Wagoner mailbag, 3/4… parts 1 & 2… could Rams go defense in Round 1?

Evaluating the Rams’ chances of keeping Janoris Jenkins

Nick Wagoner

http://espn.go.com/blog/st-louis-rams/post/_/id/27389/evaluating-the-rams-chances-of-keeping-janoris-jenkins

EARTH CITY, Mo. — The offseason is here for the Los Angeles Rams and now that we know where they’ll be playing their home games for the long term, things have settled down enough to spend our weekends answering a few of your Twitter questions.

As always, you can find me on Twitter @nwagoner and fire away with any Rams-related questions you might have. Please use hashtag #RamsMail so I can see them.

On to your questions.

Josh ‎@josharace
Q: Is Janoris switching agents a good sign or bad? Or does it not make much of a difference either way?

@nwagoner: The agent change ultimately isn’t going to play a huge part in this. His new agents have Darrelle Revis as a client and have negotiated a number of big deals for him in the past. But they also are known for getting deals done so it’s not like it’s going to lead to some major issues. For the Rams to keep Janoris Jenkins, it will come down to what it was always going to come down to: money. When Jenkins broke off talks during the season, I was told the Rams were operating in the area of $8 million annually. There have been reports that the Rams upped that to closer to $9 million. But I was also told that Jenkins was looking to start somewhere closer to the $10.5 million annually that Byron Maxwell got from Philadelphia last year. Now, whether other teams view Jenkins as deserving of that type of deal or not remains to be seen, but it wouldn’t be a surprise given the lack of talented corners around the league and the amount of money teams have to spend. To be clear, the Rams want to keep Jenkins and know that corners are like pitchers in baseball — you can never have too many. But they also are going to let the market dictate where this goes and then decide if they want to jump to higher if necessary. I wouldn’t entirely rule out Jenkins’ return just yet, but I think it was always a possibility that the Rams would lose one of their starting corners. So long as it wasn’t both — tagging Trumaine Johnson all but ensures it won’t be — the Rams will be OK either way.

Michael Habig ‎@BadSpike
Q: Conspiracy theory?. Do you think the Rams(competitively) have been held back by ownership recently to facilitate a move to L.A.?

@nwagoner: I know this has become a popular theory based on the way everything played out and there are fans, especially those in St. Louis, who have kicked this idea around. But no, I don’t think that happened. St. Louis fans have every reason to be upset just as the Los Angeles fans did when the Rams left there. The Rams have spent at or very close to the salary cap every year since Stan Kroenke took over as majority owner in 2010 and he spent a lot of money to hire Jeff Fisher as head coach in 2012. Now, you can obviously debate the merit of the decisions they made with all that money but remember, this is a franchise that hasn’t had a winning season since 2003. That would mean a whole lot of “holding back” for a long period of time and that certainly wouldn’t be good for business. The on-field product hasn’t been good, of that there is no question. And it’s fair to wonder how long the plan to move back to Los Angeles was in place. But I don’t think there was some sort of “Major League” type of plan that took place from a competitive standpoint on the field.