The start of the NFL draft is just one day away, but for the Los Angeles Rams, they’ll have to wait a little bit longer to make their first pick. They’re not slated to go on the clock until No. 52 overall in the second round, the fourth straight year they’ll go without a first-rounder.
In advance of the big (virtual) event, Les Snead and Sean McVay held a conference call with reporters to address the most notable topics surrounding the Rams – including their draft plans, the Brandin Cooks trade and the status of Leonard Floyd and A’Shawn Robinson’s contracts.
We already touched on a few of the topics from the call, such as the backup QB plan and the Rams’ confidence in Josh Reynolds, but here’s everything else we learned from their pre-draft conference call,
Rams played “hard to get” with Cooks
The Rams wanted to hold onto Cooks, and were not openly shopping him. Given his contract and the season he had in 2018 with the Rams, it’s easy to see why they wanted to keep him. But once they got offers for second-round picks, they couldn’t pass up that sort of return.
“A lot of teams did contact us about Brandin throughout this offseason – whenever the new league year started, even before a little bit. We were committed to keeping Brandin because of what he did for our offense,” Snead said. “I think in that time where we, I’d call it, naturally played hard to get because we weren’t actively trying to move him. When a few teams did come with a chance to get a second-round pick, that’s probably when we sat down and Sean and I discussed, ‘Hey, what could be best moving forward?’ That pick being very valuable. Us with the emergence of Josh Reynolds and Robert Woods and Cooper Kupp, especially Josh Reynolds coming. We’ve got a deep receiver room, I think that helped and then getting another pick in the top 60, very valuable.”
It was always going to take a strong offer for the Rams to part with Cooks because they had to take on $21.8 million in dead money, and clearly the 57th overall pick was enough to get it done.