General managers in the NFL typically do not have long tenures of employment and for a league that cycles executives yearly, Rams GM Les Snead’s 13 years with the Rams would be a surprise if not for his annual successes in the draft.
Snead was criticized by some for his post-Super Bowl LVI roster management but quickly redeemed himself through his performance in the 2023 NFL draft. Snead has continued to stack his team with underrated and undervalued talent.
The longtime GM has many tricks of the trade and one was on display Thursday night. Jared Verse’s selection was surprising to the draft community, only because some would have expected that if the Rams were to acquire a player of such quality, they would have had to trade up.
With no news coming out about a potential move to acquire Verse, many assumed he was off the Rams’ draft board. That was intentional. Despite the interest, the Rams played it cool. They purposefully did not bring Verse in for a workout to hide their interest and once he became available at Pick 19, the question of who to pick wasn’t difficult.
“No, we didn’t do any privates with him,” Snead said. “He was one of those guys we tried to somewhat keep under the radar except a lot of mocks felt like we might go that way, go defense. We try to go stealth with it. But like Sean mentioned, he’s one of those players that from the vetting process, he was really one of – it’s all subjective, but one of our higher-rated guys in terms of intangibles off the field and also it transcends to when you rate some things that are not necessarily physical talent, but let’s call it competitiveness on the urgency on the field, he rated very, very high.
Snead and the Rams were highly interested in the pass rusher from Florida State throughout the entire pre-draft process.
On Verse, Snead had this to say: “You can tell he cares about football, he has fun playing football, and oh, by the way, he’s pretty disruptive, violent. You think defense, the way he plays is next to the word in the dictionary.”