I happened to be late to get in my car for my short commute to work, and that was propitious because it allowed me to hear the SFO station go Full Meltdown for about a minute or so about the Rams’ trade. They hate it.

I will say this: the Rams next year will have the 32nd pick in the draft which is not high enough to draft Matthew Stafford’s replacement. I think we all agree that it is desirable to have a really good QB. Case Keenum and Nick Foles had some moments, but Matthew Stafford is preferable. So to draft a replacement for Stafford, or trade for one, that was going to cost the Rams a lot of capital.

IMO, they just acquired that capital, and it didn’t cost them much. They dropped from 26 to 46 in a draft where everybody in that range is rate more-or-less the same. So it’s a small sacrifice. Now the Rams are armed with 2 first rounders in 2026 which will be an attractive package to a team that doesn’t need to draft a QB. The Bears or the Commodores or whoever.

I’m sorry the Falcons did WHAT

— Mina Kimes (@minakimes.bsky.social) 2025-04-25T03:01:04.508Z

The Rams move back from 26 to 46 and stay in a good value position in this draft class. They receive a 2026 first round pick which allows them to be competitive and gives them ammo to move up next year if needed for a QB. Les Snead cooked.

— Blaine Grisak (@bgrisaktst.bsky.social) 2025-04-25T03:06:56.783Z

The Falcons blew a 28-3 first-round lead

— rivers mccown (@riversmccown.bsky.social) 2025-04-25T03:02:11.314Z

Welp. Seems like the consensus is the Rams did okay on this.

how hard were the Rams laughing during this trade call.

— John Hollinger (@johnhollinger.bsky.social) 2025-04-25T03:12:04.221Z

You have to respect the Rams. Every year, they rent the biggest, most extravagant place to draft from. And every year, they do their best to not draft until the second day. They just want to have a good time and enjoy the space

— Hector Diaz (@iamhectordiaz.com) 2025-04-25T03:31:50.970Z

Somebody is bitter.

I still can’t get past that Falcons Rams deal. Fuck the Rams I’m gonna have to root so hard for Penix and ATL

— VegasMILF?? (@justwhitney.bsky.social) 2025-04-25T03:45:48.819Z

Here's where the Falcons have ranked in sack rate each year since 2018:2018 262019 282020 262021 322022 322023 192024 31Don't think paying ~$1.62 on the dollar by the Jimmy Johnson chart to get a second edge rusher in Round 1 is good business. But they may have been driven insane.

— Bill Barnwell (@billbarnwell.com) 2025-04-25T03:19:49.253Z

Hram wrote:

I’m guessing they’d trade out even if Dart was still there. They really have 15 to 20 players rated about the same and they don’t have any specific need, then they essentially traded a third round pick this year for a first round pick next year. Sounds good to me.

I heard some expert dude yakking in a radio interview this morning, talking about QBs, and his opinion was that Dart had a modest ceiling. Like…he might be a decent starting QB, but nothing special. I think it was arm strength. In any event, I’ve also heard next year is stronger with QBs, so the Rams have something to package to move up to get a guy. Next year seems like better timing anyway, because I think Stafford has 2-3 years left at a high level of play.

I like it.

zn wrote:

LAFB Network@LAFBNetwork
Since 2014, Les Snead has only made five first-round picks.
Three of them won Rookie of the Year.
Four became Pro Bowlers as Rams.

And the 5th – drafted before Aaron Donald – was Greg Robinson.

zn wrote:

Ah, so…an obvious DEI hire. The government should step in and deport Snead.

It’s bad enough that we have a DEI hire covering the Rams for The Athletic.

I can be really dense sometimes. The obvious answer was right in front of me, no research required.

Soon we’ll learn that Mina Kimes is actually transgender, and the whole picture will be complete.

zn wrote:

The 2024 draft was just so impossibly good. They needed a top edge rusher after years of rentals and weak lower draft picks at the position, and…the defensive rookie of the year was there at pick 19.

Speaking of that guy. It’s safe to say he hasn’t hit his ceiling yet. The best is yet to come, and that DL just might be very entertaining to watch this year.

Zooey wrote:

zn wrote:

? I’ve seen longer lists than that…I think?

I double-checked the date of the article before I posted it because it seemed strange.

Dunno.

If you have questions, Jourdan has answers. See Point 1.

The Rams’ unique strategy: 5 things to remember up to the NFL Draft

LOS ANGELES — The NFL Draft is next week, which means the Los Angeles Rams are nearly done with their process of meeting with scouts and coaches on strategy and closing arguments for or against prospects.

Right now, L.A. picks at No. 26 in the first round — a position general manager Les Snead has referred to (whenever in the 20s in general) as “purgatory.” Snead and head coach Sean McVay will explore their options at the pick point, inclusive to trading back for more picks.

The Rams, as most fans know by now, approach the draft and scouting process uniquely. Last season, I released a two-part series called “Finding Rams” that illustrated a year spent with their scouting department to explain how, and why, they think about the draft the way they do. As we reach the peak of “draft buzz season” in the final days before the first round begins, I thought it would be helpful to summarize a few key items to keep in mind about their methods:

1. The Rams don’t do ’30’ visits or private workouts
Teams are allowed to host up to 30 prospects in their building for pre-draft visits each year and most bring in at least a few. The Rams do not. They don’t send top executives or high-ranking coaches (including Snead and McVay) to private workouts, either. Instead, Snead deploys a few trusted scouts to spend a day with prospects the Rams want more information on at either their college or their high school (if the player is in their hometown), which the NFL allows. The “30” visits have to be reported to the league. Visits to the prospect within a 50-mile radius of their college or hometown do not, which is why the Rams’ don’t often leak. When a prospect is connected to a “Rams visit” in the media after the combine into the third week of April, this is what it means. Andy Sugarman, Steve Miller and Kellen Clemens are all special assistants to the general manager and they are usually the scouts conducting these visits.

2. All-Star events are attended covertly and the main goal is gathering player surveys
The Rams don’t send the majority of their front office and scouting staff, nor any coaches, to All-Star offseason events such as the East-West Shrine Bowl, scouting combine or Senior Bowl. At the combine, the entire medical staff attends in order to get crucial and official medical information shared among the 32 teams. Some scouts attend the events, though do so under the radar (they don’t use their booths in the testing stadiums, for example) and the key objective is to issue a personality test to players that was designed by internal experts with the team. The 28-question test takes players about six minutes to complete. The goal is to get about 300 tests completed and input into JAARS to be analyzed and weighed among other evaluations.

3. What is JAARS?
Most NFL teams have a data and information processing system, usually constructed in-house, into which scouts, coaches, medical staff, front-office executives and others input notes on players (you might be surprised to learn that some teams don’t!).

The Rams call theirs a “Joint After-Action Review System,” or JAARS. It was built over a decade ago by former director of data and analytics Jake Temme and developer Ryan Garlisch. JAARS tracks players in the scouting process well before they are in the Rams’ building, then logs hundreds of data points including medical and sports science information (such as speed during practice movements using GPS trackers, force output in the weight room, etc.) as players continue their careers there. It also tracks players outside of their building for pro personnel purposes, though they have less personal data on those players.

Because the many data points on prospects can be combined, built into projection models and/or compared with other combinations for other prospects, JAARS helps scouts and analysts debate where they position players on their draft board (Snead keeps players organized into nine buckets).

The language of JAARS is unique to Snead’s own preferred communication. Scouting reports used to be thousands of words in length per prospect. In JAARS, players are described in detail using simple colored tabs, shapes and symbols and gradients to illustrate changing opinion over time.

From “Finding Rams”: JAARS tabs, which have movable sliding scales, contain information on anything from character and mental assessments to medical history, athletic testing results and the composite scores built by weighing the different results together. The number of total tabs along a row varies by position — some weigh over a dozen different physical traits.

There is a section where staff can easily access film cut-ups and a section for “chatter” — leaks, agent-driven reports, videos of workouts shared on social media, quotes from news conferences and more. There is also a section for anonymous surveys … that gather a variety of opinions from scouts after each position evaluation to help the group better understand its consensus or disagreements. Consensus opinions of prospects’ top strengths are “superpowers,” while weaknesses are “kryptonite.” A section called “the wisdom of the crowd” references group opinions or collective findings.

4. Snead’s call sheet
Snead “calls” the draft similarly to how a coach calls a game, including his use of a sheet that looks a lot like one of the giant play cards coaches often hold on the sidelines, though his is digital and displayed on a massive double screen in the draft room. The sheet looks like a series of rectangles that split players by position into four overall tiers and nine different buckets. They are organized in those buckets by their JAARS tab (Snead can immediately recall an evaluation because he instantly sees the tab color and some of the symbols in the tab). There are no round-by-round grades. By mid-April, all draft-eligible players are split into the buckets based on the Rams’ finished evaluations, which include the medical and character checks completed in March and, for some, notes from the traveling visits. The buckets aren’t always “rankings” — some are lateral to others.

From “Finding Rams”: Where McVay groups preferred plays together depending on different scenarios and scribbles notes to himself in the margins, Snead groups positions and players on a massive screen in JAARS, moving between the nine buckets and using the program’s simplified language — colors, badges, one-liners such as “superpower” and “kryptonite” — to get quick refreshers on that prospect.

5. The Rams reorganized their staff after the departure of James Gladstone and Temme
While most of the scouting and evaluation process was complete by the time Gladstone, the Rams’ previous director of scouting strategy, got the general manager job in Jacksonville, Snead had to fill Gladstone’s key role as the conductor of their entire draft operation during the three days. Nicole Blake, who previously worked as a strategist and analyst under Gladstone, will fill that position as the Rams’ new director of scouting strategy and analytics. She is 29.

Temme was hired by Gladstone in March. His role has not yet been directly filled, but the Rams will have to find ways to support Garlisch and continue to evolve JAARS as new technology and player data does the same.

Meanwhile, 32-year-old John McKay is the first titled assistant GM under Snead in the Snead/McVay era. McKay and director of pro personnel Matt Waugh, who also serve as remote scouts during the prospect evaluation portion of the year, will continue to lead the college free agency process in the hectic hours after the final round of the draft.

The 23 members of the scouting and analyst department, minus Blake, McKay and Waugh, work remotely. Those people will arrive in L.A. several days before the draft for final arguments, surveys such as the “Make him a Ram” assessment that famously paired 2024 first- and second-rounders Jared Verse and Braden Fiske together and strategy meetings with coaches.

And, yes, Isaiah Bond is the guy with the recent sexual assault warramt.

There are 10,000 ciswomen athletes in the NCAA for every 1 transwoman.

That means that the vast majority of athletes will never encounter a transathlete in 4 years of college competition, let alone have one come between them and a championship.

This is one of the biggest non-issues I’ve ever seen.