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Inside the seismic Myles Garrett trade: ‘This is gonna break the NFL’
Jourdan Rodrigue
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7325829/2026/06/02/inside-myles-garrett-trade-rams-browns/
Superstar pass rusher Myles Garrett walked through the cavernous concrete tunnels of SoFi Stadium well after Cleveland’s 2023 loss to the Los Angeles Rams. A black SUV pulled up next to him; the window rolled down. Inside was Sean McVay.
“I didn’t f—ing sleep all week because of you,” the Rams head coach told Garrett, laughing. Ahead of that game, McVay and his offensive coaches had agonized over how to slow down Garrett, a player so dominant in his nine NFL seasons that he has twice won Defensive Player of the Year honors and broke the league’s single-season sack record last season.
Now, Garrett will play for McVay following Monday’s landscape-altering trade agreement between the Rams and Browns. In exchange for Garrett, Cleveland will receive third-year pass rusher Jared Verse (a first-round pick in 2024), a 2027 first-round pick, a 2028 second-rounder and a 2029 third-rounder.
Garrett has had many complimentary interactions with coaches in his illustrious career. But McVay’s comments, Garrett once told The Athletic, would always stand out to him because of the Rams coach’s status in the league and his directness — and also because the two might never have crossed paths if Garrett had not left the locker room that day exactly when he did.
“The timing was impeccable,” he said. Years later, it would be again.
With a potential window to trade Garrett opening on June 1, the Rams and the Browns had been discussing a trade involving Garrett for months, starting in late March. By Saturday, it was agreed to but for a few final details, multiple league sources said. But if not for the specific timing of many variables — Garrett’s disappointment with Cleveland; his no-trade clause and recent contract adjustment; the Browns’ shift in team-building strategy; L.A.’s willingness to give up a favorite young player; even the Rams’ controversial first-round selection in April’s NFL Draft — such a seismic move could never have happened.
Even a few days before it became official, the trade’s magnitude still felt a little unbelievable to the people involved. As one high-ranking team source put it: “This is gonna break the NFL.”
The Rams have coveted Garrett for years. He’s one of McVay’s favorite players — ever. The coach believes Garrett could eventually be regarded as the best outside pass rusher of all time.
Featuring him within the defense, the Rams’ decision makers believe, will give them a similar advantage to the one they enjoyed with future Hall of Fame defensive lineman Aaron Donald. Donald’s dominance required the attention of multiple players on every snap, similar to Garrett — whose double-team rate on pass rush snaps was nearly 60 percent last season, per Pro Football Focus, the second highest of any defensive lineman. When an offense dedicates its blocking and protection plan to either stopping or shifting the play direction away from one player, it becomes vastly more predictable to their opponent. Further, Garrett’s ability to win quickly and close on the quarterback, and to convert that pressure into hits and sacks, has long reminded the Rams of the benefits Donald used to give the second and third levels of their defense, especially the secondary in coverage.
McVay and his coaching staff used to joke with each other: “Who is the best cornerback on our roster? … It’s Aaron Donald.”
L.A. first called the Browns to inquire about Garrett’s availability in 2022 as the Rams attempted to repeat as Super Bowl champions, according to a league source.
That season was ultimately disastrous, due to the Rams’ injuries and McVay’s own burnout. Cleveland also was not open to trading Garrett at the time. Rams leadership discussed moving for him again the following offseason before ultimately opting for a teardown into 2023, rebuilding their roster through strong draft classes that spring and in 2024.
Meanwhile, the Browns were mired in the disastrous results of their 2022 trade for quarterback Deshaun Watson, which cost Cleveland three future first-round picks. The Browns also gave a fully guaranteed $230 million contract to Watson, who was embroiled in multiple sexual assault allegations at the time. He was ultimately suspended for 11 games after an NFL investigation into the allegations, then missed more time due to injury. From 2022 through 2025, the Browns went 26-42. Watson has played in just 19 of those 68 games, as his salary and the vacuum of picks acted as anchors on Cleveland’s roster.
In February 2025, with Cleveland coming off a 3-14 season, Garrett requested a trade, to no avail. Though he received a four-year, $123 million contract extension from the Browns in early March of that year, the perception of a philosophical schism between him and the team lingered.
Garrett had expressed a desire to compete for championships, a possibility still years away for Cleveland. His new deal also carried a no-trade clause, a powerful tool that players view as a way to maintain some control.
By the time the 2025 season ended, he had claimed the single-season sack record but had played in just three postseason games over nine years. In an open rebuild, the Browns had drafted well in 2025, their roster featuring several young starters and key contributors. And Garrett had acquired a significant position of influence in the organization — yet the organization was not winning.
At the start of this offseason, the Browns hired a new head coach in Todd Monken, the former Baltimore Ravens offensive coordinator. Monken was set to be the fourth head coach of Garrett’s career. He had also been chosen over then-defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz — a coach to whom Garrett was very loyal, and who angrily resigned after Monken was hired.
At the end of March, the Browns and Garrett agreed to a contract modification that deferred a total of $29 million in bonus payments over the next three years. Because the modification created no immediate salary-cap space for the Browns and pushed around $10 million in guaranteed money for Garrett from March to a week before the start of the regular season in September, it immediately told teams that his trade window was open — even if Cleveland general manager Andrew Berry publicly denied it.
With Garrett’s contract adjusted, the Rams saw a sliver of possibility. They had already decided they could move future picks for the right player — engaging earlier that month with the Eagles on a potential A.J. Brown trade before backing out.
So they dialed up the Browns. Other teams did, too. Berry fended off multiple trade calls after the contract broke, a league source said.
Then the NFL’s general managers, head coaches and other team executives arrived in Scottsdale, Ariz. for the league’s annual meetings.
As a long line of high-ranking NFL personnel filed into a ballroom at the Phoenix Biltmore at the end of March, McVay caught sight of Berry and beelined toward him.
Laughing, McVay bumped Berry’s shoulder and ribbed him about the rule change proposal the Browns had recently submitted for consideration to the NFL’s competition committee, on which McVay serves.
The Browns suggested in the proposal that teams should be able to trade draft picks five years in advance, instead of three as currently allowed. The proposal had some support — including publicly from members of the Rams’ own executive team — but not much, and it was not expected to pass, although it drew much discussion between organizations. McVay shut the proposal down completely in a televised appearance before it advanced into formal committee circulation. (It’s unusual for members of the Rams’ leadership group to disagree privately, even if they might do so in public.)
The proposal, especially in tandem with Garrett’s adjusted contract, drew more speculation: First the Browns made Garrett more tradeable — were they now trying to increase compensation flexibility for interested teams?
“Myles is a career Brown,” Berry said, when asked by Cleveland-area reporters at the league meetings whether he could unequivocally say that the Browns would not be trading Garrett. “He is one of the faces of our organization. I think we’ve been very clear both past and present in terms of our goals. I understand all the questions. I’ll be honest, I don’t really want to waste a ton more breath on the topic.”
But that friendly interaction between McVay and Berry at the league meetings previewed many weeks of continued conversations between the two teams. The Rams stayed persistent, with Berry and L.A. general manager Les Snead bouncing terms off of each other frequently during that time.
Nothing was officially agreed upon until a few days ago. But by the NFL Draft, the teams’ joint confidence that they’d get the trade done in large part informed the Rams’ surprising pick at No. 13, Alabama quarterback Ty Simpson, multiple team and league sources said.
The selection itself was controversial at the time, in part because few analysts predicted that Simpson would actually go in the first round, much less in its top half. McVay also was surly in his press conference after the first night of the draft, which did not help the optics around the pick and stirred speculation that Simpson was not his preferred choice. Privately, though, McVay had raved to people about Simpson for a couple of weeks and believed the team could develop him into a legitimate starting quarterback, especially given the cushion of time the Rams still expected to get from reigning MVP and current starter Matthew Stafford.
(McVay has since explained that he didn’t want to tout the pick in his news conference out of respect for Stafford — who incidentally had not yet agreed to the terms of his new contract — and league sources said he was additionally reacting to a personal situation that had occurred right before the news conference.)
It was true that Stafford’s age (38), plus backup Jimmy Garoppolo contemplating retirement, had already prompted more urgency on the part of the Rams than in previous offseasons to figure out a longer-term solution for a post-Stafford era.
But securing the future of that position also meant the Rams could use other first-round picks to make a major trade — and in this case, their sights were firmly set on Garrett. “If you’re gonna trade future first-round picks for a player, you had better know who your quarterback is gonna be,” said a high-ranking team source.
The Rams once put together a roster full of star players, many of whom were acquired via trade, and they won Super Bowl LVI in Los Angeles. This season, L.A. again hosts the Super Bowl and the Rams believe they are following a similar formula. Where that championship team featured Donald, cornerback Jalen Ramsey, receiver Cooper Kupp and Stafford, this one will feature Garrett, cornerback Trent McDuffie (for whom they traded as free agency began and then extended on a four-year, $124 million contract), receiver Puka Nacua and Stafford. This time, though, they hope to be cost-controlled at quarterback on the other side of a title run and “built better” overall, in the words of a team source.
Nacua and other players currently on rookie deals are due extensions soon; the combination of those finances, factoring in Garrett’s and McDuffie’s contracts (the Rams don’t plan to change Garrett’s existing deal right now, multiple team sources said) and an uncertain Stafford timeline further encouraged their pick of Simpson. They also didn’t want to get caught among other teams aiming to maneuver into the upper first round for a quarterback next spring.
Meanwhile, league sources believe the Browns are gathering ammunition with an eye on next year’s touted quarterback class, should their current options at the position not take a step forward. Moving away from Garrett also signals a more complete shift into their young roster after back to back years of drafting well.
Now Verse figures into that equation for Cleveland. League sources said that getting one of the Rams’ young pass rushers back in a trade was crucial for the Browns. Verse, the 2024 Defensive Rookie of the Year with two years left on his rookie deal plus a fifth-year option, fit the bill.
“As we embark on a new era of Browns football with a young core and a replenished asset base, we felt this move was important to our transition,” said Berry in a statement released by the team on Monday afternoon. “Chief among the considerations to make the decision was the inclusion of Jared Verse, a player our fan base will love.”
For McVay, the idea of parting with a player from the Rams’ young core was his only reason for pause throughout the process. He also did not want the details to leak before he got a chance to speak with Verse. The teams agreed to try to keep everything as quiet as possible until the two could speak, according to multiple league sources. A source with knowledge of their conversation said that Verse handled it “with pure class.”
