WOODLAND HILLS, Calif. — From the moment the Los Angeles Rams walked off the field after their worst loss of the season, 27-24 to the Atlanta Falcons last Monday night, coach Sean McVay and his team held a different tenor about the season they’re having.

The Rams are 11-5 and headed to the playoffs for a third straight season. They’ve rolled up some historic offensive stretches, beaten two 11-win teams and often sat as the odds-on favorites to win the Super Bowl. But a loss to an eliminated Falcons team, where they trailed almost the entire game, brought a different reality to the nearly always positive Rams.

“We need to play better football,” McVay said.

And then he made a promise: His starters would be playing in Week 18 against the Arizona Cardinals, and it wasn’t about seeding.

McVay and the Rams know they can’t enter the playoffs in their current form.

The fixes that need to come to Los Angeles are more about getting key players back than anything else. Every team faces injuries, and the Rams’ have come in this late stretch, in part because they wanted certain players to heal up for a playoff run.

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Quentin Lake

The biggest jolt the Rams could get after that Falcons loss arrived this week: Not only is safety Quentin Lake back to practice after a six-week absence, but the Rams believe so much in what he’s coming back as that they were ready to lock it in for the long term.

In the span of one hour Thursday, Los Angeles opened the practice window for Lake and announced a three-year contract extension that will pay him $42 million with $25.7 million in guarantees, a league source confirmed to The Athletic. Conversations about the deal had been in the works since this spring, but the timing of it feels like a statement about what this defense needs now.

“He does so many things and wears so many hats for this defense, and there are no excuses,” defensive coordinator Chris Shula said of Lake. “Anytime you lose a great player like that, you definitely feel the absence when you don’t have them. You feel it when you’re game planning, and then you feel it on the practice field all the time.”

On a defense that is the lowest-paid in the NFL, Lake, a 2022 sixth-round pick, has become the engine to the creative elements Shula wants to deploy in a group built around the pass rush to run heavy dime packages and disguised zone looks to make quarterbacks hold the ball and play in the face of Jared Verse, Byron Young and others.

Verse and Young will be Pro Bowl starters. In the 10 games Lake started, Young and Verse combined for 13 sacks. In the six games without him, they’ve combined for just 4.5.

But perhaps the most noticeable difference has been in the run defense. Through the first 10 games, the Rams allowed 100.7 rushing yards per game. In the six games without Lake, that has grown to 133 yards per game. The explosive plays have skyrocketed. A unit that rarely allowed a run of 15 yards or more has been gashed in two straight weeks by Kenneth Walker III and Bijan Robinson as the Seattle Seahawks and the Falcons combined for 6.7 yards per carry.

One illustrative play came when Verse had a chance to stop Robinson in the backfield Monday night, and Verse grabbed Robinson by the collar and said he was expecting backup to arrive. It never came, and Robinson shook Verse off and ran for 31 yards. The backup Verse expected would come from Lake, or would often be coordinated by him. He is known for moving his alignment just before the snap to disrupt blocking schemes and free up the second level to make tackles, allowing Nate Landman to enjoy a breakout season to earn an extension of his own, only to see his tackle rate plummet during Lake’s absence.

Lake won’t play Sunday as he’s gaining game speed in a precautionary way ahead of the playoffs. But his return will bring some run defense, a back-end force in coverage and the coordination a younger secondary could use right now.

Davante Adams

The Rams’ offense hit its stride around midseason when Adams and quarterback Matthew Stafford got on the same page. Adams arrived as a 12th-year veteran to replace Cooper Kupp this offseason, but Stafford was rarely around in training camp as he rehabbed a degenerative back issue. For the first several games, their targets could be forced and off-rhythm, leading to red-zone inefficiency.

Then, with Puka Nacua sidelined, a week together in Baltimore delivered the time and focus to create a change. Los Angeles rolled out a 13-personnel offense in London against the Jacksonville Jaguars, with Adams as the lone receiver on the field, and he exploded for three touchdowns. That led to a run in which Adams scored 11 times over the next eight games. He still leads the league with 14 touchdown catches despite missing the past two games.

Adams missed those weeks with his third hamstring injury of the season, this one more severe than the previous two that he played through. For one game in Seattle, the Rams mostly overcame his absence with a nuclear Nacua performance in which he totaled 12 catches for 225 yards and two touchdowns. But it’s hard to replicate that each week, and in Atlanta on Monday, Nacua was held to just five catches for 47 yards on 10 targets, and the receivers around him struggled to get open on a night in which Stafford threw three interceptions.

The Rams have missed Davante Adams in his absence. (Dan Istitene / Getty Images)

Los Angeles is committed to its 13-personnel approach now, which McVay admitted is one of the factors that has cost Tutu Atwell playing time. The need for strong run blockers at receiver has led to Konata Mumpfield and Xavier Smith playing ahead of Atwell. Smith has added a few splash plays, but Mumpfield has struggled as a seventh-round rookie with just 10 catches on 22 targets at 4.2 yards per target.

Adams brings more than just an unguardable play in the red zone. He often draws a traveling assignment from the top outside cornerbacks, freeing Nacua up for easier opportunities. His route running also forces defenses to deploy more zone coverage, which favors a 17th-year veteran like Stafford and a rugged player like Nacua, who is so smooth at settling into soft spots and creating after the catch.

Adams was back at practice Thursday for the first time since the latest hamstring issue. Like with Lake, the Rams are just readying him for the playoffs, but they’ll need not only his play but also his experience and confidence as they go into hostile road environments and play in the elements, which he has lots of experience with after stints with the Green Bay Packers and New York Jets.

Alaric Jackson and Kevin Dotson

The biggest key to the Rams’ midseason offensive explosion wasn’t the use of 13-personnel or Stafford or Nacua or Adams; after all, McVay has long created strong passing games through the wide receivers.

The offensive line’s dominance in creating the most balanced offense in the league made the difference.

It was harder to see coming than those other forces, because the Rams do not boast a Pro Bowler in that group. They have a couple of players who had legitimate cases this season, excelling in different phases while being strong enough in the other. And then they had to play without Jackson and Dotson against the Falcons, and a ferocious front swallowed the line up too often.

Jackson is arguably the Rams’ best pass protector, a rock-solid piece on Stafford’s blind side who is key to protecting that degenerative back issue and making his quarterback feel confident to work progressions at a time when Stafford is also trying to avoid hits to extend his career. Jackson suffered a knee injury out of the Seattle loss that ultimately sidelined him last week, and since Warren McClendon Jr. was already filling in for Rob Havenstein at right tackle, it meant going to a 32-year-old fourth tackle in DJ Humphries.

The Rams felt the sting. Humphries was flagged on two explosive Nacua plays and was also beaten on a 4th-and-1 run play to Kyren Williams that the Falcons thwarted in the red zone.

The @AtlantaFalcons defense gets the 4th down stop! 😤

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Jackson has returned to practice, and the Rams expect him to play Sunday against the Cardinals. What could also help the situation for the playoffs is if Havenstein returns from injured reserve to allow McClendon to fill in at left tackle if he’s ever needed, though Havenstein’s status is not yet clear.

Dotson has a murkier outlook. He suffered an injury against Seattle that earned Seahawks linebacker Derick Hall a one-game suspension for stepping on his ankle. After the game, Dotson was in a walking boot, and though the boot has come off, Dotson has only walked gingerly on the sidelines at practice and does not appear particularly close to a return.

The ankle wasn’t broken, though, and so the Rams have hope that he could return if they can launch a run in the postseason. That will require steady enough play from Justin Dedich as a fill-in, and he’s had moments good and bad in five starts. But returning to Dotson at some point, even if he’s not 100 percent, could help get the two-headed backfield of Williams and Blake Corum back to the No. 1 rushing tandem in the NFL as they were entering the Seahawks game.

“He is the real deal,” said an opposing defensive coach who faced the Rams this season. “I see him just knock people off the ball. He is physical and the engine of their run game.”

Tyler Higbee

The Rams also returned Higbee to practice this week, marking his first action since the Week 10 victory over the Seahawks. And he is expected to play Sunday against the Cardinals.

Los Angeles has run a committee approach at tight end this season, a natural shift to the 13-personnel it runs more than any other team. Higbee was a piece of it, but a reliable one as a 10th-year veteran who has spent every year of his career with the Rams. It’s why he played more than half their offensive snaps in every game before suffering the injury in Week 10.

At 33 and with an extensive injury history, Higbee is no longer the constant safety valve he was for Stafford earlier in his career. But with 381 career catches in 126 career starts and 12 in the playoffs, Higbee’s another area of experience the Rams are counting on when the stage gets bright and the elements get difficult.

“He’s just an awesome teammate. He’s what you want,” Stafford said of Higbee. “Everybody calls him a glue guy, probably an understatement. He’s an unbelievable player.”