The Los Angeles Rams are already one of the best teams in the NFL this season. They’re 3-1 and in line to take first place in the NFC West after Week 5.
As such, some of their top contributors are also among the top at their respective positions in the league.
ESPN’s Bill Barnwell broke down his top-3 picks for every position after a quarter of the 2025 season and put Rams head coach Sean McVay and receiver Puka Nacua on his list for Coach of the Year and Offensive Player of the Year, respectively. He put both at No. 3 for each award.
McVay has already established himself as one of the finest coaches in the league and has somehow insulated himself from winning the Coach of the Year award as a result. But he’s doing great things in Los Angeles. The Rams are a couple of plays away from starting 4-0, and it’s driven by the offense, which continues to rank in the top 10. McVay is always evolving, and the Rams have leaned more into 12 personnel groupings with success on the offensive side of the ball. Alongside Kevin O’Connell with Justin Jefferson in Minnesota, nobody gets more out of their star receiver than the Rams do with Puka Nacua, whose ability and threat as a blocker is the focal point for the Rams’ run game and their resulting play-action attack.
If there’s any flaw, it’s that McVay’s game management can be a little too conservative at times, especially with the strength of the Rams’ offense. And yet, the Rams have scored three touchdowns on their three fourth-down conversions this season, including critical scores in their wins over the Texans and Colts.
Nacua is just behind Smith-Njigba in yards per route run, but the Rams star makes up for it in volume. Nacua is commanding targets on 42.4% of his routes so far this season, which is one of the highest rates we’ve ever seen for a receiver through four games. He leads the league in just about every raw metric, including targets (50), receptions (42) and receiving yards (503). About the only thing he hasn’t done is get into the end zone often, although his one receiving score (a fourth-and-2 catch to tie up the score late against the Colts) is buttressed by a 45-yard rushing touchdown on a fourth-and-1 jet sweep against the Titans.
If you did some division in your head when you saw those numbers, you weren’t wrong; Nacua has caught 84% of the passes thrown in his direction this season. By the Next Gen Stats receiving model, he has already caught 7.3 more passes than an average receiver would be expected to bring in with the same targets. The top of the leaderboard for that metric last season was St. Brown, who got to 16.3 receptions over expectation in 17 games. Nacua is nearly halfway there in four.
And of course, it’s difficult to overstate just how essential Nacua is to the entire Rams enterprise. He’s an excellent run blocker, with the Rams routinely using him to dig out bigger players on duo and even taking on edge defenders when they go to outside zone runs. With the play-action game then triggers off that threat, Nacua will motion like he’s about to take on a linebacker, only to run a route through offensive linemen and away from defenders. One of his eight incompletions this season was a snap against the Eagles where Nacua just casually split the right tackle and tight end after coming in motion, ran a sail route back across the field and might have set up a potential touchdown just before halftime, only for Matthew Stafford to miss the throw.
McVay and Nacua are two of the biggest reasons for the Rams’ success in 2025. But they’re not alone. The defense is a big part of the team’s record, too, including pass rusher Byron Young. He’s tied for the NFL lead in sacks with five.
So, while McVay and Nacua could win some awards, the Rams are partly where they need to be because of the defensive work as a whole, too.
This article originally appeared on Rams Wire: 2 Rams make ESPN’s quarter-season awards list
