Fishkiller@FV_Mylia_Lynn
Take a deep breath everyone. Ramsey wanted the next 2 years of his contract fully guaranteed. The Rams weren’t going to do that. He wanted out. The Rams made the best deal they could with a team that would fully guarantee his next 2 years & that Ramsey would actually play for.

Cornell@gqscholar
The team obtaining Ramsey having to guarantee the last two years of his deal was a value killer.

Nick Wagoner@nwagoner
#Rams were always going to have to sell off expensive pieces after their run. But make no mistake, it wasn’t just a one-year, all in thing. They won 3rd most games in NFL with 2 SB appearances and one win from 2017-2021. Five-year window is a run any team would be happy to have.

Patriots have skewed what sustained success looks like a little bit in the league over the past 20+ years. But unless you have one of those few QBs who always keeps you competitive, it’s tough to be in the hunt for a decade or more.

Jourdan Rodrigue@JourdanRodrigue
Good stuff. People forget that the trade FOR Ramsey in 2019 was the first big layer of duct tape around their foot and the gas pedal. “All in” was a years-long model, not 2021 alone. In many ways, as humans, you can see why the pace of that burned some of them out so completely.

This is probably too cheesy for here but there is something cool about a player being such a catalyst/signal for the changing cycles of teams. Rams trade FOR Ramsey meant no turning back on fragile, high-stakes model that won them a Super Bowl. For Miami it now signals the same.

More inside the agreement to trade Jalen Ramsey to the Dolphins, w/ @ByMikeJones – the Rams had five teams in on talks but certain factors affected team…and terms https://t.co/CIYej3zrrj

— Jourdan Rodrigue (@JourdanRodrigue) March 12, 2023

…

I prayed for this specifically for about a month & now it’s happening! 🙏🏾@MiamiDolphins LETSGO! 🧡

— Jalen Ramsey (@jalenramsey) March 12, 2023

Thanks to an adjusted contract, Jalen Ramsey has two years fully guaranteed left to complete a deal that averages $20M per year. He got an additional $25M guaranteed as part of the trade … and he gets his preferred destination in the #Dolphins. https://t.co/a2uiNarBo8

— Ian Rapoport (@RapSheet) March 12, 2023

Rodrigue: Rams’ trade of Jalen Ramsey moves them to new window, old pattern

By Jourdan Rodrigue

https://theathletic.com/4300711/2023/03/12/rams-offseason-plan-jalen-ramsey-trade/

An NFL building with the luxury of continuity will work in patterns, and the Los Angeles Rams — a core of leaders bound together for better and for worse since 2017 — are no different.

The Rams agreed Sunday to trade star cornerback Jalen Ramsey to the Miami Dolphins for a 2023 third-round pick and tight end Hunter Long, multiple people with direct knowledge of the trade told The Athletic. The terms were surprising to many: Ramsey will be 29 in October, and his age caused a few of the five teams involved in trade talks for him to balk. But he’s still elite and a perfect fit inside the defensive system deployed by so many in the NFL (its architect, Vic Fangio, is Miami’s defensive coordinator). The Rams initially hoped they could get at least a second-round pick in the deal; the trade they settled on is more equivalent to two third-rounders.

But Ramsey also was due money, and the Rams weren’t going to pay it. They signed him to a five-year, $100 million extension in 2020, and other than a simple auto-restructure at one point, they never touched the deal again. It lacked guaranteed money on the back end, which Ramsey and the Rams have mutually understood for weeks would have to come from somewhere else, and the Dolphins were willing and able to add it. The Rams preferred not to trade him to an NFC team, a few of whom were in the sweepstakes for Ramsey down to the wire.

The Rams are not looking at 2023 as a year that they can contend for a championship, as opposed to the previous five seasons. The dead money they are taking on — a running sum now up to about $45.5 million in 2023 between the Leonard Floyd and Bobby Wagner cuts and the Ramsey trade — is a short-term issue, offset in their minds a little by the tens of millions in cash they have subsequently freed, which can go toward bonuses, managing restructures and holding space for elements of eventual new deals. In 2023, they have 11 draft picks (no first-rounder) to help them overhaul their depth on both sides of the ball, and other resources will go into jacking up an offense that ranked among the worst in the league last season. In 2024, they’ll have cash, cap space and draft picks, including a first-rounder. That’s also about the time they’ll start pushing harder — spending instead of offloading as they are now.

There’s a pattern, and even a little poetry, in the timing of this trade. The Rams have already been here before — at the start of something. It’s just that before, their adjustments were hidden in the afterglow of a team that stayed relatively competitive following its Super Bowl loss to New England. The Rams never actually went through a full “rebuild” in 2019, though it was their second-worst season in the Sean McVay era (and still not a truly terrible one) and a year in which they began to change almost everything about their team.

It was the year they traded for Ramsey. In doing so, they set off a ripple effect that featured a total systemic overhaul of their defense, which then helped prompt a quarterback change, and ultimately the trade signaled a commitment to the high-stakes, fragile team-building model that won them a Super Bowl. They had dabbled in picks-for-players trades before, yes. But the Ramsey trade meant duct-taping their foot on the gas pedal. No turning back, whatever happened. And it worked.

Now they’re overhauling at least part of their roster again. General manager Les Snead has referred to quarterback Matthew Stafford, receiver Cooper Kupp and defensive tackle Aaron Donald as “weight-bearing” walls. The fourth, left unspoken but implied, is McVay.

Why not just blow up the whole thing? Why trade some players, but not all?

Sometimes, the answer is so simple yet still so complicated: Who is the head coach?

McVay nearly walked away from coaching two years in a row. Two offseasons ago, it would have been from a team contemplating what life would be like if it just pressed the red button right then, imploding the roster right after the Super Bowl in early 2022 and starting anew, internally knowing how illogical it would be to repeat a title. It would have meant McVay moving toward the comfort and glow of a fat broadcasting deal and none of the irrational, impractical things a head coach in the NFL has on his to-do list on a daily basis. That wouldn’t have made him happy, and he knew it. The Rams also believed they could at least stretch their window at least one more season. The contracts they tried to get done (Von Miller) and eventually doled out (Stafford, Kupp, Donald) showed it. McVay coming back and the players’ extensions seemed tied together at that time in ways that are even clearer now.

Then McVay almost walked away again, this time with a deeper understanding of an internal personal crisis that had been building for years, aligned with the Rams’ years-long sprint back to a Super Bowl and so intertwined with it that each was the function of the other. During the months (not days) that McVay contemplated his future, as the Rams spiraled to a 5-12 finish, he grew to understand more about the factors that enable his own worst qualities. He committed to returning, and the Rams committed to getting out of McVay the best version of himself, whatever that meant.

And so a total rebuild, for that reason, never seemed to be an option for a team that operates wire to wire like this one does. A team that still has Stafford (most likely, though he has been the subject of trade rumors), Kupp and Donald — and McVay — can’t be a rebuilding team. It can’t be a tanking team. A team without McVay doesn’t have Stafford, Kupp and Donald, nor perhaps does a team without Stafford, Kupp or Donald have McVay.

Contention is one thing, and for so long it was the only thing. The hope of competition in a setup year is something very different. The Rams may instead be a team that sacrifices one side of the ball for the sake of the other in the short term. In this case, the Rams can hope a younger and more raw defense will be lifted a little by an experienced offense that has gotten back to its scoring ways and, maybe, a wiser head coach.

Of course, it may not work out the way they think it will. Statistically speaking, and in consideration of the arc of the modern league, they could be guessing right. If they are, and they have the resources they think they will in 2024, their “remodel” could be a quick and even competitive one.

They have been here before, in a way. They once opened a door with Ramsey, and now they are opening another one. It all becomes easier to understand once you realize that, by the act of moving through the first door, a second one becomes inevitable.

We actually already know what will happen next. They are showing us the answer. The people in charge work in patterns because the sport does and the league does, and they all have been here before. Just because you don’t like how it feels right now doesn’t make it any less their plan.

Everything we need to know about the Rams, they have already told us.

Billy_T wrote:

Jourdan’s podcast is a coupla days early this week. Ad-free if you have The Athletic. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/inside-the-jalen-ramsey-trade-whats-next-for-rams/id1477535034?i=1000603975002

Is it entirely about the Ramsey trade? If not, maybe it should be it’s own thread? I fixed your ¶s in that one post btw.

InvaderRam wrote:

i think this is all being done in preparation for 2024. and if stafford was even just five years younger i’d be cool with it. but who knows how stafford looks in 2024. or maybe they have a plan there too. after thinking about it i’m not sure what more they could have done. ramsey held all the cards on this one. and more power to him by the way. i’ll always. almost always. side with the player. if he wasn’t willing to budge on his demands and the rams were set on getting rid of him what more could they have really got for him? if they try to get rid of him next year how does that impact the cap. does it just further delay the inevitable and waste another year of stafford? i don’t know. but it sure seems like they are conceding 2023. with hopes that they can be competitive in 2024. only problem is how good stafford will be in 2024.

Was Ramsey’s contract guaranteed for 23 and 24 before the trade or after the trade?

I haven’t done full-out research on this yet but I did catch a whisper or 2 that the reason for the trade in the first place was because JR wanted his money for 23 and 24 to be guaranteed.

Zooey wrote:

I just don’t understand giving up on a team so quickly after winning the SB

But if reports are true that Ramsey asked for his money to be guaranteed in both 23 and 24, then they didn’t do anything except move on from a player they couldn’t afford.

Here;s his 2020 contract:

Here’s what Miami did with it:

 The Dolphins retooled his contract, guaranteeing him his full $17 million salary in 2023 and $17.5 million in 2024.

from https://www.miamiherald.com/sports/spt-columns-blogs/barry-jackson/article272800350.html#:~:text=Ramsey%20has%20three%20years%20remaining,and%20%2417.5%20million%20in%202024.

Another report:

Ramsey is set to make nearly $30 million in new money over the course of this contract, fully guaranteed. Next season, his cap hit climbs to $28 million. In 2025, that cap hit is $22 million.

from https://phinphanatic.com/2023/03/14/numbers-game-jalen-ramsey-deal-helps-miami-dolphins-cap-in-23/

According to Rodrigue, Ramsey also controlled where he could be traded by indicating which new contracts he was willing to sign. Plus the DC in Miami is Fangio, and Ramsey has been in that system since Staley in 2020.

Billy_T wrote:

But if reports are true that Ramsey asked for his money to be guaranteed in both 23 and 24, then they didn’t do anything except move on from a player they couldn’t afford.

ZN, I get that they thought they had no choice but to move on, cuz of the guaranteed money. Perhaps for other reasons we don’t know about, as well. The issue to me is the compensation, and why they narrowed the pool of possible trading partners. It’s clear to me they botched that part. It’s also clear to me that they put themselves in the position of having to say no to Ramsey’s contract demands because of their impulsive contract extensions after the Super Bowl, especially Stafford’s. IMO, Ramsey would have been the better guy to extend than Stafford, if it came down to a choice. More likely to actually see the field for the majority of his new contract. I just don’t see Stafford as playing for much of his. He’s taken a beating throughout his career, and while he’s tough as nails, I’m not sanguine about his future with the Rams. Don’t know how retirement impacts contracts and guaranteed money, but I’d bet Stafford retires after this season, especially if the Rams don’t make it to the playoffs. AD likely too. In short, I stand with Achebe: Things Fall Apart.

I just don’t see it that way BT.

I respect the fact that you do see it that way. There will be a wide range of opinions on their 2023 off-season, I’m sure of that.

Billy_T wrote:

If you think it should be on its own, that’s kewl too.

I haven’t heard it yet but I trust your judgment on it.