This was supposed to be a reset year for the Rams. They had no first-round pick (gone to Detroit as part of the Matthew Stafford trade). They were carrying $75 million in dead money (accounting for money pushed forward to extend the team’s title window). They moved on without Jalen Ramsey, Leonard Floyd, Greg Gaines, Nick Scott and a bunch of others. They came into the season with a banged-up Cooper Kupp, rookies contributing everywhere, and fans eyeing Caleb Williams.
Yet, here we are. The Rams (8–7) enter the weekend as the NFC’s sixth seed, and set up after a year of restraint to be the aggressor again. They have a first-round pick for the first time since selecting Jared Goff with the No. 1 pick in 2016, and could have as much as $50 million in cap space.
And, yes, Stafford and Sean McVay deserve a ton of credit. But so too does GM Les Snead, and the team’s personnel department, and the team’s roster—with a third of the team’s cap space dedicated to players who are no longer around, and nearly another third dedicated to three players (Stafford, Kupp and Aaron Donadl)—is a testament to the work that’s been done within an organization that’s constantly thought outside the box.
So how do you work around all that? By finding players under every rock.
By bolstering the offensive line with Steve Avila in the second round. By landing the guys who rank first (Byron Young) and second (Kobie Turner) in sacks among rookies in the third round. By finding a receiver who’s rewriting the rookie record book in Puka Nacua in the fifth round. By having a fifth-round back from a year ago, Kyren Williams, leading the league in rushing yards per game entering Week 15.
And on the veteran market, it’s by hitting on minimum-salary guys such as corner Ahkello Witherspoon and receiver Demarcus Robinson, and finding Kevin Dotson at the trade deadline in October.
Put it all together, and, yes, McVay and his staff have done a great job making it work, but the personnel department, led by Snead, has found a way to go through the roster reset—one the Rams felt was necessary to avoid having to go through a multi-year cap reckoning—while putting a competitive group on the field for training camp, and then through the season.
For his part, Snead’s done this by being relentless in finding ways to improve the team’s processes, from incorporating and managing data and analytics to self-scouting mistakes to developing formulas beyond the basic metrics. The past couple of years, for example, they’ve tried to eliminate speed biases, and find new ways to measure play speed, which helped them unearth Williams last year and Nacua (who Snead called the Deebo Samuel of the Mountain West in the runup to the draft) this year.
Thinking differently also led them to Turner, an undersized defensive tackle whose playmaking ability at Richmond translated immediately to Wake Forest and the power-five level, and leading the Rams to think he could excel at the NFL level.
Now, in all likelihood, this is all going to end for the Rams in the wild-card round, with the likelihood they have to line up with the Lions or Cowboys or Eagles. Maybe they can pull an upset. Maybe not. What’s clear, either way, is that an organization that won it all just two years ago, and pulled the Band-Aid off a year later, is back on the way up again. That’s why McVay, Stafford and Snead all deserve a lot of credit.
(And it was something that was again clear on Thursday night in the way that Nacua, Robinson and Williams, et al, played.)
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