The Los Angeles Rams made a gigantic shift toward 13 personnel on offense last season, deploying an abundance of three-tight end packages in the second half of the year. They featured Colby Parkinson, Terrance Ferguson, Davis Allen and Tyler Higbee heavily, keeping defenses on their toes by mixing things up.
It worked to utter perfection, with the Rams averaging 6.2 yards per play and scoring 32 total touchdowns out of 13 personnel, both the highest in the NFL since Next Gen Stats began tracking statistics in 2016, per Wyatt Miller of TheRams.com.
Naturally, teams are going to try replicating the Rams’ success out of 13 personnel, and the trend appears to have already started based on this year’s draft. There were 22 tight ends drafted in April, the second-most in the common draft era. It’s a clear indication that teams could be gearing up to use more 13 personnel after watching the Rams dominate out of that grouping in 2025.
Matthew Stafford doesn’t think it’ll be an easy trend to follow, though. Not many teams have the tight end depth and talent that the Rams do, which will make it challenging to deploy three tight ends at a time and still have success.
“People are like, ‘Oh man, everybody’s going to be in 13 next year because that’s the way the league goes,’” Stafford said on the “Green Light” podcast with Chris Long. “And I’m like, ‘Well, they better have four guys that can all do everything.’ And that’s what we have. We’re so lucky in the room. People talk about it as just the X’s on the field, but it’s like, these guys are really talented players that can block at the point of attack, they can catch the ball intermediate, down the field, the whole thing. And they’re smart enough to go learn all these positions and do all these things and that takes a lot.”
The Rams didn’t go into the season planning to shift away from 11 personnel and toward 13. Amazingly, Stafford revealed that they didn’t have a single snap in 13 personnel during training camp last year.
It’s something that happened out of necessity in Week 7 against the Jaguars after Puka Nacua got hurt the week prior and Tutu Atwell went down early in the win over Jacksonville. With limited resources at wide receiver, Sean McVay pivoted to heavy packages with tight ends and the Rams cruised to a 35-7 win.
“So, yes, we did pivot because we probably had zero snaps of 13 personnel in training camp,” Stafford said. “Puka gets hurt and Tutu gets hurt on maybe the 10th play of the game. We’ve got like Davante, Konata and I don’t even know if J-Whitt was up but we just didn’t have that many receivers available at that point so it was like, ‘OK, let’s have a plan if something does happen here and sure enough, we just kind of went into it, we liked the way it dictated the terms a little bit as far as, ‘Hey, this is what we’re going to get from their defense.’ And sometimes it was, ‘We don’t know what we’re going to get. We might get nickel, we might get penny, we might get base, whatever you want to call it.’ But we had plans for all of that and how we wanted to go attack it. As we move forward, there’s always a chess match going on in the NFL and I’m lucky to be playing for a coach that’s ahead of the curve on a lot of that.”
McVay is a trend-setter as a head coach, whether it’s with his approach to the preseason, his 11 personnel usage or now his shift toward 13 personnel. As Stafford said, having a coach who’s ahead of the curve makes the Rams as successful as they are because it’s not easy to outsmart other coaches around the league.
With 13 personnel, that’s exactly what McVay did in 2025, and teams are bound to steal from his blueprint.
This article originally appeared on Rams Wire: Matthew Stafford explains why teams could struggle to copy Rams’ 13 personnel
Reporting by Cameron DaSilva, Rams Wire / Rams Wire
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Cameron DaSilva, Rams Wire | USA TODAY Network
