It sounds too ridiculous to consider realistic, but Pro Football Focus thinks a Jalen Ramsey reunion with the Jacksonville Jaguars could actually make sense.
In a post about trades that could shake up the NFL in the 2023 offseason, PFF’s Marcus Mosher suggested the Los Angeles Rams trade their star cornerback back to the team they got him from in 2019.
Ramsey would join a defense with one elite cornerback in Tyson Campbell (80.8 grade in 2022) and a young pass-rush unit. Ramsey is still a fantastic player, as he had the second-best grade of his career (86.4) during the 2022 season. If he were to join this defense, Jacksonville would have one of the most talented rosters in the league going into the 2023 season.
It’s not hard to find the logic in the idea.
The Rams are currently stuck with a decaying roster just one year after winning Super Bowl LVI. Los Angeles has aging stars like Matthew Stafford and Aaron Donald, a handful of bloated contracts, a dearth of cap space, and not much draft capital to fix their 5-12 roster.
Jacksonville is aiming to make the tweaks necessary to turn its playoff roster into a championship-level one. Perhaps the biggest priority is finding a cornerback to pair with their rising star, Tyson Campbell.
In a vacuum it all sounds great, but the human element gives pause. It’s impossible to ignore the real possibility of hurt feelings. While Dave Caldwell and Tom Coughlin aren’t the ones calling the shots anymore in Jacksonville, owner Shad Khan and executive Tony Khan were part of the confrontational meeting that led to Ramsey requesting a trade out of Jacksonville.
Ramsey has never said he had a problem with the Khans, and even recently tweeted (then deleted) that he still loves Jacksonville. But would Shad Khan be interested in bringing back a player who strong-armed his way out of town?
Perhaps more important is whether the Jaguars could even afford to take on Ramsey’s contract. The cornerback signed a five-year, $100 million deal with the Rams in 2020 and is due to make $17 million in base salary for the 2023 season.
A team that acquires Ramsey could knock that number down with a restructure — something not too difficult with most of his guaranteed money already paid out — but that team would be putting faith in a player they don’t yet have in the building to be amenable to a contract rewrite.
Ramsey back in Duval is an entertaining scenario to imagine, but there’s more than a few reasons to doubt it has much of a chance of happening.