The Rams trusts the future to untested young players, including Stetson Bennett
By Bret Stuter
To many fans, the future is now. Week 1 defines as far into the future for the LA Rams football team that they are ready to peer. After all, the future is uncertain. All we know about the team's future is that the players and coaches who are with the team today will not remain intact with this team in 2025. Not even winning Super Bowl LVI could ensure that the Rams roster would remain intact.
So it's a pretty safe bet that, after the 2024 NFL season, some coaches and players will sign on with other NFL teams. I cannot cite specific data about such annual turnover, but it seems as though this team has to reform a coaching staff and a roster more thoroughly and often than any other NFL team.
Perhaps that is the motivation for the team to onboard nearly a third of the active roster as rookies recently. Not just once, but for two consecutive seasons. That is simply not the type of roster-building strategy for an NFL team that is chasing another Super Bowl ring.
And yet, players in the first and second years of their rookie contracts are abundant on this team. Not just on a rebuilt from the ground up defense, but in key roles on offense as well. Thanks to the success of recent drafts, the team has an even brighter future to expect as a result of this year's youth movement.
This is not about embracing young players. Rather, this is about a team hiring only the finest football coaches from among the ranks of professional and collegiate football coaching ranks, empowering them with the promise to promote their careers, and relying on that high-talent coaching staff to infuse quality principles and techniques into the crop of rookies that arrive every year.
And so far, the coaches have been doing their job. Let's take a look at the 'next wave' of player who are young and perhaps off the radar now, but who will certainly have a role to play in the future success of this team: