LA Rams are still high-stakes gamblers, but 2023 is on house money

So it's just not that easy to do, after all. The LA Rams laid the tracks for any NFL team to ride to their own Super Bowl victory, and yet the teams that tried to emulate the Rams' strategy fell short, some by a country mile. All of that simply brings us to the main point of this article. Which is? The LA Rams are still attempting high-stakes gambles, but this team is going about it in a way that they are playing with house money.

What do I mean by that?

The LA Rams covered their bets by appearing in Super Bowl LIII. The LA Rams avenged their Super Bowl loss by winning Super Bowl LVI. And as LA Rams General Manager Les Snead so eloquently described in the second episode of Behind the Grind, Chapter 3 is about sustainable success. In other words, the Rams proved that they can win the Super Bowl. Now, the goal is to build an NFL dynasty.

Sustainable success

The LA Rams have, for the most part, relied upon the innovative and offensive-inspired mind of head coach Sean McVay. To augment that, the Rams front office has delivered almost any and every player that McVay has wanted. And when that player does not work out, the front office divests from that player. The track record of the LA Rams signing players to multi-year deals with plenty of guaranteed money was necessary to keep shoveling the coal into the LA Rams steam engine.

Then, the 2022 NFL season hit, and the train rolled off the rails. The team, having exhausted their available draft picks, no longer had the currency to pry game-changing talent away from other teams. Either the Rams were outbid (by the San Francisco 49ers for RB Christian McCaffrey), or simply unable to offer enough (for Carolina Panthers DE Brian Burns).

That hard halt to sustaining the Rams run of success force the Rams to rethink how they strategized improving each season. After all, with so many team trying to replicate the Rams strategy of trading picks for present-day talent, the Rams front office had to take a new, bold turn to a new strategy. The Rams wanted to win, yes. But the team could no longer do so by swapping players like a pit crew swaps tires mid race.

The Rams want to build sustainable success.