James Laurinaitis has spent his entire seven-year career with the Rams, and in those seven years the Rams never won more than seven games. Now Laurinaitis is with the Saints, and he thinks he’s in for a refreshing change.
Laurinaitis noted that during his entire college career at Ohio State, the Buckeyes lost only nine games, and so it was a rude awakening to play for the Rams, where losing nine games a season was the norm. In New Orleans, Laurinaitis says, no one is satisfied with 7-9.
“We have a lot of guys here who are extremely hungry to be good,” Laurinaitis said, via Larry Holder of NOLA.com. “I think it’s refreshing to me to be in a place where they’ve won. The expectations are to get back to that. Coming from a spot where we couldn’t break .500, in college I lost nine games -- that was it at Ohio State.”
With the Rams, Laurinaitis constantly felt like the team was trying to climb out of a sub-.500 hole, and never able to.
“Then you get to here and you hear 7-9 is just not acceptable. It’s awesome to be around that, that hunger,” Laurinaitis said.
Although Laurinaitis didn’t exactly say that the Rams considered 7-9 acceptable, that’s the implication of his comments. And, given that Jeff Fisher has kept his job while failing to win more than seven games in any of his four seasons, that’s a fair assessment of the Rams.
