The Los Angeles Rams enter 2026 as one of the most talked-about teams in football, and for once that’s not hyperbole — an MVP quarterback, a defense that just added two of the league’s premier playmakers, and a roster built to finish what came up just short last January. Here’s our team’s full breakdown of where things stand.
2025 Season Recap
Los Angeles put together a genuinely strong 2025, finishing 12-5 and reaching the NFC Championship Game before falling 31-27 to the Seattle Seahawks, who went on to win Super Bowl LX. Matthew Stafford had arguably the best season of his career, leading the NFL with 46 touchdown passes and 4,707 passing yards en route to NFL MVP honors. Puka Nacua backed him up by leading the league with 129 receptions for 1,715 yards, the second-most receiving yards in franchise history behind only Cooper Kupp’s 1,947-yard campaign in 2021.
It wasn’t a perfect season. The Rams settled for the NFC’s fifth seed after Seattle took the division, and their two regular-season losses to the Seahawks — plus the playoff rematch — became a running theme, with special teams miscues playing a real role in some of those results. Still, a 12-win season and a trip to the conference title game is a strong foundation, and it’s why the roster additions since then have been aimed squarely at closing the gap that Seattle currently holds.
Offseason Moves
Sean McVay stayed on as head coach, but the staff around him got a real refresh. Nate Scheelhaase was promoted to offensive coordinator after Mike LaFleur departed, Kliff Kingsbury joined as assistant head coach, and Bubba Ventrone was brought in as special teams coordinator — a direct response to the unit that hurt the Rams late last season.
The two biggest storylines of the offseason both came on defense. In free agency, Los Angeles traded a package of draft picks — including this year’s first-round pick at 29th overall — to Kansas City for cornerback Trent McDuffie, immediately signing him to a four-year extension that runs through 2030. Then in June came the far bigger move: a blockbuster trade that sent 2024 first-round pass rusher Jared Verse and future draft capital to Cleveland in exchange for reigning NFL Defensive Player of the Year Myles Garrett, who set the league’s single-season sack record a year ago. Cornerback Jaylen Watson also arrived in free agency to further reshape the secondary.
On offense, the headline departure was Cooper Kupp, who signed with division-rival Seattle after his release — a strange full-circle moment given how much of the Rams’ passing game he built. In the draft, Los Angeles used a first-round pick acquired from Atlanta (13th overall) on Alabama quarterback Ty Simpson, developmental insurance behind Stafford, while their natural first-rounder went out the door in the McDuffie trade. Running back and offensive line depth also got addressed on Day 2 and Day 3.
2026 Season Outlook
The schedule opens about as unusually as it gets: a Week 1 trip to Melbourne, Australia to face the 49ers, kicking off a brutal stretch that includes road games at Denver and Philadelphia and a home matchup with Buffalo inside the first five weeks — a combined opponent record north of 50-30 with heavy travel mixed in. The Rams also have seven primetime games this season, a sign of just how closely the league expects this team to be watched.
The softer side of the schedule comes later, but the season’s real signature matchup is circled twice: Los Angeles travels to Seattle in Week 16 and hosts the Seahawks again in the Week 18 finale, a rematch of last year’s NFC Championship Game that could easily decide the division. With a retooled defense now fronted by Myles Garrett and Trent McDuffie, this is a team built to finally get over that particular hump.
Our Team’s Projection
We’re projecting the Rams at 12-5 for 2026 — a repeat of last year’s regular-season output, but with a defense that should be meaningfully better equipped to close out the games that got away in 2025.
Los Angeles opened its season win total at 11.5, with the over priced at -125 and the under at +105. Our 12-5 projection leans toward the over, and the reasoning starts with the defensive additions: adding a Defensive Player of the Year-caliber edge rusher and a top-tier cornerback to a unit that already ranked among the league’s better scoring defenses is the kind of upgrade that shows up in close games, and last year’s Rams lost several of those. The case for the under is real too, though — that brutal opening five-week stretch across three time zones could put Los Angeles in an early hole, Garrett and McDuffie both need time to fully integrate into a new scheme, and Seattle looked like the better team on the field the last time these two rosters met.
Win total bets like this one live and die on exactly this kind of schedule-shape and roster-integration reasoning — our Bet Smarter breakdown on how season win-total betting actually works digs into that process in more detail.
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