What could trip up Sean McVay’s Rams offense: the league adapts to personnel trends

The question hanging over the Los Angeles Rams heading into the next NFL stretch is not whether Sean McVay can scheme. It is whether the Rams’ most repeatable offensive advantage, heavy reliance on 12- and 13-personnel groupings, will still confuse defenses once every opponent has studied the same patterns.

According to analysis attributed to Warren Sharp in a report from Yahoo Sports, the Rams’ personnel packages helped create major efficiency in 2025, in part because McVay and his staff helped push league-wide thinking about how to use extra tight ends and how to stress matchups without telegraphing pass or run intentions. In the report’s framing, those groupings were part of the reason McVay “set trends for the following season,” meaning other teams had less unknown to defend when the Rams lined up.

The concern, as presented in the same report, is that success can become predictability. If the Rams keep coming back to a small set of personnel templates, defenses gain a clearer scouting picture of what formations are likely to precede certain run fits, certain protection calls, or certain passing concepts. The report points specifically to the league’s knowledge of how McVay can deploy two or three tight ends on the field, suggesting that opponents now have a stronger answer set for the Rams’ most common “shape.”

That does not mean the McVay offense has to abandon those personnel groups. In NFL offenses, personnel is only the start of the story. Formation tells part of the tale, but motion, personnel substitutions within the same drive, snap counts, and how receivers and tight ends align before the snap often determine whether a defense’s pre-snap advantage becomes a post-snap problem.

Still, if opponents can consistently identify the Rams’ intended leverage from the personnel and the alignment, the offense’s margin for error tightens. It can turn a high-variance, matchup-driven attack into something that relies more heavily on execution in tight windows, which is harder to sustain across a full season than opponents managing to cover fewer unknowns.

For Rams fans and league watchers, the next test is how Los Angeles responds as teams become more prepared. The meaningful indicator will be whether the Rams continue to use 12- and 13-personnel as one tool among many, pairing those looks with clearer variation in routes, blocking assignments, and quarterback decisions, or whether they lean so heavily on familiar package identities that defenses can neutralize them more often than in the recent past.