It was all good a year ago.
The Rams were rolling. Their young head coach was being hailed as a genius and rightfully so. Their 24-year-old franchise quarterback was squarely in the MVP discussion and months away from signing an extension that would keep him in Los Angeles for years to come. The do-it-all running back, Todd Gurley, was on pace to break the league’s touchdown record and had just signed a massive deal in the offseason. The offensive line was being discussed as one of the best of all-time. The defense hadn’t quite gelled but it was loaded with star power at every level.
After a thrilling 54-51 win over the Chiefs on Monday Night Football, the Rams were sitting on top of the NFL world. Fast-forward to November 2019, and things have taken a turn. A dark turn.
Sean McVay’s offense has been figured out. Jared Goff hasn’t played well for a calendar year and his newly-signed contract already looks like one of the worst in the NFL. Todd Gurley’s knee will never be the same again and he’s losing snaps at an alarming rate. The offensive line is among the worst in the league and just lost two more starters to injury. The three big defensive acquisitions of 2018 — Marcus Peters, Aqib Talib and Nadmukong Suh — are gone. The Rams limped out of Week 10 with a 5-4 record, but the odds of this team making a run at a wildcard spot are long.
Things change quickly in the NFL. A roster situation that was the envy of the league 12 months ago now looks bleak. Los Angeles is projected for just $25 million in cap space this offseason, doesn’t have a first-round pick for the next two years and has three key contributors — LB Cory Littleton, LT Andrew Whitworth, and OLB Dante Fowler Jr. — headed for free agency (or, in the case of Whitworth, retirement).
It gets worse. Gurley’s 2020 salary is already guaranteed and his cap number jumps to $17.25 million. Goff is looking more and more like a system QB and all of a sudden finds himself in a system that doesn’t make his job easier. And his unwieldy extension hasn’t even kicked in yet! Even if the Rams wanted to move on from him, they can’t really do so until 2023 unless they can find some mark to offload his contract onto.
This is not a very good football team as currently constructed, but things might get worse before they get better. With very little in the way of roster-building assets, GM Les Snead will have to get creative this offseason if the Rams are going to get back to where they were last November. Snead getting creative isn’t necessarily a good thing…
It’s easy to look back at those trades and ridicule the Rams for their short-sightedness, but they were lauded at the time for aggressively building up their roster during Goff’s rookie contract. Why that was viewed as a smart strategy is unclear, as there’s no evidence that the strategy actually works — especially when that rookie quarterback isn’t special.
The Rams got a Super Bowl appearance out of it, but it was the less-costly moves — hiring McVay and Wade Phillips; signing Robert Woods and Andrew Whitworth; drafting Cooper Kupp, etc. — that really fueled the team’s run. Cooks was good for the 2018 Rams but has struggled to stay healthy. Watkins was a disappointment in 2017. The same goes for Peters, Talib and Suh in 2018. Snead compared the 2018 acquisitions to the Warriors adding Kevin Durant to a 73-9 team, but for that metaphor to really work, Goff would have to be Steph Curry and that’s just not the case. A more apt comparison would have been the Warriors adding DeMarcus Cousins.
It turns out these Rams won’t provide a blueprint for teams looking to build around a quarterback on a rookie deal. They are more of a cautionary tale and not the only one you’ll find around the NFL. The Browns took a similar approach this offseason. GM John Dorsey has already burned through all of the assets collected by the previous front office and has a 3-6 record to show for it. The Jets were given credit for spending big this offseason with Sam Darnold on his rookie deal, and, well, we’ve seen how that’s turned out.
Snead will ultimately get the blame for the overly-aggressive approach, but this approach was backed by the entire organization. Rams executive VP of football operations Kevin Demoff said as much to The Ringer’s Kevin Clark before Super Bowl 53:
“I think in the sports world right now, there’s been, whether it’s the tanking phenomenon or the draft-pick phenomenon, everyone wants this really long window, and you can’t be afraid to raise your hand and say, ‘You know what, this happened a little faster than we thought.’”
Tony Pastoor, the Rams VP of football and business administration, compared it to what the Seahawks did to build up the roster around a young Russell Wilson during the Legion of Boom era.
“The key to building around a quarterback on a rookie contract is having the players to actually build it. Obviously, you look at Seattle, building around Russell [Wilson], they had players—Richard Sherman, Earl Thomas, Avril, Bennett, Wagner. They hit on those guys and knew what they had,” Pastoors said. “We were fortunate to hit on Jared and have Aaron, a superstar. Todd was a budding superstar. We were able to supplement those guys with guys like Robert Woods, Brandin Cooks, Andrew Whitworth. It all starts in the draft so that you aren’t trying to piece-meal it all together.”
But there’s an obvious difference between how those two rosters were constructed: Like Wilson, Sherman, Thomas and Wagner were also on cheap rookie deals. Bennett and Avril were undervalued vets who signed modest deals in free agency. The Seahawks did make an aggressive move trading a first for Percy Harvin before the Super Bowl season, but, as we’d later see when Seattle dominated the league with Harvin out injured, that was more of a luxury move.
The Seahawks have made more aggressive moves since then, but they’ve never reached the heights that young, cheap roster did and Wilson being one of the league’s best quarterbacks has helped cover up major holes on the roster. Goff is not providing the same value.
So that’s how the Rams got here. Now how do they get out of this hole?
Now that Snead has exhausted all of the team’s assets, it’s going to be hard for him to make any more aggressive moves. Instead, he’ll have to take a more subtle approach to build the roster back up.
He can start by dealing some of the team’s more redundant players. TE Tyler Higbee has lost snaps after signing an extension and trading him away could save the team $6 million. Trading safety John Johnson won’t save the team money, but he’s a good, young player with a team-friendly contract. He could bring back a Day 2 pick and second-round rookie Taylor Rapp has played well in his absence. The team could also restructure reliable vets like Robert Woods and Aaron Donald to save about $15 million total. And extending Ramsey should allow the team to bring his 2020 cap hit down a few million dollars.
Those moves would be a good start, but if the Rams really want to open up avenues to improve the roster, putting Goff on the trade block would be the best way to go about it. His contract will be hard to move, and the Rams would have to eat $20 million in dead money but they’d also save $16 million against the cap in the process. If they can get a first-round pick or multiple Day 2 picks, that would be hard to turn down. That would recoup some of the draft capital they gave back in their naive trade for Jalen Ramsey and give them about $65 million in cap space this offseason.
Getting a first-rounder for Goff (and his contract) may sound like a pipe dream at this point, but don’t forget: John Elway still runs a QB-needy franchise and Goff is tall. But seriously, Goff is a former first-overall pick and only a year removed from a productive season. This is a league that was willing to trade a first-round pick for Sam Bradford … in 2016. Some team will take the bait.
(Any team that did trade for Goff would be getting him at $130.5 million over five years, but it would essentially be the same deal that Kirk Cousins got in Minnesota. The first three years, which would cost $84 million, would be fully guaranteed. The last two years would be relatively cheap, especially with the cap to take several big jumps between now and 2023.)
With a number of veteran quarterbacks slated to hit free agency this offseason (could McVay get the most out of Marcus Mariota or Jameis Winston?) parting ways with your starter isn’t nearly as risky as it typically is. The front office would have the means to build the offensive line back up AND find a decent starting quarterback. That should be more than enough for McVay to get his offense back up and running.
McVay’s genius has been questioned this season, but the Rams’ offensive problems aren’t really scheme related. The woeful offensive line has prevented him from doing what he had done in the past, and Goff’s limitations have prevented him from adequately adjusting. Fix the line and you’ll fix the offense. Goff would, of course, look like his old self if that happens, but it’ll be difficult (if not impossible) to fix the line with no cap space or draft capital, and if he NEEDS everything to be right in order to play well, the team is better off moving on.
Will all of this allow the Rams to get to where they were at this time a year ago? Probably not, but it sure beats willingly falling off the cliff they’re headed for.
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