How to build an NFL roster? The Eagles’ way has worked. So has the Rams’ way.
Howie Roseman has used a measured approach. Rams GM has Les Snead has taken a splashy, all-in tack before. Both have won Super Bowls.
The last time the Los Angeles Rams selected a player in the first round of the NFL draft, the Chicago Cubs were still waiting on their first World Series victory in more than a century, Hamilton hadn’t won a single Tony Award yet, and Donald Trump was six months away from, to his own great surprise, being elected President of the United States. Those were heady days indeed, back when the NFL franchise now famous for going full-Teddy KGB and living with the aftermath was still operating in a relatively conventional manner.
No, the Rams haven’t done much by the standards of pro football convention in a good long time. They took Jared Goff with the No. 1 overall pick in 2016, and they haven’t had a first-rounder since. When they drafted Steve Avila, who has started at center in all four of their games this season, at No. 36 this year, it was their highest selection since Goff. For Les Snead, the Rams’ general manager, the future has always been now.
That approach has had its benefits and its drawbacks, and it makes the Eagles game Sunday at SoFi Stadium all the more interesting as a mini-referendum on the way Snead has gone about his job and the way Howie Roseman has gone about his. Since hiring Sean McVay as head coach before the 2017 season, Snead has punctuated periods of relative inactivity with flurries of splashy acquisitions designed to improve the team immediately. In 2018, the Rams brought in big-name veterans — Ndamukong Suh, Marcus Peters, Brandin Cooks, Aqib Talib — and reached the Super Bowl. In 2021, they did pretty much the same thing, sacrificing picks and players and salary-cap space to get Matthew Stafford, Jalen Ramsey, Von Miller, and Odell Beckham. Snead’s strategy worked. The Rams won Super Bowl LVI.
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“They went about it one way,” Eagles center Jason Kelce said. “They went all-in on that year. Traded a lot of resources and assets. It got them a Super Bowl, and hey, that’s hard to do in this league, no matter how many assets you mortgage for the future.”
Roseman and the Eagles, of course, have preferred to hoard those assets for the sake of either using the draft picks to replenish the talent on the active roster or trading them to acquire established stars (e.g. A.J. Brown). Simultaneously, Roseman has been willing to retain several longtime Eagles players (Kelce, Fletcher Cox, Brandon Graham, Lane Johnson), even if a couple of them are no longer starters, to perpetuate the organization’s culture and standards. The result, at least at the moment, is that the Eagles have a 4-0 record and one of the deepest rosters in the league.
“I think what Philadelphia does a really good job of is retaining enough around each successive year that that culture does maintain,” Kelce said. “The teams that I think of more so where you see it’s hard to build that [continuity] are the teams where every three years they have a new coach. Every three years, the roster looks completely different. There’s so much turnover, it’s hard to build and sustain anything.”
The Rams, despite remaking their roster so frequently, are 2-2 this season and have managed to mitigate some of that potential upheaval. They have an elite head coach in McVay and perhaps the league’s best defensive player in Aaron Donald, and they upgraded at quarterback when they traded Goff for Stafford. Though they have tended to be top-heavy with talent, they have hit on enough mid-to-late-round draft picks. Cooper Kupp was a third-round pick in 2017, and rookie wideout Puka Nacua, who has 39 catches through his first four games, was a fifth-round pick this year.
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Snead has taken the chance that he can unearth those gems, and so far, his recent track record, at least in the aggregate, is pretty comparable to Roseman’s. Since the start of the 2017 season, the Rams have won a Super Bowl, lost a Super Bowl, made the playoffs four times, and had one losing season. Over that same period, the Eagles have won a Super Bowl, lost a Super Bowl, made the playoffs five times, and had one losing season.
The biggest contrast between the two philosophies might come down to expectations. No one should have been surprised that the Rams wobbled to a 5-12 record last season. Snead’s approach is more likely to lead to a Super Bowl hangover. You go all-in, as Kelce said, and then you really start all over again. The Eagles don’t want to start over. They do all they can to avoid it. Of course, that doesn’t mean they always do. Remember: Carson Wentz and the 2020 season — a debacle that included speculation that the Eagles’ front office wasn’t particularly unhappy to lose the regular-season finale and improve the team’s draft position — weren’t all that long ago. Lin-Manuel Miranda was three Tonys and three Grammys deep by then.