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Rams GM Les Snead has no fear of great heights
THOUSAND OAKS — Late in the fall of 1996, Les Snead started wondering where the ripcord was.
He was in the personnel department of the Jacksonville Jaguars, doing whatever nobody else wanted to do, and the Jaguars were 3-6. He had come from Auburn. He could have stayed there as a graduate assistant and hopped on the coaching track.
He thought about med school. “I would have had to check a lot of boxes,” he said the other day, lounging at his desk in the Rams’ headquarters at Cal Lutheran. “But it was an option.”
Football is freefall. The doors close behind you.
You can’t go play in Europe, or coach there. There is one pro league. Becoming one of 32 general managers often requires riding the coattails of somebody who’s already won.
“There were days when I started looking up law schools,” he said. “I thought about Pepperdine law school. I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll sit there and study looking down at the ocean.’ That looked pretty good.”
Then the parachute opened. Jacksonville won six of seven. In its second year of existence, it won a playoff game at Denver.
Snead stayed, gained more responsibility. He joined the staff in Atlanta, where the GM was Thomas Dimitroff, who brought the subtleties of winning from New England.
In 2012, the St. Louis Rams gave Snead the GM job, handed him the keys to the drafting, the releasing, the hiring and the firing.
The Rams had already hired coach Jeff Fisher. Their club was a group of bass guitars in search of a lead singer. As recently as 2016, people wondered if Snead could hang on.
Today, there is no NFL team with more premium players than the Rams.
Todd Gurley and Aaron Donald were the Offensive Players of the Year. Sean McVay, 30 at the time, copped Coach of the Year in his first season.
Going into 2018, Snead brought in cornerbacks Marcus Peters, Aqib Talib and Sam Shields, defensive lineman Ndamukong Suh and receiver Brandin Cooks.
No one has to encourage Snead to jump.
“The NFL is like a 32-man cage match in the WWF,” he said. “Only one team climbs out of the cage. You need a semblance of aggressiveness. We’re going to attack and take advantage where we can.”
Snead picks up a coin on his desk, courtesy of his wife.
It reads, “You Could Leave This Life Any Day.”
PULLING THE TRIGGER
There are people in the federal witness protection program who are more forthcoming than the typical NFL general manager. The Rams also function in secrecy, but Snead is personally engaging and circumspect.
As much as he glows about drafting Donald with the 13th pick in 2014 when some thought Donald was too short, Snead still broods over drafting can’t-miss OT Greg Robinson with the second pick, because Robinson missed.
Recently, Snead was sitting at a bar and overheard strangers discuss the aggression of water moccasins. He broke in and told them about shooting BBs at a moccasin from his boat on an Alabama lake.
“He looked up and you could see he was going what he could to get in the boat with us,” Snead said. “That wouldn’t have been good.”
Snead still pulls the trigger. He dealt Tennessee six draft picks, including two firsts, to get the first pick in the 2016 draft, which he spent on quarterback Jared Goff.
Didn’t the Rams have bigger needs? Was Snead sure Goff was as NFL-ready as Carson Wentz, who went No. 2 to Philadelphia?
The Rams went 4-12 in 2016 and Goff didn’t win a start. They were 11-5 in 2017 and Goff, in a different system with real players, looked like the future.
Snead kept remembering his St. Louis years, when Sam Bradford kept hurting his knee and the Rams were playing a lot of Austin Davis and Shaun Hill at quarterback.
“Everybody knows you need to stabilize that position, but you don’t really know it until you’re living it,” Snead said.
Gurley’s draft year was 2015. Snead saw him tear up his ACL at Georgia. “I’m thinking, ‘Oh, no, he’s going to drop to Seattle and be the steal of the draft,” Snead said.
When Gurley confirmed his health at the combine, Snead knew Gurley deserved the Rams’ 10th overall pick.
No one else could know.
“I started muddying the waters a little,” he said. “Everybody thought we were going OL. I felt this undercurrent from people in the building, like, ‘I can’t believe we’re not taking Gurley.’
“We had been trying and failing miserably to add explosiveness. But I knew teams behind us would jump over us with a trade if they thought we’d draft Gurley. We kept it tight. Finally, in the room, I got up and told the area scout, Shawn Gustas, to call Todd and tell him he was a Ram. The place went crazy.”
And who else would have picked McVay out of a barrel of older, most credentialed coaches? “Like everything else, it looks like a no-brainer in hindsight,” Snead said.
Back then, it was a leap.
Seventeen players drafted by Snead’s group, prior to 2018, are still Rams. There are 21 others who played in the NFL. The best pick, in retrospect, might have been Daryl Richardson, the 252nd player drafted in 2012 and a 475-yard rusher that season.
“I think it’s great that people write about whether our draft was an A or an F,” Snead said. “But the highest day-after draft guide we ever got was when we drafted Robinson and Donald. It wasn’t because of Donald.”
WAR EAGLE DAYS
Snead was a 240-pound guard at Troy University in Alabama. That was about 70 excess pounds ago.
With two seasons of eligibility left, he found himself wondering about transferring to Auburn as a walk-on. Typically he quit wondering. He became a tight end there.
“I got to play whenever we played New Mexico State, or when it was homecoming,” Snead said. “But in my last college game, we beat Alabama. That’s something you never forget.
“One of the coaches said it seemed like we ran the ball better when I did play. He said they should have played me more. I said, ‘Well, it’s a little late for that.’”
That coach was Rick Trickett, most recently of Florida State.
“Blocking was his strength,” Trickett said. “He’d always do something to catch your eye. He exemplified what you’re looking for. Some guys are smart but they don’t have walking-around sense.”
“He got beat up pretty good,” said Tommy Bowden, also on that Auburn staff that had a 20-game win streak. “And he kept coming back. When I got the head coaching job at Tulane, I wanted him to come with me.”
Snead was a graduate assistant at the time. One of his jobs was dealing with NFL scouts. Relationships developed.
“Most of the time you don’t know GAs are around or you don’t care whether they’are around,” Trickett said. “He always stood out.”
And he was still calculating.
“I was an off-the-ball guy,” Snead said. “Usually those guys don’t become coordinators. I felt like offensive line coach was my ceiling. And I’d always been interested in personnel. As kids, we’d get these football cards and have drafts and then go play in the backyard. I remember getting Anthony Munoz one time and feeling pretty good.
“I always feel like I was close to inventing fantasy football. I just didn’t have the wherewithal to profit from it.”
THE BIG ROCKS
One team comes out of the cage. The rest sit exhausted, in defeat. Snead admits there are some Mondays when med school looks pretty good.
But then he touches that coin.
“Today could be your last day. … That doesn’t mean go out and eat all the ice cream you want,” Snead said. “If you can be disciplined, if you can be the best father, husband, the best guy to hire coaches, whatever it is, be that. Push aside all the small rocks that are just distractions and don’t mean anything. Dominate the big rocks. Don’t be scared. If you do that, everything will take care of itself.
“That’s what’s fun about it, the passion of getting better each day. It starts the day after the draft, pointing at the next one. You see guys like Aaron, Todd and Sean, ultra-high-end achievers, putting in their daily grind. It excites you.”
Falling can feel like flying, for a little while.
