LA Rams Les Snead ranks 2nd among Rosenthal’s NFL GMs

In his NFL.com’s latest (er… first ever?) GM Power Rankings article, author Gregg Rosenthal has certainly sat up and taken notice of LA Rams’ General Manager Les Snead’s unconventional, but truly effective, methods of building an NFL Championship roster.

In a bold undertaking, Rosenthal ranks 32 NFL teams on the effectiveness of their GM, which in itself can be a bit tricky. How so? With so many new faces taking over the reins of new teams, 10 of 22 teams fall under the category of “Too New” and are discussed, but fall outside of the 22 rankings.

To provide a point of reference, the list ranks the NFC Western Division in this way:

• Rank       NFC West GM

1.  2nd        LA Rams GM Les Snead
2. 13th        SF 49ers GM John Lynch
3. 17th        Sea Seahawks GM John Schneider
4. 19th        Ari Cardinals GM Steve Keim

The list is worth a read, as Rosenthal avoids the typical pandering of hot NFL marketplaces by ranking the Dallas Cowboys and anywhere Tom Brady plays among the top three in the list.

He lists the Buffalo Bills’ combination of Brandon Beane/Sean McDermott first, and in the process displays a shrewd understanding of just how much harder GMs in small cold-weather cities must work to compete in the NFL.

What makes Rams GM Les Snead so effective?

I’m okay that LA Rams GM Les Snead comes in second in this list because Rosenthal touts the very things that have made Snead most effective as other NFL analysts have listed as reasons why the Rams strategy won’t work:

I:    Trading away all first-round picks since 2016
II:   Hitting on mid and late-round  draft picks (and even on UDFAs after the draft)
III:  Aggressive trades
IV:  Active salary cap management
V:   Feeding the talent pipeline for coaches to develop into NFL starters.

This thankfully is not a puff piece. Rather this is definitely one article that is worth the time invested in reading and pondering the different ways to build a winning NFL team roster.

Rosenthal goes about the process of pointing out the major accomplishments, and struggles, of each team’s GM, but does so without the preachy lecture style that seems to propagate in modern writing style recently.

Rather than feeling emotionally charged to give Rosenthal a piece of my mind after reading his article, I feel a bit wiser and more informed for having done so. His ranking was not intended to incite and create clicks and views. Rather, he gives the facts with some context and leaves the reader to form an opinion over the rights and wrongs of his ranking without that emotional content that often accompanies an NFL ranking piece.

What do you think? Did he get it right? Did he do the ranking justice? Let us know in the comments section.