The fate of 4 quarterbacks hang in the balance of 1 Wild Card Round game

There is always a story inside a story, and that is true for the Los Angeles Rams as they prepare to face the Minnesota Vikings in the Wild Card Round of the 2025 NFL Playoffs. Of course, the same can be said of every team competing in the postseason. There is the main storyline of what the team will do in the game. But for each game, there remains the underlying current of the Rams roster. One of the biggest questions facing the team in the upcoming offseason is how to address the quarterback position.

If you simply examine the Rams roster, you will not that veteran backup quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo's contract expires at the end of the 2024 NFL season. But if you focus on contracts, you will miss nearly everything that makes the the offseason both complex and entangled in terms of reinforcing the quarterback position for years to come.

After all, the team has a lot to unpack over the quarterback position this offseason.

Is there some line in the sand drawn that will force the team to act as soon as the season is over? That is extremely unlikely. But there is the matter of building a case on evidence. Objectively, it is simply a matter of standing back and letting the chips fall where they may. And that can be an effective strategy in dealing with the performances and production of players in real time. Still, the team has had a continuous onslaught of mitigating circumstances all season long. So how can coaches and personnel executives sort through the conflicting bits of evidence to find the real truth to the matter? Is there even one real truth?

That is a great question, and we will not know the answer for many days, if not weeks. There is still plenty of football to be played. So there is no logic to drawing conclusions on partial data. Yet, there is a certain need of scrutiny about the team, about specific players, that warrants close vigilance. Do the Rams have one more Super Bowl run in them? Has the team constructed the Rams roster to seamlessly hand off the baton from Matthew Stafford to some successor in the future? Or is the team still banking on being all-in today, and leaving the solution to solving the team's next generation quarterback for the 2025 offseason?

If 2025 is the point in time for such a difficult determination, then what goes into that decision? It's a complex conundrum that the team has already begun to address as recently as the 2023 NFL Draft. So let's step back and consider the quarterbacks who the Rams' performance in the Wild Card Round of the 2025 NFL Playoffs will impact: