Myles Garrett is a Ram.
Let that sink in.
In the years since their Super Bowl LVI title, the franchise’s f— them-picks regime has shed icons like Aaron Donald, Cooper Kupp, Jalen Ramsey and Andrew Whitworth. They’ve built through the draft, bringing in young cornerstones such as Kyren Williams, Puka Nacua, Byron Young, Kobie Turner, Braden Fiske and Jared Verse, among others. And now, they’ve ripped the governor off, and punched the gas toward Super Bowl LXI in their home stadium.
The Rams are trading Verse, a 25-year-old star rusher good enough to draw comparisons to Terrell Suggs, to the Browns, along with a 2027 first-round pick, a 2028 second-round pick and a 2029 third-round pick for Garrett, who has been first-team All-Pro five times and second-team All-Pro twice in his nine-year career.
In doing so, Los Angeles GM Les Snead and coach Sean McVay are pushing their chips in on a team that went toe-to-toe with the Super Bowl champion Seahawks in the NFC title game last year, has the reigning MVP at quarterback, and pushed the button on another monster trade for a veteran only three months ago with the acquisition of Chiefs All-Pro corner Trent McDuffie.
And this blockbuster deal goes back almost that far. In March, the Rams went down the road with the Eagles on the idea of a trade for A.J. Brown—one that would be centered on a 2028 first-rounder and contingent on a corresponding deal to send Davante Adams elsewhere. The team couldn’t thread the needle on sequencing a Brown-Adams double, and there were some concerns about Brown’s knee. But the Rams showed then that they had a big swing in them.
Then, the move to take Ty Simpson with the 13th pick—seen by many as a move that wouldn’t help Matthew Stafford in the here and now—actually was viewed internally as one that gave the Rams the flexibility they needed to help Stafford get another ring in the most profound way possible. With their next quarterback in the fold, the team could afford to be more creative to find a way to add another massive piece because they wouldn’t need to worry about spending a first-rounder in 2027 or 2028 on Stafford’s replacement.
How the Rams landed on Garrett
The Rams, remember, had a difference-maker of the highest order on defense for a decade in Donald, and with that added flexibility with their draft picks, their eyes turned to the idea of landing Garrett, who’d put in and rescinded a trade request a year earlier. And they knew, of course, that generating that sort of rare opportunity would force them to do something uncomfortable, and that in this case was trading a young player they badly wanted to keep—the Rams tried, right up until the end, to find a way not to include Verse in the deal.
As for the Browns, Garrett’s trade request, made during Super Bowl week in February 2025, did force the powers that be to at least ponder the idea of eventually moving him.
As such, GM Andrew Berry and the Browns had three principles they’d stick to on a deal. First, because Garrett isn’t a normal star, the normal two-first-round-picks framework of a star-centered deal (Khalil Mack, Ramsey, etc.) wasn’t going to work—the deal would have to serve the Browns both short term and long term. Second, along those lines, a young star on a cost-controlled deal at a premium position would have to be included in the deal. And third, having that star in the deal would be on top of getting premium draft capital.
Getting a two-time Pro Bowler, Verse, who’s only 25, and has two years left on his rookie deal, plus an option for 2028, on top of top-100 picks in the next three drafts, with a first-rounder coming in 11 months, would satisfy all of that.
Verse also lines up from a timeline standpoint with the Browns’ burgeoning young core. Last year’s trade to Jacksonville of the second pick and the right to draft Travis Hunter was an acknowledgment from Berry & Co. that Cleveland was more than a player away, and the group that made playoff appearances in 2020 and 2022, and won the franchise’s first playoff game since Bill Belichick was its coach, had aged out.
That doesn’t mean, by the way, that they didn’t think Garrett had a lot left. In fact, the Browns expected Garrett to age like Bruce Smith (who was four times first-team All-Pro and had seven double-digit sack seasons in his 30s, and won DPOY at 33) or Reggie White (who had five double-digit sack seasons in his 30s, and was first-team All-Pro at 34 and 37) did a generation ago. They saw him as that freakish, that driven and different.
Why Verse fits with the Browns
It was just that, at this point, the value started to match up. Verse matches up age-wise with the guys they’ve drafted since the Hunter trade—players such as Carson Schwesinger, Mason Graham, Quinshon Judkins, Harold Fannin Jr., Dylan Sampson, and now Spencer Fano, KC Concepcion and Denzel Boston, who are all in their early 20s. He also plays the same position, again, a premium position, that Garrett does.
And all of those draft picks should help the Browns’ pursuit of their next quarterback, pending what happens with Deshaun Watson, Shedeur Sanders, Dillon Gabriel and rookie Taylen Green over the course of the next nine months, as they go forward with a young core that’ll be built to grow around whoever that quarterback winds up being.
But in the end, there’s also an acknowledgment here that, for Cleveland, this is trading a player like Jim Brown or Otto Graham, one whose name will be up in the stadium years from now and whose football career will be honored 45 minutes down the road in Canton.
Because of all that, the Browns have communicated with Garrett, who needed to waive his no-trade clause for the deal to be completed, on the potential that this could happen, and had Garrett come to Cleveland on Saturday to sit down with the Haslams and Berry.
There were signs this could happen, of course—pushing back the execution of Garrett’s $29.2 million option bonus to September, and Garrett skipping the start of OTAs (he was actually traveling through much of the spring). But the relationship that comes out of it remains intact, and in a good place, with everyone knowing Garrett will be back someday to be honored for the nine otherworldly seasons he had as a Brown, which includes breaking the NFL’s single-season sack record last year.
Similarly, the Rams, and McVay in particular, wanted to make sure the player they were so reluctant to give up, Verse, got the news from them first. That happened Monday. And with that, L.A. can move forward with the NFL’s MVP and now perhaps its best player on the roster, with the goal of turning the Super Bowl into a home game, the same way they did the last time when they made a trade of this magnitude.
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