The Rams had no choice but to pay Jalen Ramsey like the cornerback he isn't

[touchdownwire.usatoday.com]

Doug Farrar
26 seconds ago
As it turned out, Bills cornerback Tre’Davious White’s status as the NFL’s highest-paid cornerback based on annual average salary lasted five days. White’s four-year, $69 million contract extension that could hit $70 million with Pro Bowl incentives was overwhelmed by the five-year, $105 million contract extension given to Rams cornerback Jalen Ramsey. Ramsey’s $21 million AAV re-sets the cornerback market quite definitively, the $71.2 million guaranteed blasts past Miami’s Byron Jones’ $54.374 million for the most guaranteed money ever given to a cornerback, and it’s not like the Rams had a choice.

Last October, after shopping Marcus Peters to the Ravens for linebacker Kenny Young, a second-round pick, and a fourth-round pick, the Rams turned around and traded their first-round picks over the next two years, and a fourth-round pick, to the Jaguars for Ramsey’s services. They did so knowing that Ramsey was only under contract through the 2020 season, and given the draft capital they hurled out the window, there was no way head coach Sean McVay and general manager Les Snead were going to let Ramsey walk out the door.

It’s not surprising that Ramsey re-set the market at his position; other players who have recently been acquired in exchange for multiple first-round picks have had their new teams over the same barrel: Giving up that much and admitting that the move was anything but a colossal success could be an easy career-killer.

Last August, the Texans traded two first-round picks, plus a second-round pick, to the Dolphins for left tackle Laremy Tunsil and Kenny Stills. Tunsil was the major part of the equation, and this trade was one of several that people have roasted Texans head coach and de facto general manager Bill O’Brien for making. O’Brien may have a skewed concept of player value overall, but Tunsil did do a lot to improve Houston’s blindside blocking. Tunsil was due to be a free agent following the 2020 season, but after giving up so much for him in the first place, the Texans doubled down in the second place with a three-year, $66 million extension with $40 million fully guaranteed that made Tunsil the league’s highest-paid tackle on a per-year basis. Your smarter people around the league would say that O’Brien had no choice but to give Tunsil whatever he wanted.

When the Bears traded their 2019 and 2020 first-round picks to the Raiders for edge-rusher Khalil Mack in 2018, they also started work on a six-year, $141 million contract extension with $90 million in total guarantees over the life of the deal. This made Mack the NFL’s highest paid player at his position, an honor he holds to this day.

(Note to the Seahawks, who gave their first-round picks in 2021 and 2022 to the Jets for safety Jamal Adams, whose rookie contract runs out in 2021: You’re next).

So, what are the Rams getting for all that cash? Of course, by doing this deal, they believe that in Ramsey, they have the NFL’s finest player at his position. Then again, this is the same team that gave Jared Goff a four-year, $134 million contract extension last September, so you’ll forgive me if I’m not completely aligned with their concept of player value.


Oct 20, 2019; Atlanta, GA, USA; Atlanta Falcons wide receiver Julio Jones (11) carries the ball as Los Angeles Rams cornerback Jalen Ramsey (20) defends in the second half at Mercedes-Benz Stadium. (Jason Getz-USA TODAY Sports)

And with no personal disrespect intended to Mr. Ramsey, we’re not aligned at all in this case, either. When I recently put together my list of the NFL’s top 11 outside cornerbacks for 2020, Ramsey didn’t even make honorable mention, and that’s not by omission. Ramsey did rank ninth on my 2019 list, so there’s that. Peters, who the Rams gave away for a relative pittance, did make my 2020 list, and I would argue that if you just have to have a boom-and-bust cornerback with both formidable physical ability and ravenous inconsistency in your secondary, Peters is the guy you want on that wall.

In addition, Ramsey didn’t make my list of the league’s 11 best cornerbacks in zone coverage, nor did he make my list of the 11 best cornerbacks in man coverage (though Peters, ahem, did).

Overall, in his nine games with the Rams last season, Ramsey allowed 28 receptions on 40 targets for 336 yards, 94 yards after the catch, no touchdowns, one interception, and an opponent passer rating of 85.0. Not bad at all, but not earth-shatteringly great, and his Rams tape syncs up nicely with his Jaguars tape to show a player just as prone to make an amazing play as he is to leave himself out in space. In addition, Ramsey is inherently flawed when presented with certain kinds of receiver problems to solve.

Let’s go to the tape, starting with his 2019 Jaguars performance, and seguing into the Rams stuff.

Where Ramsey provides optimal value as a player is his ability to take the league’s best receivers up the field, without safety help, at a dominant level. Here, in Week 2 against the Texans, he has the speed, flexibility and physical nature to hold DeAndre Hopkins, one of the league’s best receivers, to an incompletion when most outside cornerbacks would have melted down somewhere along the route. Like Richard Sherman in his prime (which, to Sherman’s credit, he was able to extend through at least the 2019 season), Ramsey lives in a world that perfectly aligns technique and the predisposition to — if not intimidate, (a corner is not going to intimidate a guy like DeAndre Hopkins no matter what he does), at least hold the hand-fighting to a draw.



But this play later in the first quarter, followed with a minor Ramsey meltdown as it was, shows where he’s vulnerable. Hopkins is off the field for this play, and Ramsey is asked to cover receiver Kenny Stills in the slot. Stills crosses Ramsey’s face on an out route after moving him inside, and bigger cornerbacks don’t generally fare well in these circumstances — there are too many lanky moving parts to get in position in too short a time.



Another way to counter cornerbacks of Ramsey’s stature is to foil him with route combos and more quick angular stuff. Here, the Texans get a seven-yard gain from Hopkins on a quick slant, predicated with free space via a legal push-off.



But when Deshaun Watson tries to go deep to Hopkins again in the third quarter, it’s more of the good side: Ramsey mirrors Hopkins’ route and adjusts perfectly to jump the play. The only thing preventing this play from becoming six points for the Jaguars is Ramsey’s drop.



There are also focus issues to deal with, like in this Week 1 touchdown pass from Patrick Mahomes to Sammy Watkins in which Ramsey covered Demarcus Robinson, stopped after Watkins caught the ball, and watched as Watkins ran right through the middle of the defense. Jacksonville’s defense was plagued with communication and placement errors last season, and Ramsey was as much as part of that as anyone else when he was there.



Onto Week 16 against the 49ers, when Ramsey was in a Rams uniform. Two plays, both involving San Francisco receiver Emmanuel Sanders, illustrate that Ramsey’s feast-or-famine paradigm isn’t a bug — it’s a feature.

This first-quarter interception of Jimmy Garoppolo is about as good as it gets when it comes to range and recovery speed. Here, Ramsey moves across the formation with tight end George Kittle, seems to read two-to-three on the offensive left side, and baits Garoppolo into throwing a pick aimed at Sanders from the inside slot on a curl route. This is a marvelous athletic response to Kyle Shanahan’s pre-snap trickeration.



Later in the game, Ramsey and Rams safety Taylor Rapp conspired to allow a 46-yard completion from Garoppolo to Sanders, and I wrote an entire post about this play last year, because it ran pretty deep. The 49ers won the game, the loss eliminated the Rams from the playoffs, and after the game, Ramsey put the blame on Rapp for a blown assignment.



“It wasn’t me and Eric — he played the other side. It was [safety Taylor] Rapp,” Ramsey said, when asked by ESPN reporter Lindsey Thiry what he and safety Eric Weddle saw on the Sanders play. “We were in a form of 2-Man [coverage]. We had an adjustment check to it because [the 49ers were in a] condensed split, I played my technique, trusting that he was going to be over the top… and he wasn’t. That’s what happened.”

Rapp was the Rams’ second-round pick in 2019 out of Washington. He had seen his snaps increase over the last month due to injuries in the secondary (most specifically, John Johnson III’s shoulder injury), and it’s clear that in a 2-Man responsibility, this was not the right technique. 2-Man is basically a Cover-2 safety look with man coverage underneath, and safeties must be where they’re supposed to be so that the cornerbacks can play man coverage confidently.

There is also the question of how closely Ramsey should have covered Sanders through the route if 2-Man was the coverage. If you want to, you can assign all kinds of responsibilities to coverage meltdowns.

“One thing Jalen’s dead right about — his technique was awful,” former NFL defensive coordinator and head coach Rex Ryan said on ESPN after the fact. “They’re running what we call a slice fist, meaning [the cornerback] is going to start from outside leverage, get your hands on [the receiver], and then get back to an inside trail. Jalen never touched the guy off the line, and Rapp ends up playing over the top. He’s supposed to be deep and outside, thinking that Jalen’s gonna be trailing the thing inside. Maybe the ball will be elevated. Well, guess what? Jalen wasn’t there. Rapp’s a young player; he’s going to do exactly what you tell him to — outside and deep. Well, guess what? Jalen, it’s your fault.”

None of this analysis is intended to malign Jalen Ramsey as a player. When he’s on, he’s the very model of a modern NFL cornerback. But when a guy gets paid in a way that sets the market for his position on its head, he had better be the best at his position on a play-to-play basis. So far in his career, Ramsey has not been that at all. The Rams are now locked into a situation where they had to pay Ramsey more than he was “worth” because of the draft capital investment they originally sunk into his potential, and if Ramsey is not able to shelve the liabilities and make the most of his assets, the sunk cost could be severe over time.