from Ranking the NFL’s Best Offensive Triplets for 2026

Matt Verderame

https://www.si.com/nfl/ranking-nfl-best-offensive-triplets-2026

…

1. Los Angeles Rams

Triplets: Matthew Stafford, Kyren Williams, Puka Nacua

The Rams are the best team in football, and they have the best triplets as well. Stafford is coming off an MVP season in which he threw for 4,707 yards and 46 touchdowns. He has the whole supporting cast returning, with Williams, who rushed for 1,252 yards and 10 touchdowns on 4.8 YPC, while Nacua amassed 129 receptions for 1,715 yards despite missing a game. When Nacua and Stafford are rolling, they’re the toughest combination to stop in the sport.

Zooey wrote:

Yes, and there was a strong chance last year.

Okay. But I think that the addition of Garrett, Watson, and McDuffie makes this year’s chances so much stronger. Once the Rams defense got figured out after the bye last year, I don’t think that chance was near as strong.

Of course I am saying this way in advance of playing hands-in-the-dirt against live bullets.

So, it’s a strong chance.

wv wrote:

I wonder why AD is thinking about a comeback now. Why would the signing of Myles Garrett change any of his algebra?

w
v

Strong chance for a 2nd ring.

wv wrote:

Well the timing is important. They are arguing the Rams were sure at the time of the Simpson pick. And they hadnt offered Verse back then, had they?

I dunno, I guess they could have known that they were gonna offer Verse if they had to.

w
v

I really don’t know, and you you’re probably right about Verse. But something made Jourdan say they were confident before the draft that they would get him. Here’s what Rodrigue says in the article she wrote about the trade (it’s posted in the Garrett thread):

“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.”

wv wrote:

Not sure I buy the idea that the Rams were sure they were gonna get Garrett. I mean how could they be? How did they know some other team wouldnt offer more?

w
v

Just speculating from all the hints that are out there. First, Garrett had a no-trade clause. He had a lot of control over where he went. If he wouldn’t waive the clause, there would be no trade. That helped narrow down the teams being considered, and the Rams have become a dream team for top players who think about a new home. But also the Browns wanted a player in the trade. The Eagles were in the mix, but Cleveland asked for Jalen Carter, and Philadelphia wouldn’t do it. When the Rams agreed to consider trading Verse, it helped make them the front runners. As many people have pointed out, Verse fits in perfectly with what the Browns want to do on defense, plus he’s young and still on his relatively less expensive first contract.

And this is the same kind of situation Philadelphia had trading Brown away. They could agree to a deal early on, but then sit on it waiting for the June 1st deadline. The June 1 date let Cleveland reduce the 2026 cap hit they were going to take on Garrett’s signing bonus for trading him. That means they could agree in principle to a deal in late April, but just not say anything or act on it until June 1. If that’s the case (and there are a lot of hints that that is the case) then the Rams could be confident a few weeks back that they had a deal in principle.

…

Geoff Schwartz@geoffschwartz
The Rams were a game away from the Super Bowl and then aggressively fixed their two biggest issues with … the best pass rusher in the NFL and an All Pro CB. Of course ppl are going to be high on them.

from Albert Breer’s Mailbag: https://www.si.com/nfl/albert-breer-mailbag-what-potential-aaron-doJared Verse

From Ihateskipbayless (@ocdan74): Has Verse been seen or released a statement since the trade?

BREER: I send this to you with the caveat that, sure, What is the team gonna post? is a fair rebuttal to this. … But Jared Verse looked fine coming off the jet and landing in Northeast Ohio, and also fine in reporting to work early Tuesday morning. Verse’s reputation is good, and he’s a guy who worked his way up to this point, going from Albany to Florida State to the first round, so I think he’s more equipped than most to deal with some bumps.

early bird in the building!@JaredVerse1 | #DawgPound pic.twitter.com/mQNADHONMe

— Cleveland Browns (@Browns) June 3, 2026nald-return-could-look-like#inline-text-3

Fro IGI Media (@_IGI_Media_): How does the Myles Garrett trade affect other teams’ player acquisition plans? More meat up front … a QB with 4.4 speed … an increased life insurance policy for the QB room …

BREER: I think it puts the onus on the teams in the NFC West to continue investing into their offensive lines, and being balanced in how they build those groups across the board, since Garrett’s such a moveable piece and the Rams have Byron Young, Kobie Turner and Braden Fiske to play alongside him. I’d also say it affects how you call a game, and where you run the ball, and to which side you slide your protection … and on and on and on.

Sam Monson@SamMonsonNFL
Pressures vs sacks, let’s talk about it, let’s actually break it down as a valid discussion.

A sack is almost always a better play than a pressure in terms of results. A pressure CAN lead directly to a turnover, forcing an errant throw for an INT etc, so it’s not always, but generally, a sack on the play is a far better result for the pass rusher than a pressure would have been.

BUT, that doesn’t mean it was qualitatively a better rep from the pass rusher.

There’s a wide range of quality in the pass-rush reps that can end in a sack (same thing is true for pressures). You can whoop the LT in 1.5 seconds and smoke the QB in a way that the play never stood a chance, or you could have been dominated by your blocker, but the QB tripped over as he went by you and you touch the guy down for the stat. Box score shows those two plays as the same, but obviously, they’re not.

This is where the subjectivity that people hate has some power. It’s subjective, placing a distinction between those 2 plays, but clearly it’s directionally more correct than acting like they were the same quality of play from the rusher. That’s why PFF grades have some predictive power that other stats don’t have. They can capture some of that lost info.

That range in quality of rep, added to the small sample size, is largely why sacks aren’t a great measure of actual pass-rushing performance.

A rusher can play 1,000 snaps over a season. The difference between a solid season and an All-Pro season is 10 sacks to 20 sacks. 10 snaps. 1% of his season. Intuitively, we know that’s just a bad sample size to be leaning on.

This is why people lean on pressures so much. The guy with 10 sacks may have 80 pressures. We’re upping the sample size almost by an order of magnitude, which is in turn reducing the impact of outside variables. This is why the better indicator of FUTURE sacks is pressures, not current sack totals.

But pressures are just ‘almost’ plays.

Sure. But those almost plays aren’t necessarily an indication of any failing by the pass-rusher. I can find you dozens of pressures over a season that are qualitatively better reps from a pass rusher than some sacks.

If you whoop the LT instantly, but the QB gets the ball out quickly against a CB who got roasted off the line, you may only end up with a pressure. Hell, if you even bury the QB with a hit but he manages to blindly fling the ball out of his grasp forwards, it’s an incomplete pass and your sack becomes a pressure, even if the play was wildly risky by the QB.

The point is that you don’t always control the outcome of the play as a pass-rusher, certainly less than people want to ascribe when they’re dismissing players with high pressure totals and lower sack numbers.

People like to think of elite pass-rushers as ‘finishers’, but in reality I think that’s pretty rare, and a much lower factor in finishing than the other influences outside of the rusher’s control.

There ARE some players who ‘finish’ pressures into sacks at an unusually high or low rate over a few seasons, but they’re rare. Most players regress back to the mean in either direction after an outlier season.

None of the top 10 edge rushers over the last two seasons in terms of pressure to sack rate had an overall pass-rush win rate over 20%. And basically the only guy to rank very highly in both is Myles Garrett, arguably the best single football player in the game.

The bottom line? You want as much data as possible when you’re evaluating edge rushers. As big a sample size as you can find.

High pressure totals are a pretty good indicator of pass rushing ability. High pressure rate has signal. PFF pass-rushing grade has power.

Combine as much as you can to build the best picture of a rusher you can get, but sacks would be a few steps down on the list of data points i’d focus on if i was trying to evaluate how good a pass-rusher was.

Sacks are the goal, not the best measure of performance.

Ross is joined by Greg Cosell to break down how all of the top remaining rookie tight ends fit in their new offenses including:

Intro 00:00
Eli Stowers, Philadelphia Eagles: 05:25
Nate Boerkircher, Jacksonville Jaguars: 08:40
Marlin Klein, Houston Texans: 11:20
Max Klare, Los Angeles Rams: 13:30
Sam Roush, Chicago Bears: 16:10
Will Kacmarek, Miami Dolphins: 18:25
Eli Raridon, New England Patriots: 20:30
Justin Joly, Denver Broncos & Matthew Hibner, Baltimore Ravens: 21:40

Daniel Jeremiah@MoveTheSticks
every championship team needs a closer. You can make a case the Rams have the best closer on both sides of the ball. Down by 4- Stafford can close out the game. Up by 4-Garrett can can do the same. Elite finishers.

Mackenzie Brooks@kenzbrooksbets
Rams sack production increases 25% with Myles Garrett in our model, leading to 2 less points allowed per game translating to one more full win.

This makes the Rams most likely to get 1 seed in our model, and No. 1 in power rankings over the Seahawk