The Los Angeles Rams Could Not be More Dysfunctional if They Tried

All is not well in Los Angeles and with the Rams. Oh, is that not a surprise? What gave it away? The 4-8 record? The annual gravitational pull to mediocrity? The fact that even Eric Dickerson is tired of it? The fact that, not to put too fine a point on it, we are talking about the Rams?

Perhaps it was that open bit of sniping by Jeff Fisher this past week that got your attention. It isn't often that you see a coach take a swing at his own front office. There are a number of reasons for this, the most obvious of which is that the easiest rebuttal to a coach saying, "Hey guys, how about you get me some more talent" is, "Hey coach, why don't you do a better job with what you've got."

But this did not deter Fisher, who plunged on into the darkness. First Fisher claimed to be unaware that GM Les Snead's contract had been extended, then he paid some lip service to his own poor performance. Then he dropped it all at the feet of the front office:

"I'm so busy here, I was honestly unaware he was extended. I'm being honest with you, we're just working here," Fisher said. "I look at this as being my responsibility, the win-loss record. We need to do a better job from a personnel standpoint. We've had some unfortunate things take place with some high picks in Stedman Bailey and Tre Mason and those kinds of things you don't anticipate.

"But we're moving forward."

This, apparently, is just the tip of the iceberg. According to a report by Albert Breer of The MMQB, the Rams are even more of a mess off the field than on, a non-stop chaos of infighting and turf-grabbing, despite both Fisher and GM Les Snead receiving recent contract extensions.

Rams people have come to calling their facility "Rams Junior High," Breer reports. A Rams official told Breer that Snead and Fisher have a "toxic" relationship. And there has been plenty of finger-pointing between the two and their circles. One side seems to be knocking the front office for not getting enough talent on the roster, the other for mismanaging the talent that's there and not pushing the players hard enough.

Perhaps this is not so surprising. Bad teams tend to result in coaches and execs under a lot of pressure and facing high internal and external scrutiny. These are guys trying to keep their own jobs, after all. But you know that things have become a mess when it pours out into the open—and in Los Angeles, the bad blood has seen the light of day.

"It pissed me off because I knew it was meant as a shot," a Rams person told Breer of Fisher's attempt to shift the blame upstairs.

"You see it under that umbrella—'We need to do a better job in personnel.' OK, but you want everyone to think that you have full control. You can't have it both ways, and it can't always be the talent. Look at the roster, 2012 to now. In '12, Jeff did a masterful job with what he was given. But we've gotten more talent, and we've gotten worse."

Which raises a simple question: If the Rams aren't very good and the coach and GM are feuding, then why did they both just get extensions?