Rams running back Todd Gurley didn’t borrow Steve Urkel’s catch phrase, but Gurley could have.
After Sunday’s 42-14 loss to the Falcons, Gurley called the team’s offense a “middle school” attack, and he suggested that some of his teammates were just going through the motions the final weeks of a lost season. The next day, only three days before a Thursday night game, the Rams fired coach Jeff Fisher.
“It was tough,” Gurley told reporters regarding the firing of Fisher. “It was tough on a lot of guys. Coach Fisher, he did a great job. He brought everybody in. We loved him as a coach. We know a lot of other people didn’t. But, at the end of the day, we knew what he did for us. He brought us in. He’s the one who drafted me when nobody else believed in me. It definitely hit us hard, for sure.”
In the interests of clarity, Fisher made Gurley the 10th overall pick in the draft. So only nine other teams didn’t want him. The other 22 didn’t get a chance to draft him or to not draft him.
Gurley was asked if he realized that his criticism of the team would resonate in a way that possibly contributed to the demise of Fisher.
“I didn’t really look at it that way,” Gurley said. “I didn’t care. Just speaking my mind, and speaking the truth of about how we looked.”
Gurley made it clear that he stands by what he said.
“It definitely should be taken to heart [given] the way we played,” Gurley said. “Just way too many turnovers, way too many penalties, and we just can’t be doing that week after week.”
They won’t be doing it week after week under Fisher. They’ve got three more weeks to do it under John Fassel before someone else takes over and makes changes and the team next year will surely look a lot different than the team this year.
Maybe by next year they’ll have a high school offense.
