How the Rams' Playbook Lives in Ty Simpson's Ears

Ty Simpson goes to sleep listening to his own voice.

Every night before bed, the Rams rookie quarterback plays back an audio recording of himself reciting play calls — Sean McVay's full, multi-layered play calls, with their motion tags and personnel checks and conditional audibles. First thing in the morning, before he drives to the facility, he plays it again. This is his system for getting a playbook into his body before it has to live in his hands.

I cover audio for a living, and I find this detail almost unbearably interesting. Not because it's an unusual study hack — athletes memorize things in all kinds of ways — but because of what it reveals about how football knowledge actually works. A McVay play call isn't a piece of text you memorize. It's a sonic sequence. It has rhythm and structure. Each syllable is a cue for a different body, and the quarterback's job is to transmit that sequence accurately, under a 40-second play clock, while ten men stare at him waiting to be told where to go. You don't just know it. You have to hear it in your sleep until it stops being information and becomes reflex.

That's the thing about Rob Havenstein's episode of Believe in Rams on the Bleav network — the schematic details are sharp, but the most structurally interesting stuff is about what sound does. How language becomes movement. How a system gets internalized.

Havenstein spent eleven years at offensive tackle for the Rams, the longest-tenured player before his recent retirement. He's on vacation with his family when Erin Coscarelli calls, and he sounds like it — relaxed and unguarded in a way that press conferences never produce. That looseness is exactly what long-form audio does. Nobody talks for an hour with their press conference mask on. Somewhere around the twenty-minute mark, when you're deep into the weeds on tight end blocking technique, the institutional caution falls away and you just get the guy who knows.

What Havenstein knows about the McVay playbook is genuinely illuminating. It's slimmer than you'd expect, he explains — more streamlined than the Jeff Fisher system he entered the league under — but the nuance is in the precision. McVay doesn't want his receiver two yards inside the hash. He wants him exactly two yards inside the hash. Not three. The whole system is built on exactness creating stress, every alignment a function of geometry that McVay has mapped and tested.

That's the context Ty Simpson is stepping into. And Havenstein captures what makes a rookie quarterback's challenge specifically acoustic: "When the play comes in, there's a play clock running, you're in the huddle, you got ten other guys staring at you being like, 'Tell me what to do.' You're the guy with the play, you need to spit it out — and you need to spit it out correctly."

Then he adds the detail that I keep coming back to. When Matthew Stafford calls plays, Havenstein says, what the offensive linemen hear through the helmet speaker sounds like "a mumbled mess." But Stafford has studied so thoroughly that "all he needs is the first word and a half of the play call and then I think he shuts off that ear and just sends it out." He's not processing the call anymore — he is the call. The words have dissolved into muscle memory.

That gap — between a rookie who needs to hear his own voice reciting play calls at midnight, and a veteran whose ear shuts off mid-call because his body already knows — is the entire arc of NFL quarterback development, compressed into one image. Havenstein mentioned that a former Rams backup, John Wolford, had a practice of playing call recordings in his car on the way to the facility, pausing them, saying the call back aloud, then resuming. The method isn't new. What's interesting is that Ty Simpson is doing it publicly, explicitly, as his stated strategy for cracking a system that produced 41 explosive plays last season from a personnel grouping the team hadn't practiced once in training camp.

That last number deserves to land properly. According to analytics writer Ted Nguyen of The Athletic — cited on the podcast — the Rams generated 41 explosive plays out of 13 personnel (three tight ends, one running back, one receiver) in 2024. The next closest team, the Steelers, had 11. Thirty plays separating first from second. And per Matthew Stafford, who discussed the evolution on Chris Long's podcast, the Rams ran exactly zero plays out of 13 personnel during training camp that year.

Zero reps. Thirty-play margin over the rest of the league.

Havenstein's explanation of how that's even possible is the most quietly revealing part of the episode. A McVay play call is structured so each motion tag addresses a different player — the first phrase is yours, the next is someone else's, you wait for your cue inside the sequence. When you've only ever played one position, you've only ever really listened for one part. Slide into a different role mid-season, and suddenly your trained ear is hunting for a cue that no longer belongs to you. He describes the mental rewiring: "Wait, wait, wait — that's for me. Okay, that's someone else, that's for me."

The offense works because the players have internalized not just their assignments, but their place in the call's architecture. Add a new personnel grouping in-season, with no camp reps, and what you're testing isn't just scheme retention — it's players' ability to reorder their listening.

McVay apparently trusts them to do exactly that. The tight end room gives him the personnel to run it without retraining most of his offense. Havenstein counted six tight ends on the current roster: Tyler Higbee, Colby Parkinson, Terrance Ferguson, Mark Andrews (acquired this offseason), Max Klare, and Kendall Blanton. Each brings a slightly different skill set — Parkinson at 6'6" or 6'7" as a red zone target and capable blocker, Ferguson (called "Tifer" by Havenstein) as a smooth, ascending athlete who Havenstein says moves with a "silky" quality that translates across both phases. Klare, the rookie, hasn't been seen enough in person yet to fully profile, but Havenstein expects him and Ferguson to occupy similar receiving-forward roles with blocking upside as they develop.

Note: Ferguson's rookie-year statistics were cited during the podcast as 12 catches, 250 yards, and 3 touchdowns in 14 games — numbers I'd want to check against official NFL records before treating as settled, since they come from conversational recall rather than a sourced document. Take those specifics as directionally accurate rather than verified.

What's unambiguous is the organizational logic. The Rams have invested back-to-back high draft picks in tight ends, and their WR3 snaps dropped dramatically in the playoffs relative to the regular season. The fan anxiety about not drafting a wide receiver high is, per Havenstein, a category error — the Rams have quietly decided that the tight end, properly deployed, covers the territory a WR3 would occupy while also covering territory a WR3 can't.

On the Aaron Donald question — which feels perennial at this point — ESPN's Adam Schefter reported on NFL Live that there's "a lot of momentum" around Donald potentially coming out of retirement for 2026, though no decision has been made. The report circulated this week; the specifics of timing and contract structure remain genuinely open. Havenstein's take, consistent with what he's said before, is that Donald wouldn't do a full training camp — that a player of his singular profile would need only a few weeks and a few games to reach his role, which would be a sub-package pass rusher rather than a 75-snap-per-game starter.

The hypothetical of Donald and Myles Garrett sharing a defensive front is where the episode goes most speculative and most fun. Havenstein describes the schematic response from an offensive coordinator's perspective: more tight ends in protection, full sliding protection to Donald's side, a second tight end potentially shadowing Garrett on the other. Chip with a running back on a three-technique, he notes, which is essentially unheard of. You're just trying to make sure neither one is isolated. His anecdote about the training camp when the Rams' offensive line finally started sliding to Donald — treating him the way you'd treat an edge rusher — and Donald's visible irritation at the acknowledgment captures something that press conferences never would: the social negotiation of practice, the ego and trust involved in admitting a player is simply a different problem than everyone else.

That's what the podcast form earns. An hour with a former player who no longer has institutional obligations produces a different quality of information than any post-practice availability. Havenstein isn't managing anyone's expectations. He's just talking.

Which is, I suspect, exactly what Ty Simpson sounds like to himself at midnight — just talking, reciting his way through a playbook, waiting for the words to stop being words.

Amara Osei covers podcasts and audio storytelling for Buzzrag.