The Los Angeles Rams lost in the Super Bowl in 2018. Despite the loss, everything was looking up for the franchise. They had all the right talent in place (most of them early in their prime) and a great coaching staff.
After some tweaks in the offseason, they were clearly one of the favorites to win the Super Bowl. Instead, they struggled mightily at times.
Los Angeles ended up going 9-7. That was good enough for third in the NFC West, and kept them out of the playoffs.
With that in mind, Los Angeles will need to do some tweaking once again if they want to get back to Super Bowl favorites. So here are three moves the Rams must make during the upcoming offseason.
Free Up Some Money
The Rams have a lot of money on the books just looking at a few players.
Next season, their top-five paid players will take up a combined $108,795,683. That's absolutely ridiculous.
It's also going to hurt them quite a bit. This is severely handcuffing their spending abilities, which makes it harder to improve.
It could also become detrimental when it comes to extensions. You can't extend players if you have no money to give them. Los Angeles needs to find a way to get rid of some of the money.
It could be cutting or trading away a few players. Or working out a new contract with some of the higher-paid guys. Something's got to give though.
Offensive Line
Yikes. The offensive line of Los Angeles was just dreadful in 2019. Don't get me wrong, Jared Goff deserves criticism for the step backwards he took during the year. Not everything was his fault though. Not at all.
It's not a coincidence that Goff's terrible year lined up with one of the worst seasons of Todd Gurley's career. The offensive line was doing neither any favors.
The stats won't really show it. In fact, the 22 sacks given up were the fewest in the NFL. That's really good. It's also a product of Sean McVay's offense though. Los Angeles tends to get the ball out quick. They weren't running a ton of plays designed to keep Goff sitting in the pocket with the ball for too long.
The quarterback still had quite some trouble with defenders in his face though, as even on those short throws people were getting through.
Los Angeles needs to add depth, as well as a potential starter or two.
Extend Jalen Ramsey
Here's a big one. Extend Jalen Ramsey. The Rams traded away quite a few picks in order to pry the superstar cornerback from the Jacksonville Jaguars.
Then they went ahead and didn't even make the playoffs. Now Ramsey is entering the last year of his deal. So there is still time to get something done. However, do you really want that hanging over the team all year.
Get the deal done now, and enjoy knowing you have one of the best cornerbacks in football for the foreseeable future.
If you ended up trading all those draft picks just for one-and-a-half years of Ramsey (and we already know they didn't make the playoffs in that half year), that would be a big bust.
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