Life in LA without an Icon
When the Rams last made a first-round draft pick, prior to this year, a 30-year-old Sean McVay was still the offensive coordinator in Washington, a 14-year-old Puka Nacua was still at high school in Utah and as for the Rams, they hadn’t played a game in LA for more than 21 years.
A lot has changed for this franchise since 2016 but one mainstay of the last eight years, the last ten years in fact, has been another Rams first-round draft pick, Aaron Donald. His retirement this offseason has left a massive hole in this organisation and one that many analysts were calling on the Rams to fill in this year’s draft. Donald is not a player who can be replaced though. A career containing three Defensive Player of the Year awards, eight first-team All-Pro selections and ten Pro-Bowl selections is not likely to be replicated by any NFL player soon, and the professionalism and leadership he brought to this team is irreplaceable.
Aaron Donald has been the focal point of the Rams defense since he joined the league in 2014. 111 sacks is an incredibly impressive total for a defensive tackle but the numbers don’t tell the whole story. Due to the threat that Donald has posed to opposition quarterbacks, he was often double or triple teamed by offensive lines, which opened up gaps for teammates to get the sack themselves. Donald hasn’t actually been the Rams’ leader in sacks since 2021 but the attention he has drawn from offensive linemen has made him a key factor in the number of sacks the Rams as a team have got. With his threat now missing from their pass rush, the Rams need to find another way to pressure opposing quarterbacks.
The Rams have begun to do this by investing in young and talented pass rushers over the first two days of the draft. This started last year with the Rams picking up Byron Young and Kobie Turner in the third round. Both had tremendous rookie seasons with Turner leading the Rams with nine sacks and Young being just one behind with eight. In fact, last season no rookie in the league got as many sacks as these two. In this year’s draft, the Rams continued to address their pass rush, using their first first-round pick since 2016 on FSU edge rusher Jared Verse before aggressively trading up in the second round for his FSU teammate, defensive tackle Braden Fiske.
Reportedly, the Rams had begun to talk about the possibility of reuniting Verse and Fiske back in February, but the plan was seriously put into action after Verse fell to them at 19 overall. Thanks to an unprecedented run on offensive players at the top of the class, the Rams didn’t have to move to pick up one of their top draft targets and as soon as Verse was bagged, thoughts moved towards how they could acquire Fiske to join him. The Rams quickly figured out that they would have to move up the board to achieve this and after spending all Thursday night and Friday on the phone, they finally achieved a deal with the Panthers to move from 52 to 39. This move cost them this year’s 155th overall pick and their 2025 second-round pick which, according to ESPN’s draft pick valuations, was the most expensive Day 2 overpay at the draft for the last six years. This just shows how badly Les Snead and Sean McVay wanted to pair the former Seminoles teammates together again.
Anybody who has seen Braden Fiske’s draft call can be in no doubt of how close him and Jared Verse are. The two players being in tears over getting to play together again was one of the images of the draft weekend. The chemistry that the two of them developed last season was one of the main reasons the Rams were so keen to reunite them. Fiske and Verse have spoken about how they got to the point last year where all they needed was a head nod between them to know what was coming and how "it just got to the point where we were just playing off each other.” Fiske went on to say, “He'd see something I’d get and I'd see something he'd get, and we'd just go out there making plays." This connection led to 21.5 tackles for loss and 15 sacks between them for FSU last year as the Seminoles finished with the fourth best pass rush in the country, in terms of sacks made. If they can replicate this sort of form in the NFL and Kobie Turner and Byron Young can replicate their 2023 form, then quarterbacks in the NFC West are in for a tough time for a number of years to come.
It is now up to new defensive coordinator Chris Shula to get the best out of this young unit. He has already spoken about how he is looking to keep the same sort of 3-4 structure used last year, so that would mean Verse in at outside linebacker, opposite Byron Young, and Braden Fiske in a front three with Kobie Turner and nose tackle Bobby Brown III. The versatility of this young group of pass rushers though gives Shula options and I would expect to see some creativity from him in terms of how the defense lines up over the season. At Florida State, both Verse and Fiske had experience of lining up in four-man fronts so this could be something that the Rams choose to incorporate more often. Fiske and Turner can play in a variety of positions across the defensive front and as Verse and Young are both able to rush from a standing position or with their hand in the ground, they could line up as outside linebackers in a 3-4 scheme or defensive ends in a 4-3 scheme. Verse’s versatility is a big reason the Rams like him so much and McVay has already said that as well as being able to play at outside linebacker and at end, he also has the ability to be moved inside for certain schemes and to play over the guard. Chris Shula might not have Aaron Donald to work with this season, but he does have a very talented group of young pass rushers and if he can design the schemes to get the best out of them, the Rams might be able to start to move on from losing one of the all-time greats.