Grade the Trade: Reviewing 7 hottest current LA Rams rumors and trade scenarios

With no real football to speak of, plenty of speculative and exploratory guesswork has gripped the airways of NFL headlines in a vicelike grip. And right now, the LA Rams are the epicenter of an NFL multiverse gone mad, where everyone seems to have a new take, spin, or imaginative scenario where the LA Rams are somehow at least receptive to, if not optimally compelled to, trade one of their key stars.

While it doesn't make sense, I've stood on the sidelines and shaken my head while almost every major national sports authority jumps in with their own special version of LA Rams Armageddon, creating a fictional future or a problematic past to fit their narrative.

How bad has it gotten? Of the seven fictional trade scenarios that have been headlined in recent days by many major NFL reporting sites, not one has adopted the most believable of scenarios, that of LA Rams DT Aaron Donald being traded to the Pittsburgh Steelers as a heartwarming form of homecoming for the NFL veteran. After all, hasn't Donald mentioned retiring, or been rumored to have mentioned retirement, at least twice before?

Not all fictional trade scenarios are created equally

If a trade scenario appears more than once, I have opted to go with the more thought out (but not necessarily more believable) scenario. That being said, I am not going to address the Clutch Sports scenario of citing Aaron Donald to the Cleveland Browns. Believe it or not, that scenario is identified by another site and author.

Even by filtering out duplication, we are left with seven unlikely but original scenarios that, thanks to the magic of the internet, can appear to be in the hundreds if you do an innocent Google search on the terms LA Rams and rumors (don't say I didn't warn you).

So now that I've excavated all of the derivative reblogs and articles that base their premise on the fact that they "read it elsewhere on the internet, so it must be true," down to the original seven, let's try to decypher if there is any meaningful logic in these articles. In fact, bring your scorecard, because I invite you to join me in a fun NFL offseason activity that I like to call: Grade The Trade.