How Rams pulled off 1 of coolest draft moments in Rams GM Les Snead's career

LA Rams General Manager Les Snead is a highly respected NFL executive who has had quite a run with the team. He was originally a graduate assistant with the Auburn Tigers from 1993 through 1994. He joined the Jacksonville Jaguars organization in 1995 as a pro scout, and was a scout for the Jaguars and Atlanta Falcons through 2008.

In 2009, he was promoted to the role of Director of Player Scouting for the Falcons, a job that we would have until 2011. The Saint Louis Rams hired Les Snead to take over as General Manager in 2012, a role that he still enjoys today. Now in his 12th year as Rams GM, you might think that he has had enough NFL experience, some 30 years of it, to have seen it all.

Well, you'd be wrong.

"One of the cooler draft moments of my how-many- year career"

The LA Rams, in a stroke in insightful genius, used their first two picks of the 2024 NFL Draft to land two of the Florida State Seminoles impressive 2023 college defense, a clip and graft of edge rusher Jared Verse plus defensive tackle Braden Fiske (ignore Andrew Siciliano's autospell check mistake below, please). Thanks to the fact that the NFL has separated Round 1 and Round 2 into two different days, the team was able to coordinate having Jared Verse as part of the initial draft call to inform his teammate that Braden Fiske was joining the team as well.

Of the entire LA Rams 2024 NFL Draft experience, that had to be the highlight

Snead would later share:

"One of the cooler draft moments of my how-many- year career."

- Rams GM Les Snead

Neither Verse nor Fiske had any clue what was coming. You see, the Rams were on the clock just as Jared Verse pulled up to the Rams Draft headquarters:

What you get is one of the most joy-filled emotional moments of football players anywhere and at any time that does not involve hoisting the NFL Lombardi Trophy:

For a moment, let's put down the projection and analytics, statistics and speculation. The LA Rams created a lifetime memory for two future NFL players that means as much as winning awards and putting on Super Bowl Rinks. For a moment in time, two battle-tested defensive warriors and friends who feared that they would be NFL opponents, learned that they would be teammates for the first four and most difficult NFL seasons of their careers.

The military has the buddy-system recruitment tool that allows high school friends to enter the same branch and training school together. Sometimes, friendships are so solid that young men put up their life at stake to maintain them.

For Jared Verse and Braden Fiske, their NFL careers are beginning together. But their friendship will last their entire lives.

Thanks for reading.