INGLEWOOD, Calif — There weren’t many people out there left for rookie receiver Puka Nacua to surprise, but he blew the doors off his prime-time moment anyway.
Nacua, who finished the Los Angeles Rams’ 30-22 win Thursday night against the New Orleans Saints with a career-high 164 receiving yards (180 total scrimmage yards), is now just 146 yards away from matching Bill Groman’s all-time rookie receiving record (1,473 yards). Nacua is squarely in the Offensive Rookie of the Year conversation, or he should and likely will be because any pundit with a pulse was watching him jet-sweep around defensive linemen and shake off defensive backs and stretch for catches and block down on safeties in the run game all night.
“He’s outstanding,” coach Sean McVay said after the game. “I could not be more grateful for the contributions … you guys have seen it week in and week out. You talk about that (run/pass) balance, you can’t have that balance if you don’t have receivers who are willing to dig out support and do some of the things that he does. You see around the league, (Houston Texans quarterback C.J.) Stroud has had a great year, but this guy … he would get my vote. He’s really special.
“But the best part about him is, he doesn’t worry about those things. He worries about being a great teammate.”
That the 164 receiving yards and a touchdown — the latter of which was on the Rams’ game-opening fourth-and-goal from the 2 — is just a yard better than Nacua’s Week 4 game against the Colts, or just 10 yards better than his Week 7 game against the Steelers is a reminder that Nacua has been doing this all … dang … year … whether people were watching the games the entire time, or still cracking jokes about the general anonymity of the Rams’ 2023 roster.
The fact is, the Rams went from a team nobody knew to a team nobody wants to play.
Memorable moments for Nacua on Thursday night included a 17-yard catch on third-and-6 on the Rams’ 14-play, 95-yard opening drive. He added a 28-yard catch in the second quarter, 10 yards of which came after the catch, and a 41-yarder in the third. Nacua accounted for six of the Rams’ 10 most productive plays.
He is also growing in the little details each week. He went from the zone-beating first read of Matthew Stafford in an historically productive start to the season (filling in for longtime star Cooper Kupp) to a receiver who has moves — like, NFL moves such as long speed on vertical routes or the little shoulder shakes and ankle-breaking pivots that help shake and spin around defenders for more yards after the catch. A third-and-1 that gained 29 yards down the sideline, 19 of which were with the ball in Nacua’s hands, showed how far he has come in just a short time (and from an already impressive start).
The Rams have a 72 percent shot at the playoffs now, according to the New York Times tracker. Nacua is a huge reason for that, but not just because of his production. He also embodies an energy so many Rams players on this roster also carry, young or old. They are present. They are too focused on the work at hand — “work works,” McVay says, as I wrote earlier this year — to go anywhere but forward, because that is where their collective growth is carrying them. Some of them don’t know any better than to be wholly present. Some, like McVay and even Stafford, have re-discovered that as “grizzled” veterans.
“I’m taking (steps) right there with them,” Stafford said. “Every year is a building process. Sometimes you do it different than other years. This year is different than all the other years I’ve played. But it’s fun to go to work with these guys, (and) fun to watch everyone come together, pull for each other, work hard.”
There are still a few key matters to clean up, that have almost — almost, but not quite — done the Rams in over the last few weeks and even throughout the season.
Kicker Lucas Havrisik keeps missing field goals. Between Havrisik and other kickers the Rams have rolled without direction through their roster in 2023, they are leading the NFL in missed field goals and at the bottom in special teams DVOA. Thursday night, it was a missed 47-yard attempt that gave the Saints the ball at their 37-yard line. They scored their first touchdown of the day three plays later. Another special teams gaffe set up another all-too-easy score that made the game a little too close for comfort. With 4:40 left in the game and the Rams up 30-14, rookie punter Ethan Evans had his punt chipped and the Saints got the ball back at the Los Angeles 35-yard line. They scored a touchdown, and then converted a two-point try, just two plays later.
GO DEEPER
NFL Week 16 playoff standings and projections: Which teams have best chance to make postseason?
“I’m always concerned with things that we can improve upon,” McVay said. “We got to look at it, we got to be honest with ourselves in terms of the totality of what occurred. There are so many moving parts on every single snap, and we’re interested in being solution-oriented. So, there’s going to be some things that we’ll look at (and) clean up.”
The defense had held New Orleans to 14 points until that late fourth-quarter drive, including two punts, three turnovers on downs and an interception in their nine drives not including kneeldowns. The touchdown also drew a rare (though still delicate) comment toward the officials from McVay, because Cobie Durant’s jersey and arm appeared to get pulled during the touchdown catch by A.T Perry. Regardless of any possible missed call, twice in five days (and a couple more times this season), the Rams have broken down in one phase or another in late moments. That won’t fly in the postseason. It certainly can’t fly wide left.
“We sure make it interesting, don’t we?” McVay said with a dry smile. “Defensively, we played really well. It was a big turnover by (safety) Jordan Fuller, and then we gave up some stuff at the end that we’ve got to clean up and there’s a lot of things that we can certainly improve on special teams.”
But Nacua — along with a cast that included Stafford and Kupp, who are always cool at the right moment, dependable gains in key situations from Kyren Williams, who crossed the 1,000 rushing yards mark Thursday with 104 yards on 22 carries and an 82-yard/one-touchdown effort from receiver Demarcus Robinson — took matters into his own hands to ice out the victory with the kind of decisiveness usually more present in players with much more experience.
Nacua fell on the Saints’ onside kick attempt after their two-point conversion — “in the moment, every alarm in my body and my brain is going off,” he said — and then carried a handoff around the left side and up the field for a conversion just on the front side of the two-minute warning, staying in-bounds so that New Orleans had nothing else to help it on the other side. They had no remaining timeouts, while the Rams had a fresh set of downs.
“Great catch on the onside kick, and physical run,” said Stafford, “which was awesome. … He stayed up, stayed in bounds. Did all the right stuff.”
Stafford said it so casually, as if that level of awareness and execution is simply just the expectation of Nacua at this point.
Nacua, the fifth-round rookie receiver who doesn’t play like a rookie.
Who this season has gotten shoutouts from LeBron James and whose No. 17 jersey was worn by new Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani as he sat in Stan Kroenke’s suite Thursday night.
Who somehow keeps growing, keeps getting better and keeps inching closer to an all-time rookie receiving record that doesn’t even cross his mind.
“Definitely not,” said Nacua, when asked whether he could have pictured now being in reach of that high mark when he started his rookie season. “I was thinking about how would I be able to block well enough to get on the field, and if I was going to be a special teams player and how I was going to be able to figure that out.”
That is “it,” whatever you want to call it. That thing that Nacua has, that the players on this roster have whether they are on offense or defense, whether they are 10-year veterans or started the year as wide-eyed rookies.
And imagine what “it” — what he, what they all — can become next.
(Top photo of Puka Nacua: Gary A. Vasquez / USA Today)
“The Football 100,” the definitive ranking of the NFL’s best 100 players of all time is on sale now. Order it here.
