LA Rams at Washington

The LA Rams are favored by 4.5 at Washington, and the model has the Rams by 6.0, a 1.5-point disagreement in favor of laying the points. Where the number sits matters. At 4.5 the Rams need to win by five or more. Three is the most common final margin in football, 14.6% of the 2,082 settled games in the model's training data, and four is another 5.0%; a Rams win by either loses. The 6.0-point projection clears both and stops short of seven, the next key number at 8.5%.

The Rams are 2nd in recency-weighted net EPA at +0.242, and Washington is 23rd at -0.120. The gap runs through both sides of the ball. The Rams' offense ranks 5th at +0.131 against Washington's 18th at -0.039, and their defense ranks 5th at -0.111 against Washington's 25th at +0.081, where lower is better. The Rams' offensive success rate is 52.1%, 2nd in the league, against Washington's 40.2%, 26th. Washington is better in two places: its special teams rank 11th at +0.139 against the Rams' 30th at -0.050, and its turnover margin of +0.462 ranks 8th, while the Rams' -0.084 ranks 18th.

Results have lagged the rating. The Rams are 4-4, and three of the four losses came by four points or fewer: 30-26 at Denver, rated 13th, 37-34 to Buffalo, rated 4th, and 18-16 to Arizona, rated 27th. The fourth was 27-7 to San Francisco, rated 6th, in week 1. They have won two straight, 35-21 at Las Vegas and 24-9 over the Chargers, and have outscored their opponents 194-168. Washington is 2-4-1 and has been outscored 182-159. Its wins came 33-31 over Seattle, rated 7th, and 27-10 over Philadelphia last week. It tied the NY Giants 27-27, and its losses include 30-13 at home to Indianapolis, rated 31st, and 37-20 at Dallas.

This is the only path from an injury to the projection, so it is worth showing rather than describing. The model reads the expected starter’s rating:

When a starter is ruled out, the depth chart promotes his backup, so the play probability above reads 100% and the post-model quarterback adjustment does not fire. The absence shows up in the rating instead, which falls to the backup’s — and that rating is one of the twenty features the model selects. A play probability below 100% with no designation filed is the default weighting applied to any unfiled starter, not a report that he is hurt.

Every input is perturbed by the standard error of a full 17-game season average and the game re-projected, four hundred times. The question each trial answers is whether the model still favors LAR -4.5 after the perturbation.

It does in 96.3% of trials at that realistic noise level, and 84.0% when the noise is doubled.

The other side of this game is priced too — WAS +4.5 — and the model puts it at 49.2% against 50.0% implied by its own price. It is the same projection seen from the other end, not independent evidence — preferring this side and declining that one are one decision, not two.

Both quarterbacks are on the report with full practices and no designation, Matthew Stafford at 98.0% of the quarterback snaps and Jayden Daniels at 91.0%. Each reads a play probability of 0.85, the downgrades of 0.031 and 0.026 net to 0.005 against the 0.05 trigger, and the quarterback adjustment does not fire.

LAR opened at -5.5 and sits at -4.5: the market has moved 1 point toward WAS. 64% of tickets and 71% of the money are on this side. That is reverse line movement: the line moved toward WAS while the majority of tickets were on the other side, which usually means the move came from bettors the public splits do not count.

Both injury lists are heavy, and none of it reaches the projection: the model's only injury input is the quarterback adjustment, and it does not fire. The Rams are the more depleted side at 2.354 against Washington's 2.104, and the damage is on the defensive front. The Rams have Poona Ford on reserve at 70.3% of the defensive line snaps and Kobie Turner on reserve at 31.5%, and Saturday's report moved Myles Garrett to reserve as well. Aaron Donald, at 31.3% of the defensive tackle snaps, and linebacker Byron Young did not practice and carry no designation. In the secondary, cornerback Jaylen Watson is out with a shoulder injury, and cornerback Trent McDuffie is questionable with a back injury after not practicing. Davante Adams is on reserve, and tight end Terrance Ferguson is out with an ankle injury. Washington is without both of its top defensive tackles, Daron Payne, out at 36.0% of the defensive tackle snaps, and Javon Kinlaw, out at 29.3%. Jacory Croskey-Merritt is on reserve and Jeremy McNichols is out, the top two running backs. Three receivers are out, Terry McLaurin, Treylon Burks and Dyami Brown, and Stefon Diggs did not practice with no designation.

Public betting splits from Action Network, captured 2026-11-07, across 13,894 tracked bets. They describe the market; they are not an input to the model.

The side held in 96.3% of trials and 84.0% under doubled noise. Put plainly: every input to the model was nudged at random by the standard error of a season's average, 400 times over, and the Rams stayed ahead of 4.5 in 385 of them. At twice that noise, 64 of the 400 flipped.

Final report: Wednesday for a Thursday game, Friday for the weekend. A player ruled out or listed as doubtful counts as not playing; a questionable non-quarterback plays about 62% of the time, a questionable quarterback about 35%. Reserve lists are folded in separately because players on IR never appear on a weekly report.

Depletion is the share of a normal week’s snap workload expected to be missing: each player’s share of his position group’s snaps in prior games, multiplied by his probability of not playing. 1.00 is roughly one full starter’s workload. It is context, not a model input.

The case against starts with the Rams' record, which has not matched their rating: they are 4-4, and three of the four losses came by four points or fewer, including 18-16 at home to Arizona, rated 27th. Games decided by three or four points are 19.6% of all settled games, and a Rams win by either loses at 4.5. Washington ranks 8th in turnover margin and 11th on special teams, where the Rams rank 30th. The Rams' defensive front is without Ford, Turner and Garrett, none of which is in the number, and the line has moved a point toward Washington while most of the bets and most of the money sit on the Rams.

Play-by-play from every game since 2019 — roughly 345,000 plays — plus snap counts, depth charts and multi-book closing lines. An ensemble of gradient-boosted trees, a regularized linear model and a random forest predicts the point margin directly; that continuous prediction is converted into a probability against any line using the model’s own out-of-sample error distribution.

Twenty features, ranked fresh each week inside the training window and never using the games being predicted. Validation is strictly walk-forward: every season is predicted using only the seasons before it. Betting odds are never permitted as model inputs — the model is not allowed to see the market it is being asked to beat.

See every Week 9 game on the edge board →

Every game played this season, with the margin. These are results, not ratings: the ranking above is recency-weighted expected points added per play, which is why a team’s record and its rank can disagree.