What the NFL doesn't know about the young Rams DL can hurt them, badly

What does the NFL really know about the 2024 LA Rams defensive line? Practically nothing.

And so, the retirement of one of the most dominating NFL players of modern times, Aaron Donald, allows them to claim a wide range of struggles and pitfalls that face this young roster throughout the 2024 NFL season. While the doom and gloom proclamations certainly does the job of garnering our attention from an emotional reaction, there is little in the way of substantive facts to justify that dour and deceptive foreshadowing of overemphasized struggles and underestimated heroics.

The Rams young defensive front has just as much chance to pleasantly surprise the NFL and fans in 2024.

While we are comfortable stepping as close to the edge in terms of conservative estimates, we all seem to share a collective fear of expressing optimism about this team. Is it the fear of being considered a biased homer? Do we all want to avoid being labeled as wearing rose-colored glasses? Or do we want to stay pessimistic to ensure pleasant surprises when the 2024 NFL season finally arrives and gets underway?

NFL analysts are not as trained in assessing the future success of an NFL team, positional group, or even a player, as some other professions are in attempting to peer into the unknown of the future. Of course there are multiple professions whose function is to assess and quantify future unknowns, such as actuarials, assessors, financial analysts, budget analysts, statisticians, and many more. But it all boils down to one thing: Taking what you know and formulating some objective process to describe and predict the future unknown.

So here are some facts that we know: