than a bad afternoon. ESPN's Dan Graziano ran his annual Week 1 overreaction column and put the following claim to the test: that the Rams could finish third in their division and miss the playoffs entirely. His verdict was blunt. "NOT AN OVERREACTION." For a team that spent the offseason being described as a contender, that is a remarkable distance to fall on the strength of a single Sunday.
Useful next steps
The case is not hard to assemble. Seven points is not a slow start, it is an offense that never arrived, and it happened against a divisional opponent who will be measured against them all year. Graziano's column was not uniformly harsh on everybody either — he judged the claim that the Bears will set a scoring record to be reasonable, and the claim that the Panthers would extend Bryce Young before the Texans extend C.J. Stroud to be an overreaction. He was making distinctions, not simply enjoying himself, which is what makes the Rams verdict land harder than a throwaway line would.
Let's not ignore the things that we can learn from, but we can't lose twice to that. We've got to be able to move forward.— Sean McVay, Los Angeles Rams head coach
McVay's formulation — that a team can lose the same game twice if it lets the first loss dictate the next fortnight — is the standard coaching answer, and it is also the actual mechanism by which a season gets away from a good roster. The most direct pushback came from someone who watches this team every day rather than all thirty-two. Blaine Grisak, lead publisher for Rams on SI, went through the five loudest overreactions in circulation and dismissed the biggest one flatly: "One game doesn't make a season." On the suggestion that coordinator Chris Shula should already be on the hot seat, he was equally short — "He needs more than one game to come to that conclusion."
The take, and who is making it
The Rams could finish third in their division and miss the playoffs.
Verdict: "NOT AN OVERREACTION."
"One game doesn't make a season."
Los Angeles lost its opener 27-7.
That Stafford is finished, that the Myles Garrett trade was a mistake, and that Chris Shula should be on the hot seat — all judged premature.
Both writers can be right, which is the uncomfortable part. Graziano is making a probabilistic claim about a division, and a team that opens with seven points has genuinely lowered its own margin for error in a race where tiebreakers are decided in September as much as December. Grisak is making an evidentiary claim about a single sample, and he is correct that nothing about one afternoon tells you whether Matthew Stafford's arm has gone or whether a defensive coordinator can coach. The disagreement is not really about the Rams. It is about how much a Week 1 result is allowed to move a season-long forecast, and reasonable people put that number in very different places. The national writer is paid to be early and the beat writer is paid to be right, and those two jobs pull in opposite directions in the third week of September more than at any other point in the year.
The only honest position in mid-September is that both takes are still unfalsifiable, and that the schedule settles arguments far better than columns do.
The Take, Judged
Divisional math. Seven points in a divisional game costs a team more than the same performance in a non-conference week, and September tiebreakers are real.
The sample. One afternoon cannot distinguish a declining quarterback from a bad afternoon, and Graziano's column is explicitly in the business of extrapolating from one.
The next four weeks. Grisak's own argument rests on the roster staying healthy through them, which makes that stretch the actual test of both takes rather than a neutral wait.
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Sources: ESPN — Judging the biggest overreactions to NFL Week 1, Rams on SI — 5 Rams overreactions we're not buying after Week 1