Rams keep finding new ways to sabotage their championship hopes

It is getting harder to trust the Rams.

Harder to believe the next promising possession signals a breakthrough. Harder to watch their talent flash across the screen and assume they are finally figuring things out.

Harder to take their championship ambitions seriously when they keep playing football that undermines them.

Too sloppy. Too undisciplined. Too susceptible to the kind of killer mistakes that turn opportunity into regret.

Those are the characteristics of a team that has not shown it is serious enough to win a championship.

And until the Rams demonstrate otherwise, consistently and convincingly, why should anyone view them differently?

Monday night’s 37-34 overtime loss to the Bills was another reason to question whether this team can be trusted to do anything beyond periodically reminding everyone how good it could be.

The possibilities remain obvious, including segments and stretches that offered a clear view of just how majestic the Rams can be.

So do the special teams’ carelessness, like the two missed field goals by Harrison Mevis, including the potential game-winner in overtime that got batted away by Buffalo’s Greg Rousseau.

The Bills made them pay by driving into range for Tyler Bass to kick a 48-yard game-winning field goal.

And how about the lack of discipline that led to 11 penalties for 84 yards, a handful of which directly led to important points for the Bills, to turn what could have been a satisfying win into a gut-wrenching loss.

Five games into the season, the 2-3 Rams should be tired of hearing about their potential. Everyone else is getting tired of waiting for them to do something meaningful with it.

Yes, there are stretches when they resemble the team we expected. A crisp touchdown drive. A sequence when the offense finds its rhythm and the talent becomes overwhelming.

Then comes another penalty. Another breakdown. Another reason to throw the sofa pillow at the television and wonder why everything has to be so difficult.

At some point, those glimpses stop being encouraging.

They become an indictment.

Because if the Rams can play that way, why do they keep burying it beneath so much avoidable nonsense?

The trouble Monday began before their offense touched the football.

Buffalo opened with a 70-yard kickoff return, immediately forcing the Rams’ defense to clean up a mess it had no part in creating.

The defense held the Bills to a field goal. Under the circumstances, that was good work.

The circumstances were the problem.

Buffalo led 3-0, gifted favorable field position and an immediate foothold in a game the Rams needed to build on their victory over the Eagles.

The offense then took its turn complicating things.

Two penalties interrupted the Rams’ opening possession. The most damaging was a holding call against tight end Tyler Higbee that erased a nine-yard run and a first down by Kyren Williams.

Instead of a fresh set of downs and another opportunity to move toward the end zone, the Rams were pushed backward.

Mevis eventually missed a 50-yard field goal.

A possession that had offered promise produced nothing.

How about the two defensive penalties that kept Buffalo’s third-quarter touchdown drive alive?

First, Quentin Lake’s pass interference penalty turned first-and-20 into a fresh set of downs. Then Josh Wallace’s holding penalty on third-and-goal from the 13 handed Josh Allen and the Bills first-and-goal at the 2.

Buffalo scored two plays later to take a 19-14 lead.

The Bills had enough weapons. They did not need the Rams’ help.

The Bills deserve credit for their victory. But the Rams should be embarrassed by how often they contributed to their own difficulties.

They were penalized on three of their first four offensive possessions.

On the only possession without a penalty, they scored a touchdown.

There is your frustration, laid out neatly enough that nobody needs to spend the night studying film to understand it.

Give this offense a clean chance, and it can hurt people.

Make it repeatedly recover yards it already earned, and you give the defense help it should never receive.

The Rams keep providing that help.

And no, one penalty does not explain a loss. Neither does one kickoff return or one missed field goal.

That is precisely the point.

There is always something else to add to the list.

Another mistake to absorb. Another possession to salvage. Another situation requiring someone to compensate for a teammate’s failure to handle an assignment.

Eventually, the rescue operation breaks down.

Against Buffalo, it did.

Sean McVay has to own that. So do the players responsible for turning reasonable expectations into this recurring exercise in exasperation.

A team with championship ambitions should not need repeated reminders that field position matters, that penalties wreck possessions and that good opponents do not require assistance.

Those are basic requirements of winning football.

The Rams keep treating them like details they can overcome with enough talent.

Talent can erase a mistake. It cannot be the weekly plan for surviving them.

And whatever confidence the Eagles victory restored took another hit Monday, when the Rams had an opportunity to establish momentum and instead supplied more reasons to doubt their reliability.

Meanwhile, the unbeaten 49ers keep setting a standard the Rams are chasing.

That pursuit becomes considerably more difficult when you spend so much of a game wrestling with yourself.

The troubling question is no longer whether the Rams can produce championship-caliber stretches.

We have seen enough to know they can.

The question is whether they have the discipline to sustain them, the attention to detail to protect them and the urgency to stop wasting them.

Until those answers change, the championship talk amounts to borrowing credibility from a version of this team that shows up only occasionally.

The actual version keeps committing penalties, surrendering opportunities and asking its best players to make everything right.

That is a dangerous way to navigate October.

It is a disastrous way to approach January.

The Rams still have time to become more dependable. But time alone will not correct what keeps happening, and another impressive possession will not prove the problem is solved.

They need complete games. Sustained concentration. Evidence that the mistakes bother them enough to change the behavior producing them.

Because trust is earned through what a team does repeatedly.

And right now, the most dependable thing about the Rams is that sooner or later, they will make winning harder than it needs to be.