INGLEWOOD, Calif.––The phone rang at 6:20 p.m. Pacific, a California number.
Ty Simpson looked down, picked it up, and broke down.
Right there, backstage at the draft, before the cameras could find him. His father, Jason, had to hold him up, not because of joy. That came later, but because of everything that led to this single ring.
Three months prior, Simpson stood in the Rose Bowl tunnel, head down, helmet in hand.
Indiana had just beaten Alabama 24-7.
His stat line: 11-for-24, 98 yards, one interception.
He played like a man carrying a piano on his back. Because he was.
Alabama's offense had no second gear. No safety valve. Just Ty Simpson trying to will a flawed team past a better one.
He couldn't.
The Rose Bowl chewed him up. He told a friend after the game, "I've never felt more alone."
Now he is a Los Angeles Ram.
The same city. A different stadium. A different kind of alone.
Sean McVay walked into the press conference room about an hour after the selection.
Usually, he bounces. He crackles.
He talks a mile a minute, hands waving, eyes dancing.
Thursday night, he sat down with his hands in his pockets. He didn't smile. He looked like a man who had just been told his flight was delayed six hours.
Les Snead sat next to him, noticeably more energetic.
Snead has a relationship with Simpson's father. They go back to SEC playing days. Snead advised the family on draft decisions. McVay?
Simpson said in his introductory press conference, "I had never met him."
Never. Not once. Not even a Zoom.
Sarah Barshop asked McVay if he had spoken to Matthew Stafford before the pick.
"Yeah, I did," McVay said.
"What did you tell him," Barshop probed.
"I'll keep that between us," McVay stated.
Cold. Direct. Curt.
The miniature press room fell quiet.
That's not McVay.
McVay loves to talk. McVay loves to charm.
Thursday night, he was a stranger in his own skin.
Another reporter asked: "Do you expect Ty to back up Matthew this year?"
"We'll see. He's going to compete with Stetson Bennett," McVay said.
Stetson Bennett. The 28-year-old career backup.
The man with 11 career NFL pass attempts. That's the competition McVay volunteered before Simpson even flew to LA.
Here's what body language experts will tell you, and you don't need a degree to see it: 55% of communication is visual.
Posture. Eye contact. Hand placement.
Another 38% is tone. Only 7% is the actual words.
McVay's mouth said, "We're excited." His body said, "I have no idea what we just did and I hate it."
Fifteen starts––That's all Ty Simpson gave NFL scouts.
Fifteen games of tape, fifteen Saturdays of evidence, fifteen chances to prove he belonged in the same breath as the quarterbacks drafted before him.
The last decade hasn't been kind to men with their résumés.
Anthony Richardson. Mitchell Trubisky. Dwayne Haskins.
First-round quarterbacks with 15 or fewer college starts who arrived raw, undercooked and unprepared, like cookie dough, for Sunday's speed.
None had a future Hall of Famer in front of them.
None had Sean McVay's playbook.
None had the stability of a roster built to win now.
Simpson has all three.
Whether that matters depends on whether you believe in development or destiny.
Simpson, an undersized QB without great physical traits going at 13, doesn't make much sense. Nothing about Simpson's time and tenure was good.
The back half of his season was mediocre at best, poo cheese at worst.
The back half. The part where Alabama needed him most.
The part where he carried an erratic offense to the College Football Playoff, then couldn't do much against Indiana in the Rose Bowl.
He mentioned that game himself, unprompted, during his draft night interview. His voice carried the particular honesty of a kid who knows failure's address.
"I hadn't had great experiences in LA with the Rose Bowl," Simpson said. "But I'm looking forward to getting out there and living there."
One bad night in Pasadena. One great night in Pittsburgh.
Simpson's Alabama career was patience personified.
He waited behind Jalen Milroe. He waited behind Bryce Young.
He turned down NIL money that would have made him a millionaire to bet on himself one more time.
"I was just super blessed and super excited," Simpson said. "The fact that an organization like the Los Angeles Rams believed in me and took a chance on me is just something I'm so grateful for."
Believed. Took a chance. The language of a man who knows he wasn't the sure thing.
McVay's offense is a Rubik's Cube.
It demands quarterbacks who process faster than they run, who read with their feet, who marry play-action fakes to downfield strikes with the timing of a Swiss watch.
It's not an offense you learn in fifteen starts. It's an offense you painstakingly absorb over years.
McVay knows this.
He also knows Simpson's coordinator at Alabama, Ryan Grubb, ran concepts that look suspiciously familiar.
"Reading with his feet, some of the different things in the dropback and the play action game, the movement game," McVay said. "There's a lot of things that Coach Grubb did that's very similar to how we operate. It made it an easier evaluation."
Easier. Not easy.
McVay rambled for well over a minute when asked if they targeted Simpson specifically, deflecting, circling, talking about Trent McDuffie and draft capital, and how "this is Matthew's team" before ever saying the kid's name with conviction.
Les Snead sat beside him, energetic, almost giddy.
Snead reportedly has a relationship with Simpson's father, Jason.
He advised the kid about entering the draft. He was the believer. McVay was the reluctant participant.
"Persevering through the ebbs and flows," Snead said, when I asked what about Simpson's character made him exceptional. "Going to Alabama, earning the job, getting his first start against Florida State and they lose that game. In Alabama, the sky was falling. But to see from that point forward how they progressed as a team, him as a quarterback, into the playoffs. That's the perseverance."
Perseverance. The word Snead used.
McVay used none. He just kept his hands in his pockets.
Matthew Stafford got the call before America did.
McVay dialed his MVP, told him the Rams were spending a first-round pick on his replacement, then clammed up when reporters asked what was said.
"I'll keep that between us," McVay said.
Stafford's reaction is the ghost in this machine. He's 38. He's coming off an MVP season. He's won a Super Bowl, thrown for 60,000 yards and earned the gravitas that makes coaches call him before they call ESPN.
But he's also mortal. Father Time doesn't care about rings.
"Seen is better than said," McVay noted, describing Stafford's mentorship style. "The best form of leadership is modeling the way."
Simpson will model. He will watch. He will sit and learn and hope that 15 starts in college plus two years on an NFL bench equals something more than Trubisky or Haskins ever found.
"I had to be patient and wait my turn at Alabama," Simpson said.
"Learning under Bryce, learning under Jalen, learning things of what I can do better. It's very similar to where I am now with Matthew. He's one of the greatest of all time to do it."
The comparison isn't perfect. Young and Milroe were college kids.
Stafford is a first-ballot Hall of Famer.
But patience is patience. Waiting is waiting. Simpson has done it before.
"I know my dad had spoken with him briefly," Simpson said of Snead. "This was my first contact. It was cool."
Cool. Not warm. Not hot. The temperature of a pick that makes sense on paper and puzzles in practice.
The Rams traded their original first-rounder last year for Trent McDuffie, an All-Pro corner who flips games.
They got Atlanta's pick in last year's draft for trading out with the Falcons.
They used that pick on Simpson.
In some ways, McDuffie is their real first-round selection. Simpson is the lottery ticket they bought with the change.
"He played mature," Snead said, defending Simpson's limited sample size. "He didn't need as many games to start playing mature."
Mature. Fifteen games. The oxymoron of draft season.
Simpson is smaller than the prototype. Questions loom and linger about his arm strength. Decision-making under pressure remains a question mark.
But he completed 65% of his passes last season, threw 28 touchdowns against nine interceptions, and ran for 412 yards when plays broke down.
He's accurate in the intermediate game. He's mobile enough to extend. He's smart enough to process.
Whether that's enough for McVay's system is the bet. Whether McVay's body language changes when they finally meet is the subplot.
"I hadn't had great experiences in LA with the Rose Bowl," Simpson said. "But I'm looking forward to getting out there."
Los Angeles chewed him up once. Now it owns him.
The Rams are betting that the kid who waited four years in Tuscaloosa can wait two more in Woodland Hills, that patience plus preparation equals playoff payoffs, that the 13th pick isn't too rich for a mystery.
McVay kept his hands in his pockets. Simpson kept his faith. One of them will be right.
Simpson walked off the stage with a Rams hat pulled low over his eyes.
He hugged his father. He hugged Dresser Winn, a former Ram, an old friend. He smiled for the cameras. Then he disappeared behind the curtain.
The Rose Bowl is 15 miles northeast of SoFi Stadium. He can drive past it on the 110. He'll remember every bad throw. Every dropped head. Every silent locker room. He'll remember that feeling, and he'll carry it with him like a pocket watch.
Time will tell if the Rams just found their next decade. Or, if McVay's shrug was the only honest answer in the room.