LA Rams do right by Ramsey, sending him to his dream destination

The NFL Rumors were true. the LA Rams have parted ways with All-Pro ILB Bobby Wagner, All-Pro DB Jalen Ramsey, and team-leading sacker OLB Leonard Floyd. But this is not a 'rebuild,' at all. Call it what you will, the LA Rams are digging a hole for themselves that no rhetoric or narrative will easily fix. You can call this a refurbish, a reset, a reboot, a rebuild, or a relapse, it makes no matter.

The LA Rams roster does not have the veteran presence on the defensive side of the football to play consistent and competitive football for 17 games just yet. And while the 2023 NFL Free Agency Market is now just hours away, I simply do not see the Rams holding sacks of cash to be big players this off-season. In fact, I would be incredibly shocked if the Rams did much more than make very team-friendly one-year contract offers to their own depth players.

Like it or not, the LA Rams do take the high road when it comes to parting ways with players. Whether or not you are good with that, it's the path that this team has and will take for the foreseeable future. But I won't lie to you, right now it very much seems as though the LA Rams were screwed by the Dolphins. Well, fleeced is more appropriate (pun intended).

So why did the LA Rams settle for so little? Did not any other teams offer more? To learn the reasons, we turn the explanation over the NFL Insider Ian Rappoport and Tom Pelissero, who have discussed the reasons behind the surprisingly low return from trading Ramsey:

It was a difficult transaction for the LA Rams to dictate the terms. This was an LA Rams team that needed to get Ramsey's salary off their books, and the offers for Ramsey is reponse to the urgency of the Rams plight were lukewarm at best. But besides that discounted price, the LA Rams did yield to the wishes of Jalen Ramsey in shipping him off to play for the Miami Dolphins, a team that was most certainly his preferred landing spot.

In doing so, the LA Rams have gifted Dolphins new DC Vic Fangio with a hugely effective defensive weapon.

Hey, I would have loved to have gotten a first-round pick in the trade. Even a second-round pick now seems pretty good. But the truth is that the LA Rams did right by a player who did right by them. DB Jalen Ramsey wears a Super Bowl LVI ring that he earned while competing for the LA Rams.

He wanted to play for the Miami Dolphins. The Miami Dolphins wanted him to play for them. But is it too much to ask for the LA Rams to get fair compensation when that happens in the future?