NFL Power Rankings: Rams’ Biggest Defensive Issue Is Star Myles Garrett’s Knee, and McVay Won’t Rush It

ESPN’s power panel asked the same question of every NFL team this week: what is wrong with the defense? Most of the answers came back as a unit, a secondary in pieces or a run fit that leaks. For the Los Angeles Rams the answer came back as a man. Myles Garrett.

That one line carries the Rams’ whole season. Los Angeles spent the spring building a superteam around the pass rusher who owns the single-season sack record, and the preseason polls rewarded the bet by putting the Rams on top. He has spent nearly all of the season since rehabbing a repaired knee, the rankings have bled with him, and Sean McVay has just said the clock on his return still will not start.

From No. 1 to No. 8

ESPN’s panel of more than a dozen analysts had the Rams first in its preseason poll. A month in, they sat seventh under the summary line “Not a superteam … yet.” This week they are eighth at 2-3, and Sarah Barshop’s entry for their biggest defensive issue is a single word and a name: “Missing Myles Garrett.” The Rams have eight sacks, tied for sixth-fewest in the league. NFL.com’s Nick Shook is harsher. He has Los Angeles twelfth and points at a run defense that gives ground and poorly timed penalties on the back end.

The pass rush is the part a roster cannot fake. Last season, still in Cleveland, Garrett had 23 sacks, breaking the record of 22.5 that Michael Strahan and T.J. Watt shared, and won his second Defensive Player of the Year award. He had told everyone what he wanted from the rest of his career when he first asked Cleveland for a trade: “The goal was never to go from Cleveland to Canton, it has always been to compete and win the Super Bowl.” The Rams paid for that hunger on June 1: edge rusher Jared Verse, a 2027 first-round pick, a 2028 second and a 2029 third.

One game, then the knee

The knee was already a story in training camp, where it limited him. He played the opener against the 49ers in Australia, 40 defensive snaps without a counting stat, in a loss. Arthroscopic surgery followed, then injured reserve. Without him the Rams have won two of four, and the last of those slipped away in overtime on Monday night: a 37-34 loss to the Bills in which Harrison Mevis’ 48-yard try was blocked and Buffalo won it from 45 yards.

In mid-September, with Garrett just off crutches, McVay sounded like a coach counting down. “He had crutches yesterday, and then he was walking without crutches today, so he’s like Wolverine, healing fast,” he said. In the same breath he drew the line he has held ever since: “We know that he’s going to miss those four weeks at a minimum, and we’re not going to rush him back.”

What McVay is protecting

The four weeks are gone. Asked this week whether he would open Garrett’s 21-day practice window before Sunday’s home game against the Cardinals, McVay answered, “we will not, not this week.” He said “the surgery went really well” and called the recovery “week-to-week in terms of how he feels.” Then he named the distinction that governs the whole timeline: “there’s a difference between return to play and return to performance.”

That distinction is what the weekly polls skip. Once the Rams designate Garrett to return, the clock is binding: he has 21 days to come off injured reserve or he goes back on it for the rest of the season. Open the window on a knee that can play but cannot yet dominate, and the Rams are betting their season’s best weapon against a fixed deadline. McVay keeps choosing the other side of that bet. “Let’s put him in a good position to return to performance,” he said.

The calendar the reporting built is already slipping. The Athletic’s Jonathan Jones had reported the Rams hoping for the Cardinals game, the first date Garrett was eligible, with a team source pointing a week later, to the Raiders. With the window still shut, the first of those dates is gone. A late-September report had floated an absence stretching to Week 9.

The polls will keep marking the Rams down for every week he is gone. McVay is running a different count, the one that starts the day that window opens, and he would rather drop a few more spots in October than let a 21-day clock decide the season of the man Los Angeles traded a first-round pick to get.

Tags: NFL, Los Angeles Rams, Myles Garrett, power rankings, Sean McVay