LA Rams lose a key piece of their Super Bowl Roster

It took only a few hours into the official NFL new year for the LA Rams free agency plans to reassemble the roster for a new NFL Championship run to take a hit. About midway through the 2021 season, the LA Rams acquired veteran outside linebacker Von Miller via trade with the Denver Broncos.

One final piece to the puzzle was missing, one last player to get the LA Rams over the hump as contenders for the NFL Championship, and hopefully as defenders of the NFL Championship Title.

To do so, they had to compensate the Broncos with a 2022 second-round pick (for the player) and a 2022 third-round pick (to compensate the Broncos for pre-paying $9 million of the salary due to Miller), to essentially have him on loan for half a season and through the playoffs.

Jackpot!

The results were better than expected and were felt almost immediately. Miller’s play on the football field and always-smiling demeanor off the football field was the secret sauce. He even generated two sacks in Super Bowl LVI, leaving some to argue that he could just as easily have been voted the game’s MVP.

Fast forward to NFL Free Agency 2022 and Von Miller, the two-time Super Bowl champion and the leagues’ current active sacks leader, signed a six-year, $120 million deal to join the Buffalo Bills, with upwards of $51.45 million guaranteed. That’s a chunk of change and the result of a bidding war that the LA Rams had little chance to emerge from on top.

The LA Rams seldom win bidding wars. The reason? The team goes in pre-armed with their knowledge of what a player is worth, and will bid up to that point. Other teams, whether they have their own valuation system or not, seem to blow right through sanity and into the nebulous realm of seriously overpaying for a player. That typically results in buyer’s remorse, and we are seeing the effects of that as multiple former Rams players have gotten unconditional releases from their former teams.