Cardinals playoff percentage: 49.9
Rams playoff percentage: 82.3
The winner of this game guarantees a place in the playoff. If Los Angeles loses, the Rams can still make the postseason with a Chicago loss to Green Bay.
With Jared Goff fresh from thumb surgery, John Wolford will make his NFL debut as a Rams starter on Sunday. Having worked as an AAF analyst during the league’s only season, I was able to get a closer look at the last action of a real Wolford game as the Arizona Hotshots starter. Wolford led the league in touchdown passes (14), while ending in a fourth place tie in front of interceptions (7). The game area that stood out the most? Pass deep, as in pitches over 20 air yards. Wolford’s 53.6% depth completion rate (15 out of 28) was the highest mark in the league. He had the deepest success among the numbers (with a perfect score of 158.3 passers, for Pro Football Focus) and off the right (125.0 passers, for PFF). One area of concern is Wolford’s performance under pressure. The Hotshots’ O-line left him out, as Wolford took the second highest number of sacks in the AAF (14), but also launched the highest number of interceptions under pressure (6).
On the other side of this confrontation, Cardinals recipient DeAndre Hopkins is likely to see a lot of Jalen Ramsey. In the Rams’ 38-28 victory in Arizona in Week 13, Next Gen Stats had Hopkins ally against Ramsey on 85 percent of routes. According to the PFF, Hopkins was shot eight times while covered by Ramsey, catching three balls in 20 yards. NGS shows that Hopkins had zero receptions from more than 10 air yards in that game and zero in last Sunday’s loss to San Francisco – his only two competitions of the season with no catch in that range. The NGS also shows that Hopkins’ 75 receptions in passes of less than 10 air yards rank as the sixth largest among wide receivers in 2020, but he only has a touchdown reception in such moves.