Rams Mock Draft: LA Rams draft 11, make 2 trades back

The LA Rams are not a typical NFL franchise in many ways. For starters, this team has been able to build a winning team without the benefit of first-round draft picks. If you pause and think about it, it actually makes sense. First-round draft picks, like anyone changing jobs, start out slowly and develop over time. Their team, whether the coaching staff all the way to the players around them, must change as well.

While that all takes time and an array of lucky guesses, the LA Rams franchise simply bypassed all that work and chose the path less trodden. That is, the team fast-tracked the impact of their first-round picks and eliminated the uncertainty by exchanging those picks for bona fide impact players.

It is not the only just no first-round picks that the LA Rams overcame, however. Most NFL teams that suffer significant dead cap space struggle to win more than half of their scheduled games. The Rams blew completely through that old rule of thumb and won the NFL championship while buried under the fourth most dead cap space in the entire NFL.  That is after the LA Rams suffered under the fifth-most dead cap space in the entire NFL the previous year.

Finally, the LA Rams have continued to win despite the net loss of talented players in recent years to the NFL Free Agency market. This year, the LA Rams will benefit from five awarded compensatory picks, four from the loss of talented players. In 2023, these same Rams project to be awarded the maximum number of compensatory picks (4) also.

All of these factors hurt a team’s chances to succeed, long before draft order, scheduling, and coaching carousels take place. One of the ways that these LA Rams have succeeded when other teams have struggled is because the LA Rams pour as much effort in the draft into the very last selection made as to the first selection. That attention to detail has enabled the team to find quality players that other teams have simply overlooked. And the Rams, while trading away early picks, have averaged nine picks per draft over the past five years.  So isn’t it about time to factor trading back into an LA Rams mock draft?

So that is just what we’ve done in this one. We used Pro Football Network’s online mock draft simulator because it allows realistic trades to be part of the no-charge simulation. Of course, these trades are only to highlight how the Rams could trade back and are by no means intended as predictions for trading back with the teams and for the picks listed.

So let’s see what that looks like: