5 LA Rams who have offered next to nothing in 2022

The Rams continue to await this TE’s breakout

The breakout season of third-year tight end Brycen Hopkins has been expected for three seasons, and for three seasons he has been quite limited in the number of snaps, his usage when he suits up for games, and the number of times he is targetted.  In his third NFL season, Hopkins has been targetted a grand total of eight times and has caught six of those passes for 67 yards.

When the Rams selected Hopkins with the 136th overall pick in the fourth round of the 2020 NFL Draft, choosing a tight end made absolutely perfect sense. At the time, the Rams roster boasted tight ends Tyler Higbee, Gerald Everett, and Johnny Mundt, and all three were vital contributors to the offense. But when Everett left the team in free agency, the Rams decided to go with Higbee and Mundt in 2021.

When Mundt fell to a season-ending injury last year, the Rams decided to promote practice squad tight end, Kendall Blanton, ahead of his teammate Hopkins. This year, without Mundt or Blanton, the Rams have opted to go almost exclusively with TE Tyler Higbee.

Hopkins has never gotten a chance to shine

Whenever the Rams roster appears to have a new window of opportunity to get Brycen Hopkins involved, the line seems to move and the offense is suddenly reconfigured in such a way that Hopkins’s services are no longer required.  Funny thing is, he has just one more season on his rookie contract, and he has done next to nothing for the Rams so far.

I cannot say whether the problem is the player, the coaching changes that have taken place, or simply the offensive game plan in 2022 that seems to have all but abandoned the 12-personnel package, but whatever the cause, the Rams have truly not gotten anything close to an equitable return on their investment in TE Brycen Hopkins.  Will that all magically change in the final season of his rookie contract?  I don’t think so.