The Rams are the betting favorites to win the Super Bowl this season and a big reason why is the trade that brought Myles Garrett to Los Angeles on the first day of June.
Adding the 2025 defensive player of the year to a team that had already made significant additions to their secondary gives the Rams a unit with few holes, which is why safety Kam Curl didn’t hold back with his assessment of their potential during an appearance on Up & Adams this week.
“Right now it’s early — it’s only what, June — but I feel like we’ve got a chance to be legendary,” Curl said. “Just the type of guys we got, the coaches we got. We’ve got a bunch of experience back there. We’ve got some Super Bowl winners in there, we’ve got some Defensive Player of the Years. We’ve got some guys that, if we do what we’ve got to do, we can be one of the best.”
The Garrett trade led to speculation about defensive tackle Aaron Donald coming out of retirement to rejoin the Rams for a run at a second Super Bowl ring. That would do nothing to change Curl’s view of what the team is capable of doing and it would likely lead to less printable responses from opposing coaches about the Rams.
Rams Clips
Last month, Deion Sanders rejected the idea of the Browns trading defensive end Myles Garrett. Now that the trade has happened, Deion is singing a different tune.
“They got a killer on defense, I’m tired of y’all talking about trading him and getting rid of him,” Sanders told Garrett Bush before the trade. “That don’t make no sense to me. That’s a once in a lifetime man. That’s a once in a lifetime man that you don’t see no more. I don’t get rid of that. Unless I could get your mama, daddy, your uncle, cousins, and everybody in a trade for that. Because that’s a grown man. That’s a winner. That’s a winner.”
Now that Garrett was traded, Deion deferred to the decision.
“I’m happy with Mr. [Andrew] Berry, the G.M., and what he’s doing, I’m not going to question his direction of what he’s bringing to the table,” Sanders recently told D.J. Saddiqi of Covers.com as part of a media tour for Deion’s Depend partnership. “I’m not there, so I don’t know all the intangibles that provoked that trade. I’m happy with what they got, and I can’t wait to see how it plays out.”
Apparently, Deion considers Jared Verse and a first-, second-, and third-round pick to equate to “your mama, daddy, your uncle, cousins, and everybody.” At least we now know how to calibrate that specific metric.
Jimmy Garoppolo remains a free agent as he contemplates retirement. The Rams drafted Ty Simpson in the first round, but Stetson Bennett could end up being the backup to Matthew Stafford.
With the Rams limiting Stafford’s offseason work, Bennett received more reps than he normally would have. Rams coach Sean McVay was pleased with where Bennett is heading into training camp.
“I’ve seen tremendous growth,” McVay said, via Stu Jackson of the team website. “I think he’s done a really nice job. He’s earning the confidence of his teammates in terms of commanding the huddle. Then, he’s done a lot of good stuff in terms of reading with his feet. [Associate coordinator/quarterbacks coach] Dave Ragone does such a good job with those guys as a whole, but both he and Ty have had good growth. Stetson especially, I think he’s had a really good last couple of weeks, and I’ve been proud of him.”
The Rams drafted Bennett in the fourth round in 2023, but he has yet to make his regular-season debut.
Linebacker Jared Verse has a new NFL team. But he’s still rooting for his old NFL team. Especially when his old NFL team faces one specific foe.
Via Cameron DaSilva of USA Today, Verse recently told Nathan Zegura of ClevelandBrowns.com that his final message to the Rams focused on their biggest current rival.
“I told them, ‘The most important thing, make sure’ — and I’m not going to cuss — ‘make sure you beat the Seahawks. That’s all I care about,’” Verse said.
Last year, the Seahawks and Rams were the best two teams in the NFL. The division, the top seed, and the Super Bowl berth turned in large part on a fluky two-point play that was fueled in part by Verse deflecting with his helmet a throw that turned out to be a backward pass.
Verse had asked coach Sean McVay for the opportunity to inform the other Rams players about the trade. McVay agreed.
“My mindset was, ‘I’ve got to leave my teammates, I’ve got to leave my brothers behind, because I don’t want to leave my brothers,’” Verse told Zegura. “So if I’m going to — I want to address them. I don’t want them to find out from ESPN or from this news site or that news site. I want them to hear it from me.
“Went to the team room. Coach, he released it, he told everybody that, ‘We’re trading Jared,’ and I got to tell everybody. I said, ‘It sucks I’m not going to be here. I love you guys to death. You guys are going to go out there, you guys are going to dominate, you guys are going to do everything you can do and you guys are going to play the best you can. You guys got 17 games for sure. Who knows what’s going to happen after that but just go dominate.’”
It would be something (and highly unlikely) if the Browns have a dominant season, too. Of all the potential storybook endings to 2026, the Browns against the Rams in the Super Bowl would be among the very best.
One of the two teams is far more likely to be there than the other. Especially if they heed Verse’s call to beat the Seahawks.
Calvin Johnson set the NFL’s single-season receiving record with 1,964 yards during the 2012 season and he doesn’t expect to have that spot in the record books for too much longer.
Johnson said on Monday that it is only “a matter of time” before someone is able to top the record that he set in a 16-game season. Cooper Kupp came close to reaching Johnson’s mark during a 17-game season in 2021 and Johnson noted the likelihood that future aspirants are probably going to have one more game than that to make their run at the No. 1 spot.
“If they go to 18 — well, should we say when they go to 18 games?” Johnson said, via Dave Birkett of the Detroit Free Press. “When they go to 18 games it’s no doubt about it. Hands down.”
Matthew Stafford was Johnson’s quarterback in 2012 and Kupp’s quarterback in 2021, so it’s fitting that Johnson thinks Stafford’s current top target Puka Nacua is the player with the best chance of setting the new record.
“That would be kind of dope,” Johnson said. “I’d have to go to that game if he did that, cause I like Puka. He’s getting some crap out of his system that’s just a young guy, just learning, but I think he’s an awesome, dynamic receiver.”
Johnson added that he thought Vikings star Justin Jefferson could be the one to break the record, but believes Minnesota “messed up his quarterback situation” and that Jefferson may have missed his window for a bid at the record as a result.
Kyle Juszczyk says the 49ers don’t need to win the offseason.
Juszczyk knows the Seahawks are the defending Super Bowl champions and the Rams are the talk of the NFL offseason, and if that means the 49ers are getting overlooked in the NFC West, Juszczyk said he’ll gladly accept that.
“We feel great about where our team is,” Juszczyk told NFL Media. “The fact that we won 13 games last season with all that we had to deal with, I think that’s easy to forget. And rightfully so. The Seahawks won a Super Bowl, the Rams had a great season, they had some great additions in the offseason, so I can understand why that is the case. But I think we feel great about where we’re at. I love our squad. I think that we have only improved. Guys are getting healthy. We added Mike Evans and Osa [Odighizuwa] on defense, which I think both of those guys are going to make such an impact. I think we’re sitting in a good spot. If people want to forget about us, that’s fantastic. That’s a good place to be sometimes.”
The 49ers have a strong team heading into 2026, but in the NFC West odds they’re +305 long shots, well behind the favored Rams (+100) and the defending champion Seahawks (+205). The 49ers will need to surprise some people to win the division. Juszczyk likes the sound of that.
As a wise man once said (repeatedly), “That’s why they play the games.”
At a time when many are ready to pencil in the Rams for Super Bowl LXI, not everyone is willing to concede anything to the Rams.
That includes Cardinals linebacker Mack Wilson. Asked earlier this week for his thoughts on Myles Garrett joining the Rams, Wilson said, “They’ve got to deal with us. At the end of the day, they’ve got to deal with us.”
It’s the right attitude. Even if the Cardinals finished 3-14 last year and, entering 2026, are considered to be a distant fourth to the Rams, Seahawks, and 49ers in the NFC West, Arizona shouldn’t surrender.
The mindset may not alter the outcome, but it’s the only mindset they can have.
Whether that mindset should be kept internal or declared to the world is a different issue. To the extent the Cardinals hope to catch the Rams napping in Week 6 or Week 10, it’s better to not give them something to which coach Sean McVay can point in the days before they play.
“They said we have to deal with them. We will.”
There’s also a chance that Wilson’s attitude doesn’t extend to the top of the organization. The failure to pursue a clear-cut veteran starter at quarterback invites speculation as to whether the Cardinals are willing to accept their fate for 2026, in the hopes of parlaying that into the first overall pick in 2027.
Which could culminate in the presumptive first overall pick refusing to play for the Cardinals.
Regardless of the plans, or lack thereof, that the organization has for putting the best players on the field in 2026, the players who will be playing will be playing as hard as they can. If they can navigate a challenging schedule better than expected, it will be a very good story.
Friday night’s World Cup match between the United States and Paraguay looked great. Most of the images from the 4-1 U.S. win didn’t look anything like the stadium in which it was played.
But it was indeed SoFi Stadium. With rich, lush, naturally green grass.
“Wonder if we could get that all season,” 49ers tight end George Kittle said on Twitter.
Although the 49ers’ annual visit to their home away from home to play the Rams won’t happen this year (they’ll square off in Australia), the 49ers will be at SoFi Stadium to play the Chargers in Week 15, for a Thursday night game.
Friday night’s soccer match showed what SoFi could be, what it would be, if Rams owner Stan Kroenke were to embrace grass.
But he won’t. It costs too much money to maintain a high-quality grass field. It complicates the effort to have all sorts of other events at the venue.
Cowboys owner Jerry Jones made that point earlier this year, regarding his no-questions-asked willingness to install grass at AT&T Stadium for the World Cup.
“We have more flexibility with the way we handle our surface at the stadium,” Jones said at the annual meetings in Phoenix, via Jordan Raanan of ESPN. “We have no belief that it’s any safer to play on a grass [field] or a turf. We are ambiguous as to the safety of it. The turf, actually like many things, improves the economics of being able to play this game and our players are the biggest benefactor of all. They get the best benefit of when we do good things financially, the players are benefiting. So I’m working for you, baby, OK, if you’re a player.
“And so the combination of that, I’m very comfortable putting some grass down for soccer under regulations and proud to be able to do it but quickly get that turf back out there to go about the other business of the stadium and the team.”
The safety narrative is a weak one. The NFL has muddied the issue by focusing on the statistical claim that the injury rate is the same on grass as it is on turf. This ignores player experience beyond the question of actual injuries. The human body takes less wear and tear when the forces it creates are absorbed by a grass field than when the forces ricochet back into the feet and up through the legs.
Besides, how does Jerry Jones hosting a bunch of other events in a football stadium benefit the football players on the Cowboys? At best, it gives him more money to pay players. In a salary-capped environment, however, who cares? The TV money and the ticket revenue from the football games gives owners more than enough money to finance the roster.
The simple reality is that the overwhelming majority of players — 92 percent — prefer grass.
“I’m going into year 10, and I can say wholeheartedly that grass feels way better than turf,” Giants offensive lineman Jermaine Eluemunor recently said, via Rohan Nadkarni of NBC News. “With MetLife getting grass, obviously it’s cool for FIFA and the World Cup. It’s one of the biggest stages in the world but, at the same time, the NFL as a whole is one of the most profitable businesses in the world, and so you would think that us as players would have a say in the fields that we get to play on.”
The players do have a say. In an environment of collective bargaining, however, they need to be willing to give something up to get something else. When the original artificial turf — a thin sheet of green all-weather carpet rolled over concrete — began to proliferate, the NFL Players Association allowed it. The owners secured the discretion to choose the playing surface without any real pushback.
Now that the pushback is happening, the only path for making high-quality grass universal comes from bargaining for it. And, if need be, going on strike to get it.
It all comes back to the fundamental imbalance between management and labor in pro football. The owners will shut the sport down to get what they want. The players won’t.
If the choice is football on artificial turf or no football at all, the players will choose football on artificial turf. And the owners will ignore the P.R. complications flowing from the hypocrisy of writing a blank check for FIFA, because at the end of the day it’s all just words. Until the words are backed up by actions, nothing will change.
Hell, Jones probably likes the fact that the grass vs. turf debate exists. His view is that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. And so, on top of the fact that Jones and other owners make more money from staging their teams’ games on turf, the organic debate over an inorganic playing surface becomes another twist in the ultimate reality show.
And it’s a twist with no stakes. Unless and until the NFLPA is willing to do something other than create public pressure at which the owners won’t even blink, the back-and-forth over turf vs. grass will be nothing but noise.
So that’s the real question. Will the players simply talk about their preference for grass or, when the current Collective Bargaining Agreement expires in 2031, will they do something about it?
Given that most of the men who’ll be playing pro football in 2031 are currently in college or high school, it’s way too early to know the choice they’ll make. History, however, tells us that the decision between playing on artificial turf and not playing at all will be a no-brainer.
In the interim, is it possible that the players could emerge from talks over an expanded season with universal grass fields? Yes. To get there, however, they may have to be willing to go not from 17 regular-season games to 18 but from 17 to 20.
Before the 2011 Collective Bargaining Agreement created a rookie wage scale with slotted contracts based on selection position, the first overall pick would often sign a contract before the draft even began.
Fast forward to 2026. Seven weeks and one day after round one happened, 30 of 32 players have signed contracts. The two unsigned first-round picks are the two quarterbacks: Fernando Mendoza (taken first overall) and Ty Simpson (13th).
There isn’t much to negotiate in these contracts. The biggest issues are cash flow (specifically, when will the full amount of the signing bonus be paid?), the mechanism for voiding guarantees, and whether the guarantees will have offset language.
It’s unclear why Mendoza and Simpson haven’t signed. Both could have forced the issue by refusing to participate in the offseason program until they had their contracts. (All draft picks should take that position, frankly.)
Both will likely sign before training camp opens. Holdouts have become rare. Still, no deal is done until it’s done. And it’s a bit glaring that all first-round picks have done their deals except for the two first-round quarterbacks.
The United States makes its 2026 World Cup debut on Friday, at the stadium formerly known as “SoFi” (the name has been redacted, per FIFA demands). Tickets remain available to watch the U.S. and Paraguay play in person at 9:00 p.m. ET, 6:00 p.m. PT.
Via Joe Lago of Sports Business Journal, FIFA has roughly 350 tickets left in its primary inventory. Another 2,500 or so are available on the secondary market.
As of Friday morning, the cheapest price for a ticket was $1,129.
The matches at SoFi will be played on lush, high-quality grass that Rams owner Stan Kroenke installed at the behest of FIFA. By February, when SoFi Stadium hosts Super Bowl LXI, the grass will be long gone and the fake stuff will have returned in all of its artificial glory.
Kroenke also had to, as mentioned above, remove the sponsored name of the venue for the duration of the World Cup, reconfigure the lower areas of the stadium, and forgo other events that would have generated significant revenue for the duration of FIFA’s SoFi takeover.
As Devin McCourty said earlier this week on PFT Live, and as the NFLPA Twitter account amplified on Thursday, it’s “disrespectful” to NFL players for NFL owners to install high-quality grass for soccer and insist on using artificial turf for football.
Said the NFLPA in another post, “If these extensive field changes are worth the cost for a month-long tournament, why aren’t they worth the cost for the NFL players who primarily compete in these stadiums?”
The bottom line is that grass fields, in the view of owners who choose turf, have too much of an impact on the bottom line. Now that it’s a collective bargaining issue, it will change only if the NFLPA makes a concession that matches the overall cost of converting all stadiums to grass.
Still, there’s value in pushing it. The NFL does a good job of locking arms during CBA talks. What better way to drive a wedge among the oligarchs than to insist on a term that, for the teams already playing on grass, will be viewed as no big deal?
