Training camps will be opening soon. Before 2011, that meant most teams engaging in a game of beat the clock with most of their draft picks.
Nowadays, most contracts are signed by Memorial Day weekend.
This year, there are four notable exceptions. They are the first four quarterbacks taken in the draft: Raiders quarterback Fernando Mendoza (first overall), Rams quarterback Ty Simpson (13th overall), Cardinals quarterback Carson Beck (third round, 65th overall), and Steelers quarterback Drew Allar (third round, 76th overall).
There’s not much to negotiate. The dollars are set by a formula based on the draft slot. Pressure points in the past have related to signing bonus cash flow, voiding of guarantees, and offsets on guarantees.
Surely, all of the deals will get done. Rookie holdouts are now very rare.
But no deal is done until it’s done. And it’s getting a little glaring for the first four quarterbacks taken in the draft.
For decades, the best of the best players from HBCU schools found their next opportunities in the NFL. Times have changed, dramatically.
Hall of Fame running back Marshall Faulk, the new head coach at Southern University, recently explained the changed circumstances for HBCU players.
“I believe that the next level is no longer the NFL,” Faulk said recently during SWAC Football Media Day, via Steven J. Gaither of HBCU Gameday. “We get poached by the FBS. They want our players.”
That’s one of the basic realities of the new era of NIL and the transfer portal. Once it’s clear that players at HBCU programs can perform at a high level, high-level college programs will come calling.
“They have an opportunity to maybe go somewhere and make good money while they’re in college,” Faulk said. “The game has changed. The landscape of college football has changed.”
In past years, this would have meant Hall of Fame players like Walter Payton, Jerry Rice, Aeneas Williams, Jackie Slater, Michael Strahan, Shannon Sharpe, Mel Blount, John Stallworth, and Deacon Jones landing quickly at major college programs — and making significant money. Now, the best players at HBCU programs will get opportunities to play, and to get paid, by some of the programs with real money to spend while further honing their skills before a chance to perform in the NFL.
If/when future Hall of Fame defensive tackle Aaron Donald resets the five-year clock on his induction to zero, he’ll join a team that has nearly zero defensive starters from the last time he played.
The only defensive starter who was on the team when Donald retired after the 2023 season is linebacker Byron Young.
Looking at the roster more broadly, the Rams have only four players left from the team that won Super Bowl LVI to cap the 2021 season: tight end Tyler Higbee, tackle Alaric Jackson, center Coleman Shelton, and quarterback Matthew Stafford. Every defensive player from that team is gone (including, for now, Donald).
Only six remain from the 2023 roster, with the four listed above, offensive lineman Kevin Dotson, and defensive tackle Larrell Murchison.
It’s another example of how dramatically NFL lineups change from one year to the next. Every season really is a one-year experience for each franchise. By the next year, many things will be very different.
For Donald, despite being gone for only two years, he’ll see only one familiar face on defense if/when he puts his No. 99 uniform back on and takes the field.
The good news is that the Rams have reloaded on the fly, with a team that has been a consistent playoff contender (except for 2022) and that is the favorite to win the Super Bowl without Donald. With Donald, some will say there’s no reason to play the games.
But that’s, as a wise man once said, why they play the games.
Jared Verse burst onto the scene as the Rams’ first-round draft pick in 2024, winning the NFL’s Defensive Rookie of the Year award. But he still remembers one offensive lineman who showed him the hard way that there’s a difference between the NFL and college football.
That player was 49ers left tackle Trent Williams, who physically overpowered Verse in a way he had never felt before when they locked up in the first home game of Verse’s career.
“It was against Trent Williams at SoFi Stadium,” Verse said on NFL Network. “He didn’t throw me to the ground or nothing like that. We were running a stunt game so I was going into the B-gap. They were trying to get outside of us, like a wide play. He got to my outside shoulder, and usually if somebody gets on my outside shoulder I’m able to just throw him off, move him out of the way, drop him to the ground. You can’t do that with Trent. I tried to move his hands and it was like moving cinder blocks. I move his hands — chopping, doing all this stuff to get his hands off. I literally said, like, ‘Trent, get off of me.’ Trent’s got a deep voice. He literally just starts laughing and was like, ‘You so funny, Verse.’ We’re watching film the next day. My coach was like, ‘Jared, you’ve got to get off this block.’ I’m like, ‘Coach, I tried, I don’t even know what you want me to tell you. I tried my hardest.’”
Williams has given a lot of rookies a rude awakening during his 16-year NFL career. The good news for Verse is that, now that he’s on the Browns, he won’t be seeing Williams this season.
When the Rams revealed their revamped uniforms for 2026 in April, their announcement noted they would debut two more uniform choices in the summer.
We now know exactly when those two alternates will be unveiled.
Los Angeles announced the club will launch the new uniforms next week, July 23.
The Rams tweaked their primary home and away jerseys while also adding white pants to the rotation. The “bone” uniform that had initially served as the primary away kit is no longer on the menu.
The Rams also have their black “midnight rivalries” uniform that was used during the 2025 season.
We’ll see what L.A. has in store for its latest uniform iterations next week.
