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The Super Bowl Dark Horse That’s Powered by a Bunch of College Football Rejects
The Los Angeles Rams are built around the NFL’s cheapest defense—and it’s stocked with rising stars who were ignored by college football powerhouses coming out of high school

By
Andrew Beaton
Jan. 9, 2025 9:00 am ET


Los Angeles Rams linebacker Jared Verse (No. 8) celebrates with defensive tackle Kobie Turner (No. 91) and linebacker Byron Young (No. 0). Illustration: WSJ, Ryan Sun/AP

Before Jared Verse was the favorite to become the NFL’s defensive rookie of the year, he was viewed as just another high-school scrub.

The best college football teams in the country had no interest in him. He graduated with just a single scholarship offer. He wound up playing in the game’s hinterlands at the University at Albany.

Instead of being showered in cash by big-time boosters, Verse made ends meet by running deliveries for DoorDash.

But as Verse began to sow mayhem as a pass rusher at Albany, powerhouse schools across the country began to realize they might have been wrong about him. Soon he was inundated with transfer offers, ultimately choosing to head to Florida State, where he played his way into the first round of the draft.

“I wouldn’t change anything about it,” Verse says now. “I developed in a way I couldn’t develop at bigger schools.”

On NFL teams, players like Verse are a rarity. On one particular NFL team, though, he’s definitely not.

The Los Angeles Rams enter their playoff showdown against the Minnesota Vikings having refashioned themselves into a Super Bowl dark horse by finding a bunch of guys just like Verse—overlooked and lightly regarded players who later emerged as rising stars.

Defensive tackle Kobie Turner, who has turned into one of the game’s best interior rushers, began his college career at Richmond as a walk-on. Fellow defensive lineman Braden Fiske started off at Western Michigan. Byron Young played at the Georgia Military College while Michael Hoecht went to Brown. Along with Verse, those five lead the team in sacks—and not one of them initially enrolled in major college football programs.


Jared Verse and Braden Fiske pressure Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers. Photo: Emilee Chinn/Getty Images

Together, these players who have been undervalued for their whole lives now form the core of the NFL’s most undervalued defense. In a league with a $255.4 million salary cap, the Rams entire defense cost a grand total of $39.5 million. That’s $27 million less than the next team, and a whopping $52 million below the league average.

And the Rams’ all say that they’ve reached this point because of where they began their careers—not in spite of it.

“We all understand and remember where we come from,” says Fiske, who led all rookies this year with 8.5 sacks. “We have something to prove.”

The Cost of Every NFL Team's Defense
The Rams made the playoffs with defensive players who cost tens of millions less than their competitors


Source: overthecap.com
Rosie Ettenheim/WSJ

That the Rams have built a defense around a battalion of long shots isn’t a coincidence. It’s part of a broader teambuilding strategy. After all, this is a franchise that traded away all of its first-round picks from 2017-2023. Uncovering hidden gems late in the draft became a necessity.

To do that, the Rams found upside in players who were barely scratching the surface of their potential when they first entered college—and then demonstrated a knack for defying the expectations set on them at every step of the way.

“You have to love football to start at that lower level,” general manager Les Snead says. “We have our algorithm, our in-house formula of how we value quality football players, and we don’t run from those types.”

The Rams had no choice but to try to assemble a group of young pass rushers. When they won the Super Bowl after the 2021 season, they had one of the greatest defensive linemen of all time in Aaron Donald. They also knew they wouldn’t have him much longer.

There was no chance the Rams could replace a three-time Defensive Player of the Year winner with just one person. What they could do was recreate him in the aggregate.

“The probability of identifying, discovering and actually acquiring another Aaron Donald was low,” Snead says. “So we tried to replace the end result and not the human.”

What the Rams did have was the benefit of time to plan. Donald had always been clear with the team’s brass that he wouldn’t hang on long past his heyday. That meant even when he retired last March at just 33 years old, they had already begun filling out the defensive front behind him.

The Rams first signed Hoecht in 2020 as an undrafted free agent. Coming from small-town Ohio, he never imagined that playing the game professionally was an option. So he prioritized an education, and only when he began to generate some buzz as a junior in the Ivy League did it dawn on him that he might actually have a chance at the NFL.

Before he knew it, he had progressed from the practice squad to playing in the Rams’ Super Bowl win over the Bengals.

“Not a lot of people were expecting us to be good,” Hoecht says, “and then you blink.”

As it turns out, Hoecht’s origin story is far from the most improbable. Young, a third-round pick in 2023, spent his early days in college working at a Dollar General before he was able to transfer to Tennessee. Turner, a fellow third round selection that year, had to plead with coaches to let him walk on at Richmond and envisioned a career as a choir director before transferring to Wake Forest.

All the while, Michael Pierce was putting their careers under a microscope. He’s the Rams scout who identified many of these out-of-nowhere defenders. While he had clips of them battling opponents in the ACC and SEC, he also had the unenviable task of trying to weigh their true talent level from games against small-school teams that might not boast a single NFL player.

With the players the Rams’ wound up drafting, Pierce saw one thing in common.

“Everybody will question the competition level, but you saw guys that dominated,” Pierce says. “Whatever level you’re on, if you dominate, there’s something to be said about that.”

The pressure to find these guys reached a new level when Donald retired after last season. That’s when the Rams finally had a first rounder and used it on Verse. Then they traded a trio of picks to move up in the second round to take Fiske, who like Verse had transferred to FSU.


The Los Angeles Rams enter their playoff showdown against the Minnesota Vikings having refashioned themselves into a Super Bowl dark horse. Photo: jayne kamin-oncea/Reuters

Now, even though these players look set to ink contracts worth tens of millions of dollars, they say the underdog mindset that drove them to reach this point hasn’t gone anywhere. It shows up in practice and in the weight room, where they’ve developed habits based on the idea that if they don’t improve, their careers might be over.

“All of those things come from the mentality of being a small school guy,” Turner says.

Verse, who was fourth in the NFL in pressures in his rookie season, is the one who will make sure the Vikings know his back story during their playoff showdown.

Verse isn’t afraid to admit that he can be a trash-talker, and particularly enjoys jawing with opponents who came out of high-school as five-star recruits—or five stars more than he had.

Compared with him and his defensive teammates, who had to claw their way to a spot in pro football, Verse thinks those blue-chip players can be “mentally weak.”

“All they know,” Verse says, “is the easy way.”

Write to Andrew Beaton at andrew.beaton@wsj.com

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