Andrew Whitworth told Rams fans to “relax” after the team’s latest loss.
That message lands differently when the defense has spent the last eight games giving people reasons not to.
Since a 41-17 win over the Arizona Cardinals on Dec. 7, 2025, the Rams have been dealing with a defensive slide that has turned Chris Shula into a target of unusually sharp scrutiny. The concern is not built on one bad afternoon. It has stretched across a run in which the Rams’ defense has been repeatedly exposed, including a 27-7 loss to the 49ers and a stretch that has left the unit with a 98.3 QBR allowed on third down and just one sack over the last four games.
That is the backdrop for Whitworth’s plea for calm: a fan base being asked to breathe while the on-field evidence keeps piling up.
The pressure on Shula has been immediate. NFL analyst Dan Orlovsky wasted little time after the Rams’ Week 1 humiliation, and he made Shula the focal point of his criticism. Orlovsky said, “I’m concerned about their defensive coordinator,” while also pointing to the way the Rams defense had been “gutted by Bryce Young, Caleb Williams, Sam Darnold and Brock Purdy” over the last four games.
That is a brutal list for any coordinator to hear attached to his unit.
The Rams’ latest loss only sharpened the conversation. In the 27-7 defeat to San Francisco, Los Angeles converted seven of 12 third downs, but the bigger issue was what happened when the defense had to get off the field. The Rams also “fell flat on the biggest stage in front of an international audience,” a performance that made the scrutiny around Shula feel less like overreaction and more like the natural result of what had already been happening.
Whitworth’s message, then, was not just a reaction to one game. It was a reminder that the Rams are still early enough in the season for patience to matter — even if patience is getting harder to sell. The team has a history of slow starts, with recent records of 3-2, 1-4 and 3-5, which only adds to the unease around a defense already under the microscope.
There is also the matter of how quickly the latest embarrassment arrived. Whitworth’s “relax” came roughly 36 hours after the loss, which makes the timing part of the story too. Fans were being asked to absorb a message of calm almost immediately after a game that left the defense facing fresh criticism and Shula facing the kind of attention coordinators usually try to avoid.
The Rams have been here before, at least in the broader sense of needing to steady themselves after a rough start. But this time the concern is tied to a specific trend: eight games of defensive problems, a third-down profile that has been hard to ignore, and a coordinator now carrying the weight of the conversation.
Whitworth can ask for patience. The Rams still have to earn it.