I completely agree with this last reply, dune.
1. There's only so much money available for each team. QBs suck up the most. In our case, it's Donald. Until it is Goff (maybe) and then we'll have two guys sucking up a lot of money. Like having two QBs from a payroll. They will both cost us other players as we won't be able to afford as many good players or another great player with less money available.
2. Mahomes is more valuable because good quarterbacks are more valuable than great DLs. They impact the game more.
3. I completely agree with you that AD is not the problem on D. I said up front he's a stud, maybe the best all time. I am glad he's on our team. On the field, he's the man. But he costs us - on the field - at other positions, that we can't pay premium $ to play for us. We're already seeing it. We didn't bring in a good, experienced vet LB as we had to keep space for Donald this year. So we will have to make due with lower round picks and UDFAs and hope we hit it big on one.But I feel that AD’s admittedly huge salary is still affordable to the Rams. The trick is to have players around him that not only produce reasonably, but take FULL advantage of the golden opportunity to get one-on-ones as a result of AD’s presence. Frankly, we haven’t really had that this year despite the big names and salaries of Suh and Brockers. The LB play has been pretty poor, too. VERY disappointing. But these things can be corrected in the next offseason.
In short, AD’s salary won’t hold this team back, providing that Snead fills the D with reasonably priced and better performing draft picks and FA’s. Honestly, wouldn’t be hard to get better bang for the buck than we’ve gotten from Suh, Brockers, and Barron, huh?
One last thing. Dead’s teacher/student analogy yesterday resonated with me. If 5-6 D players are underperforming, then it’s not the players. It’s the coaches. I’m looking at you, Wade.