They knew what the Cowboys’ defense was going to do before the ball was snapped.
“They’re a defensive line that really likes to move a lot,” right guard Austin Blythe told The Ringer. “We had a pretty good tell when they were going to do that.”
The Cowboys don’t blitz often under defensive coordinator Rod Marinelli, so they rely on stunts with their four defensive linemen to disrupt the backfield. A stunt is when a defensive lineman (or usually multiple defensive linemen) attacks a different gap than the one he is lined up across from. The goal is to confuse opposing offensive linemen by having multiple defenders crash to a different spot than expected and then use the chaos to disrupt the backfield. But stunts depend on the element of surprise, and during Los Angeles’s film study in the week leading up to their game against Dallas, the Rams discovered that the Cowboys defensive line was tipping whether they were going to stunt based on how they aligned before the snap.
Depending on the alignment of the Cowboys defensive tackles, particularly whether Maliek Collins was shaded closer to the tackle instead of the guard, the Rams figured a stunt may be coming. If the Rams saw Collins lined up slightly wider than usual, they looked for a second tell. If a certain Cowboys lineman had a specific hand on the ground—right or left—or if a player was tilted one way or the other, it confirmed what the Cowboys defensive line was going to do.
“They have good players, but we just felt scheme-wise we were able to—we had a lot of tips and tells on what they were going to do in front of us,” said Rams center John Sullivan.
Blythe elaborated:
“Usually they like to play a 3-technique but if he got a little wider, and looked like he was going to play the [left or right] tackle, he was going to slant out and we were going to get another movement from the other side too,” Blythe said. “If [the defensive tackle] is going to come in, the tell is going to come in from the other side.”
I asked Blythe how often the tells accurately predicted the Cowboys play call.
“Plus-90 percent” Blythe said.
