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https://www.si.com/nfl/2019/01/17/n...ms-saints-patriots-chiefs-roster-construction
Building a Winner: How the Rams’ Blueprint Stacks Up With the Saints, Patriots and Chiefs
By ALBERT BREER
Les Snead was in the air without wifi when divisional-playoff Sunday kicked off last January. He was in a cab when word got to him that the Jaguars beat the Steelers. And try as he might to ignore football on his getaway to Hawaii—that was the whole point of the trip—he couldn’t help but notice a certain restlessness later that day in the restaurant he was in, or that it might have been a football game that caused it.
The Minneapolis Miracle had just gone down, and it was a matter of time before Snead heard more about it. Which prompted two reactions from the Rams GM.
First, he sent a text to Case Keenum, his old quarterback and the triggerman behind the Vikings’ breathtaking, last-gasp play to knock off the Saints and advance to the NFC Championship Game. Second, he vowed to not forget what being left out felt like, just a week after the Rams’ season ended with a wild-card loss to the Falcons at home.
And then he remembered Alabama coach Nick Saban having a saying plastered everywhere after the Tide lost the national title game in January 2017 to Deshaun Watson and Clemson: Don’t waste that feeling.
“Remember the disappointment,” Snead said from his office on Wednesday afternoon. “That helps. I’ve had it written across different things in my office. So it’s everything you do—it’s improving the roster, but it’s also improving this gadget, it’s improving how we do food, how we travel, all those things. It’s the minutiae of trying to get better on a Tuesday in March.
“When that no longer stings, read that line and say, ‘Know what? That did sting. And let’s do better than we did last year.’”
Snead swears now that the Rams’ explosion of aggressiveness during the 2017 offseason happened organically—moves driven in reaction to circumstances and opportunity. But he has no problem conceding that it was also an outgrowth of the loss at the Coliseum, the feeling it left, and that moment a week later in Hawaii.
This year he wasn’t in Hawaii for the divisional round. He was back in the Coliseum, watching his Rams run the Cowboys out of the building to advance to play a Saints team that suffered an even more painful ending last January.
And so as we take our annual look at the roster construction of the four conference finalists, this is a year when there are few big overarching trends in the construction of the teams (outside of significant investment in offensive and defensive linemen). But with each roster, there is a certain urgency with which they were put together, and nowhere is that true more than in Los Angeles.
But we’re starting with a project I began three years ago, and have carried over in the years since, with a look at how each of the final four teams is built. So here’s what the study showed.
KANSAS CITY CHIEFS
Homegrown on 53: 25 (21 draftees/four college free agents)
Outside free agents on 53: 21
Trades/waivers on 53: Seven
Quarterback acquired: Drafted Patrick Mahomes 10th overall in 2017 (traded 27th and 91st overall picks, 2018 first-round pick for 10th overall pick).
Last five first-round picks: QB Patrick Mahomes (2017, 10); CB Marcus Peters (2015, 22); DE Dee Ford (2014, 23); OT Eric Fisher (2013, 1); DT Dontari Poe (2012, 11).
Top five cap figures: OLB Justin Houston $20.60 million; OT Eric Fisher $13.95 million; S Eric Berry $13.00 million; TE Travis Kelce $9.96 million; DE Allen Bailey $7.97 million.
LOS ANGELES RAMS
Homegrown on 53: 33 (26 draftees/Seven college free agents)
Outside free agents on 53: 11
Trades/waivers on 53: Nine
Quarterback acquired: Drafted Jared Goff first overall in 2016 (traded 15th, 43rd, 45th and 76th overall picks, and 2017 first- and third round picks for first, 113th, and 177th overall picks).
Last five first-round picks: QB Jared Goff (2016, 1); RB Todd Gurley (2015, 10); OT Greg Robinson (2014, 2); DT Aaron Donald (2014, 13); WR Tavon Austin/LB Alec Ogletree (2013, 8/30).
Top five cap figures: DT Ndamukong Suh $14.50 million; OT Andrew Whitworth $12.67 million; S Lamarcus Joyner $11.29 million; CB Aqib Talib $11.01 million; DL Michael Brockers $10.76 million.
NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS
Homegrown on 53: 31 (23 draftees/eight college free agents)
Outside free agents on 53: 14
Trades/waivers on 53: Eight
Quarterback acquired: Drafted Tom Brady 199th overall in 2000.
Last five first-round picks: OL Isaiah Wynn/RB Sony Michel (2018, 23/31); DT Malcom Brown (2015, 32); DL Dominique Easley (2014, 29); DE Chandler Jones/LB Don’t’a Hightower (2012, 21/25).
Top five cap figures: QB Tom Brady $22.00 million; CB Stephon Gilmore $12.513 million; S Devin McCourty $11.94 million; TE Rob Gronkowski $10.91 million; LB Dont’a Hightower $8.53 million.
NEW ORLEANS SAINTS
Homegrown on 53: 28 (20 draftees/eight college free agents)
Outside free agents on 53: 20
Trades/waivers on 53: five
Quarterback acquired: Signed Drew Brees to a six-year, $60 million free-agent deal in 2006.
Last five first-round picks: DE Marcus Davenport (2018, 14); CB Marshon Lattimore/OT Ryan Ramczyk (2017, 11/32); DT Sheldon Rankins (2016, 12); OL Andrus Peat/LB Stephone Anthony (2015, 13/31).
Top five cap figures: QB Drew Brees $24.00 million; DE Cam Jordan $14.50 million; OT Terron Armstead $13.5 million; OG Larry Warford $9.01 million; C Max Unger $8.01 million.
So what to take away? Three things I noticed:
One, more players on these rosters are landing there via trade or waiver claims than before. The 2015 quartet of Arizona, Carolina, Denver and New England had acquired a total of 18 of their players that way going into championship weekend. In 2016, that number dipped to 12 for the conference finalist. Last year, it was up to 26. This year, it’s 29. So these teams are working the waiver wire and trade market.
Two, there’s a huge gap in age at quarterback—and in method of their acquisition. Brady is 41 and Brees is 40. Goff is 24 and Mahomes is 23. Brady and Brees came into the NFL as non-first-rounders, and Brees was allowed to hit the free-agent market by his drafting team (the Chargers) due to injury. Both Goff and Mahomes were traded up for in the Top 10. Conclusion? Quarterbacks don’t slip through the cracks much anymore.
Three, the investment in linemen, as we said, is noticeable. Take the five highest cap numbers on the rosters of the Chiefs, Rams and Saints, and 11 of those 15 players (including Houston, an on-ball linebacker) are linemen. And the Patriots spent three of their last four first-round picks on linemen, and have three offensive linemen on second contracts playing for trench wizard Dante Scarnecchia.
And that brings us back to Snead, and the aggression-born-of-disappointment within the Ram organization that took the team from up-and-comer to juggernaut in one offseason.
There wasn’t some seminal meeting to map things out, nor was there a detailed plan to go and collect stars like a director would assemble an ensemble cast. In fact, as Snead explains it now, the Rams’ splashy 2018 really was more a step-by-step reaction to the conditions facing the team. And it started with a simple decision.
“It was definitely organic. We didn’t put the cart before the horse,” said Snead. “The news of the day was ‘Who are they gonna franchise? Sammy [Watkins], Trumaine [Johnson] or Lamarcus [Joyner]?’ One of them being a receiver, two of them being DBs, we did know that there would be disruption in the defensive backfield. If we franchised Sammy, two are on the market. And we knew if we picked one of the DBs, there’d be disruption at receiver.”
That Johnson had been tagged twice already made the call not to tag him (it’d be at the quarterback number) easy. And looking at the price points for Watkins ($15.982 million) and Joyner ($11.287 million), it made sense to ease the loss of one DB, and roll the dice on being able to keep Watkins after he hit the market. And that opened the door to rework the defense in coordinator Wade Phillips’ vision.
So the dominoes started falling.
• Ahead of the combine, the Rams worked out a deal to send second- and fourth-round picks to the Chiefs for a sixth-round pick and Pro Bowl corner Marcus Peters, whose disruptive and selfish behavior in Kansas City landed him on the trade block. For all his problems, Peters brought elite ability to L.A., and only cost $1.7 million for 2018, with a $9.1 million team option for 2019.
• Two weeks later, L.A. landed a bookend for Peters, trading a fifth-round pick to Denver for five-time Pro Bowler Aqib Talib, who fell out of favor with the Broncos because his performance went south with that of the team at the end of 2017. The feeling was he could pull teammates either way, and the Broncos saw that as an issue as they looked to get younger. Clearing the 32-year-old off the roster also would give them a better look at former first-round pick Bradley Roby.
• Phillips’ defense prizes two types of players—cover corners and pressure guys. With the former taken care of, and the Rams having moved front-seven fixtures Robert Quinn and Alec Ogletree to create flexibility, the hunt was on for the latter. They could spend their first-rounder on a pass rusher.
Or they could keep it as a chip and pursue defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh. In Miami, Suh wasn’t a problem so much as he’d done nothing to help fix problems that arose there, which positioned him as an easy casualty of a culture overhaul. On the flip side, the Rams had strength coach, Ted Rath, who worked with Suh in Detroit, to vouch for him, and help grease the skids for a one-year deal to get done.
• The receiver market exploded in free agency. The Chiefs outbid the Rams for Watkins, landing him at $48 million over three years, which in a roundabout way created opportunity. New England’s Brandin Cooks was headed into a contract year, and the new bar for paying receivers set too rich a price for the Patriots to extend him.
When the Rams initially asked about Cooks, they got a flat ‘no.’ In March it was a ‘maybe.’ In early April, that 1 they deemed a chip (with Suh filling the need for a pass-rusher) was to Foxboro for the receiver that McVay wanted in 2017 before settling for Watkins.
The Rams, of course, weren’t done there. They stayed out of the offensive line market, figuring they could use the draft to get younger and deeper, which they did. There still was a need for an edge player to complement Donald, addressed at the trade deadline with a deal for Dante Fowler.
And along the way, they actually inquired about Odell Beckham and got in on the Khalil Mack sweepstakes in July, later offering Oakland close to what the Bears spent for him.
But the theme was the same throughout. And while, yes, it was partly facilitated by having a quarterback on a rookie deal, the Rams’ push was more than just that.
“There’s a sense of urgency,” Snead said. “But you need to use that cap space right. So how do you best support the environment to help get your rookie quarterback to what we’d call the ‘O.K., we got one’ stage. That’s step one. You get him to the point where you’re saying, ‘O.K., he’s definitely one.’ Now he’s earned that status [and in 2017] we got this team that not only can win the division, but did win the division.
“So there’s this element—you’ve proven you’re in this window, having a quarterback on a rookie contract, and having that quarterback playing well enough for your team to be a division and playoff contender. That window is only going to last so long, so you want to take advantage of that.”
What’s interesting is that the Rams have mortgaged little of their future in their construction of a contender. They bet that the strength of their infrastructure in coaching (and with McVay in particular), the locker room (with guys like Gurley and Donald) and elsewhere would allow them to absorb the risks they took on in Suh, Peters and Talib. The team has been right in that regard thus far, but theyaren’t tied to any of those guys long-term. Nor are there are many contracts that put the team in the lurch after this year.
And if you look at the three trends we identified with the conference finalist, all are A-plus areas for the Rams. They’ve been aggressive on trades. They have a 24-year-old at quarterback. They’ve invested heavily in their lines. Their biggest decision coming out of 2018, in fact, might be whether or not to hang on to guard Rodger Saffold.
To be sure, Saffold’s been a good player. But that this is about to be the pressing issue should illustrate the kind of shape they’re in going forward. I could sense Snead is well aware of that when I gave him the roster makeup chart to analyze.
“Well, what I did like about it, of the four teams, we have the most homegrown players,” Snead said. “You have a nice nucleus. You build, build, then there’s a breakthrough, and now you’re in what you’d term the ‘alive’ stage. Well, how do you stay alive? There’s an element of variables that make that a challenge.
“Obviously, being a winning team, you’re going to have others who want players from your team, you’re not going to be able to re-sign all of them. … The other variable, when you’re in that alive stage, you’re drafting later.”
And then I stopped Snead—Good problem to have?
“Yeah,” he answered. “It’s the problem you want to have.”
Building a Winner: How the Rams’ Blueprint Stacks Up With the Saints, Patriots and Chiefs
By ALBERT BREER
Les Snead was in the air without wifi when divisional-playoff Sunday kicked off last January. He was in a cab when word got to him that the Jaguars beat the Steelers. And try as he might to ignore football on his getaway to Hawaii—that was the whole point of the trip—he couldn’t help but notice a certain restlessness later that day in the restaurant he was in, or that it might have been a football game that caused it.
The Minneapolis Miracle had just gone down, and it was a matter of time before Snead heard more about it. Which prompted two reactions from the Rams GM.
First, he sent a text to Case Keenum, his old quarterback and the triggerman behind the Vikings’ breathtaking, last-gasp play to knock off the Saints and advance to the NFC Championship Game. Second, he vowed to not forget what being left out felt like, just a week after the Rams’ season ended with a wild-card loss to the Falcons at home.
And then he remembered Alabama coach Nick Saban having a saying plastered everywhere after the Tide lost the national title game in January 2017 to Deshaun Watson and Clemson: Don’t waste that feeling.
“Remember the disappointment,” Snead said from his office on Wednesday afternoon. “That helps. I’ve had it written across different things in my office. So it’s everything you do—it’s improving the roster, but it’s also improving this gadget, it’s improving how we do food, how we travel, all those things. It’s the minutiae of trying to get better on a Tuesday in March.
“When that no longer stings, read that line and say, ‘Know what? That did sting. And let’s do better than we did last year.’”
Snead swears now that the Rams’ explosion of aggressiveness during the 2017 offseason happened organically—moves driven in reaction to circumstances and opportunity. But he has no problem conceding that it was also an outgrowth of the loss at the Coliseum, the feeling it left, and that moment a week later in Hawaii.
This year he wasn’t in Hawaii for the divisional round. He was back in the Coliseum, watching his Rams run the Cowboys out of the building to advance to play a Saints team that suffered an even more painful ending last January.
And so as we take our annual look at the roster construction of the four conference finalists, this is a year when there are few big overarching trends in the construction of the teams (outside of significant investment in offensive and defensive linemen). But with each roster, there is a certain urgency with which they were put together, and nowhere is that true more than in Los Angeles.
But we’re starting with a project I began three years ago, and have carried over in the years since, with a look at how each of the final four teams is built. So here’s what the study showed.
KANSAS CITY CHIEFS
Homegrown on 53: 25 (21 draftees/four college free agents)
Outside free agents on 53: 21
Trades/waivers on 53: Seven
Quarterback acquired: Drafted Patrick Mahomes 10th overall in 2017 (traded 27th and 91st overall picks, 2018 first-round pick for 10th overall pick).
Last five first-round picks: QB Patrick Mahomes (2017, 10); CB Marcus Peters (2015, 22); DE Dee Ford (2014, 23); OT Eric Fisher (2013, 1); DT Dontari Poe (2012, 11).
Top five cap figures: OLB Justin Houston $20.60 million; OT Eric Fisher $13.95 million; S Eric Berry $13.00 million; TE Travis Kelce $9.96 million; DE Allen Bailey $7.97 million.
LOS ANGELES RAMS
Homegrown on 53: 33 (26 draftees/Seven college free agents)
Outside free agents on 53: 11
Trades/waivers on 53: Nine
Quarterback acquired: Drafted Jared Goff first overall in 2016 (traded 15th, 43rd, 45th and 76th overall picks, and 2017 first- and third round picks for first, 113th, and 177th overall picks).
Last five first-round picks: QB Jared Goff (2016, 1); RB Todd Gurley (2015, 10); OT Greg Robinson (2014, 2); DT Aaron Donald (2014, 13); WR Tavon Austin/LB Alec Ogletree (2013, 8/30).
Top five cap figures: DT Ndamukong Suh $14.50 million; OT Andrew Whitworth $12.67 million; S Lamarcus Joyner $11.29 million; CB Aqib Talib $11.01 million; DL Michael Brockers $10.76 million.
NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS
Homegrown on 53: 31 (23 draftees/eight college free agents)
Outside free agents on 53: 14
Trades/waivers on 53: Eight
Quarterback acquired: Drafted Tom Brady 199th overall in 2000.
Last five first-round picks: OL Isaiah Wynn/RB Sony Michel (2018, 23/31); DT Malcom Brown (2015, 32); DL Dominique Easley (2014, 29); DE Chandler Jones/LB Don’t’a Hightower (2012, 21/25).
Top five cap figures: QB Tom Brady $22.00 million; CB Stephon Gilmore $12.513 million; S Devin McCourty $11.94 million; TE Rob Gronkowski $10.91 million; LB Dont’a Hightower $8.53 million.
NEW ORLEANS SAINTS
Homegrown on 53: 28 (20 draftees/eight college free agents)
Outside free agents on 53: 20
Trades/waivers on 53: five
Quarterback acquired: Signed Drew Brees to a six-year, $60 million free-agent deal in 2006.
Last five first-round picks: DE Marcus Davenport (2018, 14); CB Marshon Lattimore/OT Ryan Ramczyk (2017, 11/32); DT Sheldon Rankins (2016, 12); OL Andrus Peat/LB Stephone Anthony (2015, 13/31).
Top five cap figures: QB Drew Brees $24.00 million; DE Cam Jordan $14.50 million; OT Terron Armstead $13.5 million; OG Larry Warford $9.01 million; C Max Unger $8.01 million.
So what to take away? Three things I noticed:
One, more players on these rosters are landing there via trade or waiver claims than before. The 2015 quartet of Arizona, Carolina, Denver and New England had acquired a total of 18 of their players that way going into championship weekend. In 2016, that number dipped to 12 for the conference finalist. Last year, it was up to 26. This year, it’s 29. So these teams are working the waiver wire and trade market.
Two, there’s a huge gap in age at quarterback—and in method of their acquisition. Brady is 41 and Brees is 40. Goff is 24 and Mahomes is 23. Brady and Brees came into the NFL as non-first-rounders, and Brees was allowed to hit the free-agent market by his drafting team (the Chargers) due to injury. Both Goff and Mahomes were traded up for in the Top 10. Conclusion? Quarterbacks don’t slip through the cracks much anymore.
Three, the investment in linemen, as we said, is noticeable. Take the five highest cap numbers on the rosters of the Chiefs, Rams and Saints, and 11 of those 15 players (including Houston, an on-ball linebacker) are linemen. And the Patriots spent three of their last four first-round picks on linemen, and have three offensive linemen on second contracts playing for trench wizard Dante Scarnecchia.
And that brings us back to Snead, and the aggression-born-of-disappointment within the Ram organization that took the team from up-and-comer to juggernaut in one offseason.
There wasn’t some seminal meeting to map things out, nor was there a detailed plan to go and collect stars like a director would assemble an ensemble cast. In fact, as Snead explains it now, the Rams’ splashy 2018 really was more a step-by-step reaction to the conditions facing the team. And it started with a simple decision.
“It was definitely organic. We didn’t put the cart before the horse,” said Snead. “The news of the day was ‘Who are they gonna franchise? Sammy [Watkins], Trumaine [Johnson] or Lamarcus [Joyner]?’ One of them being a receiver, two of them being DBs, we did know that there would be disruption in the defensive backfield. If we franchised Sammy, two are on the market. And we knew if we picked one of the DBs, there’d be disruption at receiver.”
That Johnson had been tagged twice already made the call not to tag him (it’d be at the quarterback number) easy. And looking at the price points for Watkins ($15.982 million) and Joyner ($11.287 million), it made sense to ease the loss of one DB, and roll the dice on being able to keep Watkins after he hit the market. And that opened the door to rework the defense in coordinator Wade Phillips’ vision.
So the dominoes started falling.
• Ahead of the combine, the Rams worked out a deal to send second- and fourth-round picks to the Chiefs for a sixth-round pick and Pro Bowl corner Marcus Peters, whose disruptive and selfish behavior in Kansas City landed him on the trade block. For all his problems, Peters brought elite ability to L.A., and only cost $1.7 million for 2018, with a $9.1 million team option for 2019.
• Two weeks later, L.A. landed a bookend for Peters, trading a fifth-round pick to Denver for five-time Pro Bowler Aqib Talib, who fell out of favor with the Broncos because his performance went south with that of the team at the end of 2017. The feeling was he could pull teammates either way, and the Broncos saw that as an issue as they looked to get younger. Clearing the 32-year-old off the roster also would give them a better look at former first-round pick Bradley Roby.
• Phillips’ defense prizes two types of players—cover corners and pressure guys. With the former taken care of, and the Rams having moved front-seven fixtures Robert Quinn and Alec Ogletree to create flexibility, the hunt was on for the latter. They could spend their first-rounder on a pass rusher.
Or they could keep it as a chip and pursue defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh. In Miami, Suh wasn’t a problem so much as he’d done nothing to help fix problems that arose there, which positioned him as an easy casualty of a culture overhaul. On the flip side, the Rams had strength coach, Ted Rath, who worked with Suh in Detroit, to vouch for him, and help grease the skids for a one-year deal to get done.
• The receiver market exploded in free agency. The Chiefs outbid the Rams for Watkins, landing him at $48 million over three years, which in a roundabout way created opportunity. New England’s Brandin Cooks was headed into a contract year, and the new bar for paying receivers set too rich a price for the Patriots to extend him.
When the Rams initially asked about Cooks, they got a flat ‘no.’ In March it was a ‘maybe.’ In early April, that 1 they deemed a chip (with Suh filling the need for a pass-rusher) was to Foxboro for the receiver that McVay wanted in 2017 before settling for Watkins.
The Rams, of course, weren’t done there. They stayed out of the offensive line market, figuring they could use the draft to get younger and deeper, which they did. There still was a need for an edge player to complement Donald, addressed at the trade deadline with a deal for Dante Fowler.
And along the way, they actually inquired about Odell Beckham and got in on the Khalil Mack sweepstakes in July, later offering Oakland close to what the Bears spent for him.
But the theme was the same throughout. And while, yes, it was partly facilitated by having a quarterback on a rookie deal, the Rams’ push was more than just that.
“There’s a sense of urgency,” Snead said. “But you need to use that cap space right. So how do you best support the environment to help get your rookie quarterback to what we’d call the ‘O.K., we got one’ stage. That’s step one. You get him to the point where you’re saying, ‘O.K., he’s definitely one.’ Now he’s earned that status [and in 2017] we got this team that not only can win the division, but did win the division.
“So there’s this element—you’ve proven you’re in this window, having a quarterback on a rookie contract, and having that quarterback playing well enough for your team to be a division and playoff contender. That window is only going to last so long, so you want to take advantage of that.”
What’s interesting is that the Rams have mortgaged little of their future in their construction of a contender. They bet that the strength of their infrastructure in coaching (and with McVay in particular), the locker room (with guys like Gurley and Donald) and elsewhere would allow them to absorb the risks they took on in Suh, Peters and Talib. The team has been right in that regard thus far, but theyaren’t tied to any of those guys long-term. Nor are there are many contracts that put the team in the lurch after this year.
And if you look at the three trends we identified with the conference finalist, all are A-plus areas for the Rams. They’ve been aggressive on trades. They have a 24-year-old at quarterback. They’ve invested heavily in their lines. Their biggest decision coming out of 2018, in fact, might be whether or not to hang on to guard Rodger Saffold.
To be sure, Saffold’s been a good player. But that this is about to be the pressing issue should illustrate the kind of shape they’re in going forward. I could sense Snead is well aware of that when I gave him the roster makeup chart to analyze.
“Well, what I did like about it, of the four teams, we have the most homegrown players,” Snead said. “You have a nice nucleus. You build, build, then there’s a breakthrough, and now you’re in what you’d term the ‘alive’ stage. Well, how do you stay alive? There’s an element of variables that make that a challenge.
“Obviously, being a winning team, you’re going to have others who want players from your team, you’re not going to be able to re-sign all of them. … The other variable, when you’re in that alive stage, you’re drafting later.”
And then I stopped Snead—Good problem to have?
“Yeah,” he answered. “It’s the problem you want to have.”
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