WOODLAND HILLS, Calif. –– The call came early in the morning on the first day of June.
Not because Les Snead sleeps. Because Les Snead hunts.
The sun had yet to touch Pacific Coast Highway.
The 405 still moved.
Somewhere, Matthew Stafford was preparing for yet another year, training to ensure that his back would hold up one more season.
Trent McDuffie was preparing to move his family to Los Angeles from Kansas City for a flight he never knew he'd take.
And somewhere in Cleveland, Myles Garrett — all 272 pounds of fury and finesse — was staring at his phone, watching a text message turn the NFL on its ear.
A text welcoming him to Los Angeles.
You're a Ram.
Kirby Lee-Imagn Images
Myles Garrett poses on the NFL Honors Red Carpet before Super Bowl LX at Palace of Fine Arts.
The deal landed like a jackknife on concrete.
Garrett to the Los Angeles Rams. Jared Verse is going back to his home state. A 2027 first-round pick, a 2028 second-round pick and a 2029 third-round pick accompany Verse.
Let those picks sit on your tongue like copper pennies.
2027. 2028. 2029.
Years that yet don't exist.
Children who will enter the 2029 draft are preparing for their high school graduations, for futures that haven't been born.
Snead traded tomorrow for today, next decade for next February, potential for proven — because he has seen this movie before. He wrote the script.
"F them picks."
He coined the phrase himself, drunken and glorious, during the Super Bowl celebration in 2022, back when the Rams were champions and the rest of the league was still pretending that draft capital meant more than championship confetti.
He traded two firsts and a fourth for Jalen Ramsey in 2019. He traded two more firsts, a third and Jared Goff for Stafford in 2021.
He built a champion by burning the farm, then planted new crops in the ashes, then burned those too.
Now he has done it again. And again. And again.
First came Trent McDuffie — a 2026 first, a sixth and a 2027 third shipped to Kansas City for the All-Pro cornerback, followed by a record-breaking four-year, $124 million extension that made him the highest-paid corner in NFL history.
Then, Jaylen Watson in free agency, another former Chief, another piece of the secondary puzzle.
Then, Ty Simpson at No. 13 overall in April, a quarterback who won't play a meaningful snap until Stafford retires, a pick that confused the football world and angered the win-now crowd.
"I don't want to sit here, and it's April and say, 'OK, we draft one player and now we go to the Super Bowl,'" Snead said after drafting Simpson that night. His voice carried the particular patience of a man who knew something the rest of us didn't. "There is a lot of hard work that happens between this night and whoever's playing in that game in February."
Well, the hard work bore fruit. The hard work bore a monster.
Myles Garrett is not a player.
He is a force of nature masquerading as a man.
Peter Casey-Imagn Images
Cleveland Browns defensive end Myles Garrett (95) after the game against the Baltimore Ravens at M&T Bank Stadium.
Thirty years old. Nine seasons. One hundred twenty-five and a half sacks in 134 games.
Eighty-three sacks over the past five seasons — seventeen and a half more than any other player in football. Fourteen-plus sacks in each of the last five years. Sixteen or seventeen games played in every single one of those seasons.
He is durability and destruction in the same package.
He is the player Aaron Donald never became on the open market, the player Lawrence Taylor never needed to be, the player J.J. Watt was before Houston cut him loose at 32 after injuries and five-sack seasons had already stolen his prime.
Garrett has no stolen prime.
He is the prime.
His prime is optimal.
Garrett is Optimus Prime.
The numbers tell a story of systematic dominance bordering on the absurd, even as he led a defense of a ragtag collection of Autobots.
Garrett was double-teamed on 59.06% of his pass-rushing snaps — the second-highest rate in the league. He was chipped on an additional 26.07% of snaps. His true double-team rate hovered between 29% and 30%.
And still he broke the single-season sack record.
Still, he won Defensive Player of the Year.
Still, he generated pressure like a hydraulic press generates flattening.
You may ask, how often does one of the greatest defenders in NFL history become available?
The answer is simple –– never.
The answer is once in a generation.
The answer is that no player who has ever recorded more than 17 sacks in a season has played for a different team the following year — not until Monday, not until Snead, not until the Rams decided that history was a suggestion and championships were the only currency that spends.
Jared Verse is good.
Let's be clear about that. Let's not diminish the young man to make the trade look bolder.
Verse made the Pro Bowl in each of his first two seasons.
He registered 7.5 sacks and 27 quarterback hits in 2025. He is 24 years old with a ceiling that scrapes clouds.
But good is not great. Good is not historic. Good is not the man who tilts playoff games by his mere presence, who makes offensive coordinators wake up screaming at 3 a.m., who demands two blockers and still beats them both.
Verse is very good. But Garrett is great.
Ken Blaze-Imagn Images
Cleveland Browns defensive end Myles Garrett (95) is introduced prior to a game against the Buffalo Bills at Huntington Bank Field.
And in the mathematics of championship football, great is the only variable that solves the equation.
The Rams learned this in 2021 when Stafford arrived and won them a Super Bowl.
They learned it when Donald dominated the interior and made the Bengals' offensive line look like a high school JV squad in the biggest game of their lives. They are learning it again now.
Because the problem last January wasn't talent. It was the Seahawks.
It was two games against Seattle — one that cost them the No. 1 seed, one that ended their season at 31-27 in the NFC Championship — where the Rams allowed 6.6 and 6.1 yards per play.
Where the run defense collapsed in the first meeting, and the pass defense got shredded in the second. Jaxon Smith-Njigba ran free through a secondary that couldn't hold up long enough for the pass rush to arrive.
Enter Garrett. Enter McDuffie. Enter Watson.
Enter a defensive renaissance built not through patience but through aggression, not through draft picks but through dominance.
The symbiosis is the secret.
The pass rush and the secondary — they are not separate units.
They are lungs breathing together, a single organism inhaling and exhaling in rhythm.
An elite coverage group needs three seconds to defend before the rush gets home.
With Garrett lining up opposite Byron Young, offenses may now have two seconds and a blink.
Deep shots become suicidal.
Timing routes becomes the only option. And when timing routes are the only option, McDuffie and Watson — two corners who excel at sitting on short patterns, who read hips and break on balls like sharks scenting blood — become interception machines.
Chris Shula, the defensive coordinator who should have been hired as a head coach this cycle but wasn't, now has a chess set in which every piece is a queen.
He doesn't need to blitz as often — the Rams ranked 29th in defensive success rate when blitzing last season, a stat that screamed desperation.
He can rush four. He can rush three.
He can drop Garrett into coverage on a zone blitz and watch the quarterback's eyes go wide with the confusion of a man who just realized the monster is behind him instead of in front.
All he has to do is scheme. He has the Joes. Now he just needs to tinker, imagine and get creative with the chess pieces at his disposal.
Tinker. Imagine. Get creative.
Those are luxuries afforded only to men who have already won the arms race.
And what arms they have.
Kobie Turner, the third-year defensive tackle out of Wake Forest, ranked fifth among interior defensive linemen last season while drawing double teams on 52.4% of his pass rushes — the fourth-highest rate in the NFL.
Despite that attention, he generated a league-high 23 pressures when doubled. Since entering the league in 2023, he has recorded the most pressures against double teams of any defensive tackle alive. He boasts a 67% pass rush win rate per ESPN metrics.
Braden Fiske, his partner in the interior, ranked 14th and faced double teams on approximately 63.89% of his snaps, with an additional 11% involving triple teams or chips.
On run-defense snaps, he was among the most frequently doubled interior linemen in football. Yet against single blockers, he maintained a 73% pass rush win rate — one of the most efficient interior rushers in the sport.
Now add Garrett.
Garrett, who commands double teams at the second-highest rate among edge rushers, who sees chips on a quarter of his snaps and still breaks the record.
Garrett, who turns three-man blocking schemes into chaos simply by aligning in a three-point stance.
Couple them together, Fiske and Turner, eating guards and centers; Garrett and Young, collapsing tackles.
Four men generating the pressure of eight.
Offensive coordinators will need sedatives. Passing game assistants will develop ulcers.
Nate Landman and Omar Speights, the linebackers who flow free to the ball behind this wall of carnage, will rack up tackles like accountants rack up billable hours.
Pick your poison, offenses.
That's the new mantra in Los Angeles.
Block the interior, and Garrett kills you. Block the edge, and Turner buries your quarterback under 320 pounds of leverage and fury.
Slide the protection to the left, and Young comes free from the right.
Keep a back in to chip, and McDuffie sits on the slant route for six points the other way.
The defense is no longer a weakness. It is a weapon.
Stafford knows what this means.
The reigning MVP, the 37-year-old gunslinger with a Super Bowl ring and a 7-2 playoff record in horns, watched the Simpson pick in April and didn't seem enthused.
He watched the McDuffie trade and saw the secondary improve. He watched the Watson signing and saw the coverage tighten.
Now he watches Garrett arrive and sees the finish line.
Stafford has never been better positioned to win another championship.
Another ring doesn't just add to the jewelry box — it cements first-ballot Hall of Fame status.
It transforms a very good quarterback into an immortal one. It validates every hit he has taken, every back injury he has endured, every throw he has made while limping.
And the offense?
The offense was never the problem. Puka Nacua in the fifth round of 2023. Steve Avila, Young, Turner, Warren McClendon in the same draft.
Fiske and Kam Kinchens in 2024.
Snead drafts like a card shark even when he's not trading picks, which is why he can afford to trade them — because the farm he burns always seems to grow back overnight.
The Rams swindled an extra first-round pick out of Atlanta last year. That pick became McDuffie.
The picks they just traded for Garrett will likely be late firsts, late seconds, late thirds — the cost of doing business at the top of the conference.
If the only thing standing between them and a ring was Seattle, then Garrett is the wrecking ball that removes the wall.
History rhymes. History echoes. History comes back around like a spiral thrown into a headwind.
In 2019, the Rams traded for a disgruntled Jalen Ramsey.
In 2021, they traded for Stafford and won it. In 2026, they traded for McDuffie and signed Watson to fix a broken secondary. Now they have traded for Garrett, and the circle closes like a fist.
The Seahawks are defending champions. They beat the Rams twice last year, including that 31-27 NFC Championship classic. They return 14 of their top 15 offensive players, 14 of their top 17 defensive players, 15 of their top 16 special teamers.
They are loaded. They are deep. They are the team to beat.
But the Rams just tout the reigning MVP, and have just acquired the reigning Defensive Player of the Year.
For the first time in NFL history, one team holds both trophies entering a season.
The 49ers, already reeling from an offseason of stagnation, now face the prospect of opening their season in Australia against a defense that features Garrett, Turner, Fiske, McDuffie and Watson.
Kyle Shanahan's play sheet might as well be written in Sanskrit for all the good it will do.
The addition of Garrett pushes the Rams further into Super Bowl contention. It wouldn't be surprising if they are the betting favorite to win it all now. The Super Bowl will be hosted in Los Angeles this season, after all.
Super Bowl 61. The fourteenth day of February. SoFi Stadium.
The Rams are building a team designed to play the last game of the year in their own backyard, on their own turf, in front of their own fans.
It is audacious. It is arrogant. It is absolutely on brand.
Ken Blaze-Imagn Images
Cleveland Browns defensive end Myles Garrett (95) celebrates after a sack during the first quarter against the Pittsburgh Steelers at Huntington Bank Field.
Garrett leaves Cleveland with his money — four years, $160 million, the extension he signed in March 2025 still intact — and he leaves the losing behind.
No more late December games in frigid Lake Erie wind. No more playoff droughts. No more rotting on a franchise that couldn't build around him.
He gets California sunshine, January football and a defensive line that will make him even better by making the offense choose who to block.
He is 30. He has shown zero signs of slowing. His worst DPOY finish over the past four years is fifth.
His game will age like Cabernet — even when the explosiveness dips, the technique, the power, the hand-fighting, the football IQ will remain.
Garrett could play at this level for three more years before taking even a minor step back, and a minor step back would still leave him among the best in the sport.
The picks?
They are lottery tickets in a league where most lottery tickets don't pay out. The Rams have made two first-round picks since 2018 — Verse, now gone, and Simpson, the quarterback of the future. Everything else has been traded for stars who delivered championships.
Ken Blaze-Imagn Images
Cleveland Browns defensive end Myles Garrett (95) and defensive tackle Dalvin Tomlinson (94) and defensive end Alex Wright (91) celebrate after a tackle during the second half against the Chicago Bears at Cleveland Browns Stadium.
"F them picks."
It's not a philosophy. It's quickly becoming Snead's religion.
It's the belief that proven greatness is worth more than potential greatness, that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, that a Super Bowl parade is worth more than a draft room cheer.
The cycle continues. The wheel turns. George Santayana watches from the beyond and nods; Mark Twain smiles at the rhyme.
Les Snead picked up the phone early on a Monday morning. He made the call. He burned the future to light the present.
And somewhere in Cleveland, Myles Garrett is packing his bags for Los Angeles, where the weather is warm, the expectations are nuclear and the pass rush is about to become the most terrifying thing in professional sports.
The Rams believe in Snead.
They believe in Myles Garrett.
They believe that 23 sacks can be the finishing touch for an immaculate offseason.
They believe that a 30-year-old monster is worth more than a 23-year-old promise.
And in the cyclical, rhyming, reckless history of the NFL?
They've been right before.
They're betting everything they have — every pick, every dollar, every ounce of Matthew Stafford's remaining cartilage — that they'll be right again.
One more time.