Arizona Cardinals: Someone to keep Kyler Murray alive
In 2019, Cardinals quarterback Kyler Murray completed 64.4% of his passes for 3,722 yards, 20 touchdowns, 12 interceptions, and a passer rating of 87.4. That got Murray the AP Offensive Rookie of the Year award, but it also got him sacked a league-high 48 times. It’s never good to get sacked on 25% of your dropbacks, but that’s how life was for Murray in his rookie season. He still managed to complete 43.1% of his passes under pressure for five touchdowns and four interceptions, but head coach and offensive play-designer Kliff Kingsbury will not want a repeat of this in 2020. Arizona could go a couple of different ways in helping Murray — certainly adding another quality offensive tackle to bookend the recently re-signed D.J. Humphries, and giving Murray more defined targets. Murray has already been pounding the table for former Oklahoma teammate CeeDee Lamb, and when your quarterback is that passionate about a potential receiver, it would behoove the franchise to listen.
Los Angeles Rams: About three years of patience
The NFL’s best personnel people will tell you that championship rosters are often built in the bottom third from a salary and starting sense. But occasionally, a team will go all-in on the present, believing that the top talent it has is enough to get the job done. After losing to the Patriots in Super Bowl LIII, Rams head coach Sean McVay and general manager Les Snead thought the latter way. They signed quarterback Jared Goff to a monster contract extension when Goff’s play hadn’t quite put him in the top spot yet. They traded first-round picks in the 2020 and 2021 drafts for Jaguars cornerback Jalen Ramsey.
They felt the effects of Todd Gurley’s four year, $57.5 million contract extension signed in 2018 when in 2019, Gurley managed just 857 yards on 223 carries, and Goff’s inevitable regression left the offense in the proverbial lurch. In 2020, the Rams have four players — Goff, Gurley, Aaron Donald, and receiver Brandin Cooks — with a combined $95,092,682 in salary cap obligations, and there’s no short-term dead money savings that comes from releasing any of those players. We haven’t even talked about the contract extension Ramsey will get, which will add a good $15 million per year to the equation. It all gets a little easier in 2021, by which time a new CBA could extend the parameters of the salary cap to help the Rams get out of this mess, but in the short term, those big deals have hamstrung the franchise, and without a really exceptional draft class, there isn’t a clear vision to a competitive future.
San Francisco 49ers: Depth in the secondary
The 49ers are about as packed roster-wise as any team in the NFL, which bodes well for future Super Bowl trips if Kyle Shanahan can get the most out of Jimmy Garoppolo without expecting too much. The need for a more dynamic quarterback may or may not come up in free agency and the draft, but a more pressing concern could be depth in the secondary. Losing safety Jaquiski Tartt late in the regular season was one of the things that led to San Francisco’s temporary defensive implosion (from which it eventually recovered), and cornerback Ahkello Witherspoon was, to put it kindly, a liability in coverage. Giving up seven touchdowns to one interception will lead to that. The 49ers eventually replaced Witherspoon with Emmanuel Moseley and that went well, but this is a defense that played nickel on 70% of its snaps last season, and that’s not likely to change. Bringing in a difference-maker or two to add depth and dimension wouldn’t hurt at all.
Seattle Seahawks: A deep safety to bring back the Legion of Boom
When the Seahawks led the NFL in scoring defense every season from 2012 through 2015, establishing the Legion of Boom as one of the greatest defenses in modern football, a primary reason for that excellence was safety Earl Thomas, and the fact that Thomas played over 1,000 snaps in each of those seasons. Injuries started to take their toll in 2016, and the Seahawks deemed Thomas expendable after the 2018 season. You could argue that one either way — Thomas had a remarkable comeback season for the Ravens — but what you can’t argue is that with Delano Hill and Tedric Thompson as the primary Thomas replacements, Seattle’s pass defense looked lost in the sauce far too often.
Veteran Bradley McDougald held his roles together decently, and Seattle pulled off a masterstroke of a midseason trade with the Lions for Quandre Diggs, who is under club control through the 2021 season at bargain rates ($5,168,750 in cap in 2020; $5.5 million in cap in 2021) for his quality of play. But acquiring a true deep safety in the Thomas mold (not easy, we understand) would allow Diggs to roam the field as an attack player in the front six more often, giving that defense more flexibility. It’s the surest way for the Legion of Boom to roar once again before the end of Pete Carroll’s tenure.
Touchdown Wire editor Doug Farrar previously covered football for Yahoo! Sports, Sports Illustrated, Bleacher Report, the Washington Post, and Football Outsiders. His first book, “The Genius of Desperation,” a schematic history of professional football, was published by Triumph Books in 2018 and won the Professional Football Researchers Association’s Nelson Ross Award for “Outstanding recent achievement in pro football research and historiography.”