Oklahoma State WR Justin Blackmon looks like the cream of the crop.

We just published an early draft profile on Oklahoma State wideout Justin Blackmon over at This Given Sunday, and it's interesting to note that Blackmon is already being mocked to the Rams at #3 overall in preliminary mocks (OptimumScouting.com). But then again, South Carolina's Alshon Jeffery has been mocked to the Rams as well (Sportingnews.com). And Blackmon and Jeffery replace Notre Dame's Michael Floyd as the Rams' odds-on pick before the season even started (SBNation.com).

I'm no draft expert when it comes to college talent. I like to think I'm pretty good at assessing team needs and reading tea leaves, though, and even with the acquisition of Brandon Lloyd and slot weapons in Greg Salas and Austin Pettis, and even with Danario Alexander getting heavy usage, I have to think that a young elite X wideout (with healthy knees) is still high on the Rams' preliminary draft board.

With the season trending the way it is (i.e. straight down), it looks like the Rams will have their pick.

Here's a quick introduction to the top three:

Let’s be honest, at this point Steve Spagnuolo is a dead coach walking. Even if the conspiracy theorists are right and Stan Kroenke is okay with tanking the season, making a move to Los Angeles that much easier.  I cannot imagine Stan is okay with failure of this magnitude. Regardless of the end game.

In the NFL some are destined to be great head coaches others to be great coordinators. And that is okay. We all have our station in life and the sooner one knows and accepts it the better of they will be. Dom Capers and Dick Labeu come to mind as coordinators who dabbled in head coaching but eventually accepted their roles as coordinators and went on have great success.

The last three head coaches of the Rams came up the ranks as coordinators, and successful ones at that. Mike Martz and Steve Spagnuolo won Super Bowls running the offense and defense respectively for the Rams and Giants and Scott Linehan had great success running the offense for Minnesota. Both Linehan and Martz went down in flames here in St. Louis but have gone on to resurrect their careers to a point…as coordinators in Detroit and Chicago.

Some men excel carrying the big clip board and making the big decisions. Others do much better from the booth. As a head coach you have to be aware of both sides of the game and work to develop each. In his time as Rams head coach Martz’s blatant disregard for defense and the draft for that matter didn’t have that much of an impact while he still had Vermeil’s GSOT players on the roster.

Scoring at a clip of close to 40 points a game covers up a lot of mistakes. Well as those players dwindled out and Martz was left with what he built, well. We all know how that ended. Linehan was just bad and working with what Martz left behind did not do him any favors. Steve Spagnuolo is in even deeper. While he has done better in the draft than either of his predecessors (though this is not saying much) he has failed to develop that talent on both sides.

The defense has improved even acknowledging this year’s regression. But the offense does not appear to be moving forward…at all. Bringing in offensive mastermind Josh McDaniels to work with All-Pro running back Steven Jackson and wunderkind Sam Bradford has not lit the spark many thought it would. And at the risk of pointing out the elephant in the room shouldn’t Sam Bradford be further along right now?

I am sorry but Spagnuolo does not get a pass here. This is his realm, his ship…HIS team. He cleaned house over the last couple of years with the help of Billy Devaney (no pass here either) and put this team together. Should they be 6-2 at this point, No. Hell, it would be easier to even accept their 1-7 record at this stage if the level of play wasn’t sp poor and Spagnuolo’s decision making so maddening.

Much of the troubles for Martz, Linehan and now Spagnuolo can be attributed to first time head coaching mistakes. Best way to cut down on that…QUIT HIRING FIRST TIME HEAD COACHES. Everyone wants to talk about and address the culture at Rams park. Part of that comes from experience. Experience Spagnoulo does not have the same way Martz and Linehan did not. Being 2^nd in command is not the same as being top dog. As top dog there is no deflection (at least there should not be).

I do not have the answer for who should be the next head coach here in St. Louis nor do I have a list of candidates. Rather I would like to propose a new direction to Stan Kroenke as the inevitable search soon gets underway. Stay away from the next big thing assistants and the one year wonder coordinators. Please God do not call Rob Ryan. Take a look at the guys with head coaching experience, college or NFL. There is a deep pool of talent out there. Go for a swim.

Head coach of the St. Louis Rams is not a destination job, but that does not mean it has to be a training one either.

I've tried to remain open-minded about the progress of this team.  I knew it would be hard for this team, with the schedule the Rams were given through the first half of the season, to have a better record than last season.

But my faith in this team, its path and its head coach has finally reached rock bottom.  For me, the final nail was not driven into the coffin with Patrick Peterson's walk-off punt return.  No, it came before that.

It wasn't the blocked attempt at the game winning field goal.  It came before that.

The final nail in the coffin came when the Rams had the ball late in the fourth quarter.  After the two-minute warning, Bradford connects with Austin Pettis for a 9-yard gain setting up 3rd and inches from the Cardinals 33.

What followed was a series of events that led to one of the toughest losses in St. Louis Rams history. Let's look at the tape.

Another game…another new way to lose. Dominating the game in nearly all areas the Rams had their share of big plays. Unfortunately nearly all of them came on defense. The game also featured numerous spots where decision making would come into play. As we have seen these situations do not always bring out the best in Spagnuolo.

Failing to build off of the momentum from last week’s win against the New Orleans the Rams seem content to play safe and conservative even with Bradford back behind center.  The Rams had 23 first downs and a time of possession advantage of 36:58 to 24:59. Yet it all went for naught as the Rams still punted 7 times and were only 3-14 on 3^rd down conversions.

The plays speak for themselves but the decisions left a little more room for analysis and interpretation.  Starting Sam Bradford was the biggest one. After minimal practice over the last two weeks was he at 100% and would he be sharp enough to lead the Rams to a victory in the desert. If the answer to either of those was no he should have sat. It was Spagnuolo’s decision in Green Bay to leave Bradford in a game that was well done and over that got Bradford hurt in the first place.

The other two that stand out most were the 1^st quarter flea-flicker and the runs on 3^rd and 4^th and one at the end of the 4^th quarter. I for one loved the call on the flea-flicker. Show Arizona you’ll challenge them down field and you are not afraid to throw at their best corner. Poor execution by Bradford was the reason this play failed, not the call. However after this Spags play calling did seem to trend towards the conservative.

The 4^th quarter plays were another story. Love the decision to go for it and to give it to your horse. Steven Jackson has been running like a man possessed the last two games, but running the same play twice left me scratching my head…and cursing quite a bit.

That covers the decisions.  Here are the plays that show a dominating Rams performance on the stat sheet but yet another mark in the loss column.

Well, Rams fans, here we are again. Another Monday following an incomprehensible, expectation-defying loss. Where have we gotten to in our rebuilding plan? Exactly where we started from. 

I think we can say now that coach Steve Spagnuolo is sitting squarely on the hot seat. One of the hottest in football. All of the mitigating factors have been used up -- the talent, the schedule, the injuries. All of those wells are running dry as we sit here and try to explain this loss to one of the very worst teams in football, who just happened to be starting their backup quarterback, a fringe NFL talent at best. 

Spagnuolo's long-time detractors will point to his overall record as coach, a humiliating 9-31 at the 40-game mark. But that's not an honest assessment of how he will be judged. That first season, the 1-15 year with Marc Bulger and a half-completed roster renovation, was a given. A sunk cost. We could not have expected better from Tom Landry, Vince Lombardi or Jimmy Johnson, with that roster and those circumstances.

No, the Spagnuolo regime will be judged on a 24-game body of work that began with Bradford's drafting, and ends today. A period that begins and ends with disappointing losses to a badly quarterbacked Arizona Cardinals team. 

In that period of time, Spagnuolo's record stands at 8-16. And any steps forward taken by the Rams (Bradford's magical run of 11 TDs and 1 INT midway through 2010; the Rams taking a division lead in Week 16; overwhelming the high-powered Saints last week) have been immediately followed by a stumble and fall. We have a few individual standout performances, a few players whom we can still consider to be building blocks, but do we still have faith that this team as a whole is heading in the right direction? 

That's the question I'm wrestling with. I don't take "regime change" lightly. I often think that a team is rewarded by sticking with its coaches for longer periods of time even if they include some pain, as the Steelers did with Chuck Noll and Bill Cowher, as the Titans did with Jeff Fisher, even as the Bears have done with Lovie Smith. Each of those coaches ended up taking their team deep into the postseason. 

That said, when change has been obviously needed, as it was with Scott Linehan, as it was with Mike Martz, as it was in the Rams' dysfunctional front office of Zygmunt et al, I have found no use for blind loyalty, or for simple hope that things will turn around.  

The question is, are we there yet? And how will we know?

I pegged Spagnuolo's task this season, to save his job, at the seven win mark. At the very least, this team cannot lose ground from last year. Of course we expect more, but to justify our faith in moving forward, we have to not take steps backward. Well, the Rams took a significant step backward yesterday. And in doing so, dropped a critically winnable game that would have added to that seven-win mark. It will be a lot harder to get there now.

It will be a lot harder for Spagnuolo to point toward signs of improvement, when we are exactly where we were a year and a half ago. Except now we're a little bit older, and a little bit wiser, and a lot tired-er of running in circles.  

Sam Bradford will bear the brunt of criticism for the Rams' offense's failure to get more points out of their impressive yardage.

Sam Bradford's mobility was a concern after missing two weeks and most of this one with a high ankle sprain. The Rams locked his foot up in some sort of boot/brace, though, and he showed enough movement in warmups today to earn a spot in the starting lineup.

Concerns about his mobility turned out to be overblown, though. He played a decent game overall, a classically Bradford-y game that completed a decent number of passes but failed to dent the scoreboard. But he could not establish any connection with his #1 receiver, a flaw in his game that held down the Rams' score in more ways than one.

Not only could he not get that big game-changing play, his repeated attempts at such killed or set back a number of drives, where sticking to what was working -- namely, passes to everyone else, and the running game.

@DR_RAM: He didn't lose the game for us, he just didn't win it. There's a big difference.

While we're pondering that difference, here's a breakdown of Bradford's passing by receiver: 

Lloyd was simply swallowed up by a superior talent in Patrick Peterson. But as we said in the game recap, that didn't stop the Rams from continuing to test Peterson again and again. (Didn't they learn anything from LSU-Alabama the night before? Those LSU corners are pretty damn good.)

Kendricks' injury early in the game highlighted another problem with the Rams' offense, one that stems from the poor play of the offensive line. (Don't they all?) Kendricks and Hoomanawanui were supposed to be the "move" plus "block" tight end pairing that could both stay in, or both run out into the pattern, depending on the defensive alignment on the field. This was key to the versatility that was supposed to fuel the Josh McDaniels offense.

But Kendricks doesn't block well enough to take seriously as anything but a receiver, and so he has not been able to deceive defenses. And the Rams don't block well enough to spare Hoomanawanui from his blocking duties. Run or pass, he has to stay in and act as a third tackle on nearly every play.

Getting back to Bradford, he will bear the brunt of criticism for not getting enough points out of an otherwise productive offense. And he should. Part of his necessary growth as an NFL quarterback is the recognition of what plays are there for you to make, and taking the shortest path to a positive outcome.

This game featured one offensive touchdown, two safeties, four or five cart trips, and six field goals -- one blocked, and that made all the difference in yet another awful loss for the St Louis Rams under the Spagnuolo regime.

There are three major classes of losses for these Rams: blowout losses to superior opponents, a few close losses against superior opponents that we used to count in the "moral victory" column, and games like these. Horrible losses against inferior opponents where we tried to sit on a slim lead for the entire second half. 

That's not to say that the Rams didn't take a few chances in the second half of the game, they did. They kept throwing the ball deep to Brandon Lloyd, kept testing Cardinals rookie cornerback Patrick Peterson, who had primary coverage. But Sam Bradford failed those tests, again and again. In one sense they were a microcosm of the game, a simultaneous example of the aggressive mindset and failure to execute that has doomed this team all season.

Bradford's vaunted deep ball accuracy went for naught as the Rams eschewed any sort of trickery. Quite simply, they just lined up Lloyd on Peterson, sent him on the most basic "go" route imaginable (for those unfamiliar with this verbiage, it means "just run in a straight line"), and professed confusion and dismay as Peterson's makeup speed was more than a match for Lloyd downfield. 

No one should have been surprised by this. Peterson's speed is a known. He clocked a 4.34 at the combine, 2nd best among this year's prospects. Brandon Lloyd runs a 4.6 on a good day, and this was not a good day. Perhaps this was an artifact of Bradford almost total lack of practice time with his receiver, but why continue to go to a well that has run dry? It was as though McDaniels, or Bradford, saw some sort of value in continuing to fire warning shots across the Cardinals' bow. Or, in baseball terms, they were too happy to swing for the fences and settle for a loud out when a succession of singles would have done far more damage. 

Lloyd led Rams receivers with 80 yards, but only managed to bring in 5 of the 13 passes lofted his way. Peterson caught one of them, too, but that won't count positively in Bradford's line. Call the connection between Lloyd and Bradford "hopeful." But don't call it complete, in more sense than one.