Rams General Manager Les Snead famously wore a t-shirt saying “F them picks” to the team’s Super Bowl LVI celebration in reference to the moves he made to bring veterans to the roster to help with the push for a title, but he admitted earlier this year that he knew he’d have to “eat those words” at some point.
Snead and the Rams have had to do that in the wake of a 5-12 season that saw the team unable to fill holes created by injuries and offseason departures. It’s also found the team in a tough spot against the salary cap and that’s set up a different offseason in Los Angeles.
On Thursday, Snead said the Rams’s “DNA is to attack” but that they are “going to hit the brakes a little bit” this offseason. That’s expected to mean a pivot to trading away veterans to create cap space and add draft assets that restock the roster.
“Well maybe in the past we’ve used draft capital to maybe go get a veteran player knowing that veteran player’s going to cost a certain amount, we could actually fit him under our cap situation,” Snead said at press conference. “So with that being said, in this situation, maybe you don’t use draft capital to get a veteran player, but instead you use the capital to draft let’s call it normal rookies. With that being said, again, rookies help in the cap situation based on the salary structures and also in an intentionality of when you do have a core layer of veterans who are getting into their prime and on the other side of the prime, you definitely want to be ready to replenish it. So that would be a good example of that and we’ve seen it. Stepping on the gas or pressing the gas or using the brakes a little bit more. I’m not saying one or the other is better. We’ve seen teams engineer their rosters in many different ways.”
It’s a new look for the Rams and they added four compensatory picks on Thursday to help the process along. How well they pull it off from here will determine how quickly they’re back among the contenders in the NFC.