For the past two seasons, the Los Angeles Rams — led by their head coach Sean McVay — have dominated the NFC West. Winning at a distance both seasons, they would win the division by two games in the 2017 campaign and then would improve to a three-game advantage to take the crown in 2018.
Entering the new season, the odds-makers currently have them as a favorite to do it again for a third straight season. When you look at their competition, the Rams are certainly in the driver’s seat to make it happen. Other than the Seattle Seahawks who are always consistent, the San Francisco 49ers and Arizona Cardinals (both in rebuilding mode) will be no threat whatsoever to Los Angeles — even Seattle, I see them finishing a few games behind the Rams as well.
Out of the four teams, it’s pretty obvious that Los Angeles is by far the most talented, but the NFL has been known to provide shock waves and welcome parties — the 2017 Rams are the perfect example. They would come in with whopping +1200 underdog odds, and then would go on to win the division with a double-digit winning 11-5 tally.
With that being said, there is only one team that you can even consider to dethrone Los Angeles, and that’s the Seattle Seahawks, and even that is a bit of a long shot. (Good value though.) As far as the other two (49ers and Cardinals), keep your money far, far away from them.
According to online sportsbook Bovada, the full list of odds have the Los Angeles Rams as the top favorite placed at an overwhelming -180 odds, followed by the Seattle Seahawks in second at a distant +275. In third place comes the San Francisco 49ers at +550, and afterwards, you have the Arizona Cardinals in dead-last at a crazy +2500 odds.
Let’s go over each team of the Rams, Seahawks, 49ers, and Cardinals more in-depth, their odds, and review their chances of winning the 2019 NFC West division.
You can also read my previews and see my predictions on the AFC East, AFC North, AFC South, AFC West, NFC East, and NFC North , and NFC South.
Any analyst that tells you that the Los Angeles Rams will have a “Super Bowl hangover”, don’t listen. The numbers go completely against them with that “analysis”. In the past 10 seasons, nine teams who would lose the Super Bowl would go on to make the playoffs the following season. In other words, there is no actual “Super Bowl hangover”, so go ahead and ignore that. And while we’re on the subject, let’s go ahead and get rid of that narrative altogether.
Not just that, but the Rams’ potent offense — one of the best in the NFL last season — will be back in action for the 2019 campaign. To show you how elite they were, check out this statistic: The Rams were just one of the three teams to average over 30 points-per-game last season, a massive improvement from head coach Sean McVay’s rookie year. Can we expect even more potency in his third year?
Well, first we have to find out what is exactly going on with running back Todd Gurley and his knee — and right now, it’s a big question. After suffering an injury in the late part of the season, he would eventually make a return in the playoffs. However, against the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl, he was held to just 10 carries that accumulated for only 35 rushing yards.
To be fair to Los Angeles though, we shouldn’t make too much of a big deal about it. If you don’t remember, the Rams would pick up C.J. Anderson through the free-agent market in December after the Gurley injury, and he would do magnificent as a fill-in. With a whole offseason to prepare, you better believe that McVay has a solid plan at the running back position. After all, when you have a quarterback like Jared Goff, you have a lot of options available to you.
When you flip to the defensive side of the ball, Los Angeles certainly has issues there. In eight games in 2018 (that’s half of the season), they would allow 27 points or more. That’s something to keep an eye on.
Overall, the Rams should put up a similar performance as last year. Yeah, the defense isn’t the best, but the offense is so potent that it will make up for it — especially in a weak division, the only real worry there is the road game at Seattle. (A place they would win at last season, 33-31.) As a matter of fact, the past two seasons against the NFC West, Los Angeles has compiled an elite 10-2 record.
Take it to the bank, folks. This is easily the Los Angeles Rams’ division, again.
Last year, many sports journalists had the Seattle Seahawks taking a huge hit in the standings, but for another year, Seattle would continue to play Seattle football. And what that means is consistency that has produced seven straight winning seasons, and a victorious year that would put them back into the postseason in 2018.
They would once again suffer losses in the offseason in the form of Earl Thomas leaving for the Baltimore Ravens, and Doug Baldwin would go ahead and hang up the cleats through retirement. However, head coach Pete Carroll has been down this road before, being known to quickly rebuild without any harm being done to their success. You can expect the same thing in the new campaign.
And the main reason for their long stretch of consistency: Their star quarterback Russell Wilson, who by the way has an extraordinarily beautiful wife in Ciara, but we’ll leave that for another day. Leading the Seahawks to a double-digit winning 10-6 season last year, he also led Seattle to the seventh-best offense in the nation. En route to doing this, Wilson would also post career-highs in both touchdowns and QB rating, and he would also tie a career-low in interceptions. Russell Wilson is on the top of his game, and you can expect another season with elite numbers from the 30-year-old.
The success from their offense wasn’t just from the quarterback position either, it also came from their running game. Also elite like their passing, they were also dominant on the ground, placed at the No. 1 ranking in the NFL for rushing yards-per-game. With Chris Carson and Rashaad Penny at the helm, you can expect similar results for the Seahawks running game to dominate the opposition.
There’s certainly room for improvement. They were placed in the middle of the league, placing No. 13 in the NFL for the most points allowed, and also ranking 14th in most yards-per-game allowed. There’s obviously plenty of room for improvement, and Seattle would go out to try and achieve progression with the selection of nothing but defensive players in the first three rounds of the draft.
With the potency of their offense, you can certainly expect the Seattle Seahawks to be in the race for the NFC West crown at the end of the season. But with their defense just being average and the Los Angeles Rams being as great as they are, Seattle will fail to win the division when everything is said and done, but they should be able to accomplish a spot in the NFC Wild Card Playoffs.
Just three games into the 2018 season and the entire campaign for the San Francisco 49ers was over — this after quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo went down due to injury. With the 49ers new season once again being attached to Garoppolo, this could cause some major concern in the Bay Area. Or does it?
With or without Garoppolo, San Francisco might be bad regardless. Let’s be honest here, he hasn’t done anything in the NFL at all, so we don’t even know if the hype is fully authentic or not. He’s been a solid quarterback from what we’ve seen, but the sample size is so incredibly small, some folks need to slow their roll about putting Garoppolo among the top quarterbacks in the league. If I’m a 49ers fan, I’m not putting any faith into Garoppolo, and I’m preparing for another possible train wreck of a season.
I’m personally not a fan of Jimmy Garoppolo at the quarterback situation, nor am I a fan of Kyle Shanahan as the head coach, but the roster for San Francisco is coming along nicely. At the running back situation, they would bring in Tevin Coleman which is going to provide great depth at the position and provides a healthy balance on the offensive side of the ball.
With the second pick of the 2019 NFL Draft, the San Francisco 49ers would select Nick Bosa, who is a great acquisition for a defense who is already ranked in the upper half of the league in both passing and rushing yards allowed. With a system that’s perfect for Bosa, expect him to become an immediate success and bring San Francisco’s defense to a level of annoyance for the opposition.
With that being said, however, the San Francisco 49ers are at least another year away from being an actual contender. In the 2019 campaign, in particular, I see it being a mountain climb just for the Niners to hit the 8-8 mark.
They’ll be able to take advantage of the dismal Arizona Cardinals and have winnable games against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Cincinnati Bengals, but will be stuck in the No. 3 position in the NFC West when everything is said and done — the Los Angeles Rams and Seattle Seahawks are just too good, and the 49ers just aren’t there yet.
To be quite frank with it, the Arizona Cardinals were an absolute horrendous football team last season. En route to an embarrassing 3-13 record, the Cardinals would struggle to put any points on the board with a weak average of 14.1 points-per-game, the worst in the National Football League.
When the season was complete, Arizona would then switch things up in a big way. First off, they would fire head coach Steve Wilks after just one year and would ship quarterback Josh Rosen to the Miami Dolphins — also after just one year. If that doesn’t show you how depressing of a season it was for the Cardinals, then nothing will. It was the right decision too because now they have the flashy duo of Kliff Kingsbury and Kyler Murray at the helm. Things can only go up from here for the Arizona Cardinals.
You have to at least give some kudos to the Cardinals. A lot of organizations would have stuck with the Wilks-Rosen combo for at least three or four seasons, we’ve seen it before. While things burn down, they stand by hoping it gets better, finally making the change way overdue. Arizona nipped it in the bud immediately. Yeah, they have a lot of work left to do, but you have to respect how they swiftly made dramatic decision after dramatic decision, completely changing the landscape of the team for the future.
With the new tandem of Kliff Kingsbury and Kyler Murray, the potential is certainly there for the Arizona Cardinals to have one of the most explosive offenses in the league — especially in a division full of weak defenses, even the Los Angeles Rams have an average defense. Obviously, Arizona won’t hit this right out of the gate, this is two or three, maybe more, years down the road, but the potential is certainly there.
As far as 2019 is concerned, this is how bad things could be for the Cardinals: Not only are they sitting at sizeable +2500 odds, but they’re tied at the bottom of the league with the Miami Dolphins with an OVER/UNDER win total of five. With that being, Arizona will struggle to get to that number.
Overall, you can expect some slight improvement from the Arizona Cardinals, but they’ll also be the NFL’s version of a punching bag throughout the entire season. Listen to what the odds-makers say, the Cardinals will certainly finish dead-last in the division.
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