Though his value as a linebacker is probably overrated at this point, the Rams decision to trade Ernest Jones might go down as the defining moment of L.A.’s entire plan for 2024: The Rams behaved all offseason like a team that was good enough to make bold moves, but the result is that L.A.’s free agency, the draft, and trades have amounted to a franchise with multiple personalities.
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There’s the “Super Bowl contending” Rams, the team that shocked everyone by making the playoffs and advancing to the divisional round last year. The Rams that made moves attempting to level up, like signing Jonah Jackson and trading next year’s second round pick for Braden Fiske.
And then there’s the “rebuilding” Rams, the team that traded Ernest Jones to the Titans for nothing even though he was their best linebacker and he has said that he would have gladly played for L.A. without a contract.
If you’re contending for a Super Bowl and the best possible linebacker you could have had in all of 2024 was already on your roster, cheap, and happy enough, then why would you subtract value from your team when it wasn’t necessary? That was a move for the future.
If you’re rebuilding for the future, then why hold onto expensive, aging vets like Matthew Stafford and Cooper Kupp, when there would have been no shortage of buyers had those players been on the market in February, March, and April? As much as it seems like the Rams held onto these players because they were favored to win the NFC West—at least, I know I picked the Rams to win the NFC West this year, and to be legit contenders for the number one seed—the logic of L.A.’s plan was doomed to fall apart and expose the flaws in their plan if the team was so unlucky as to start 1-4.
And unfortunately for the Rams, we do live in the timeline in which the Rams got supremely unlucky in the first month of the season.
It would be foolish of me to say that the Rams couldn’t have a winning record right now and be in first place if not for injuries to Kupp, Puka Nacua, Jonah Jackson, Steve Avila, Rob Havenstein, and a two-game suspension for A.J. Jackson.
No, this isn’t me condemning the L.A. Rams for making moves they hoped would improve their 10-7 record last season when it could not have worked. The moves COULD HAVE WORKED. And if the Rams reel off three or four wins in a row, the moves could still work.
It’s not condemning the Rams for Super Bowl moves and then getting really bad injury luck. It’s a question of why other moves don’t seem to jive with “Super Bowl moves”, such as trading Ernest Jones when he didn’t ask to be traded and you don’t have any good linebackers waiting in the wings. Or if you do, you sure aren’t playing them for some reason.
That’s why trading Jones could be the defining moves of the Rams season, not because Ernest Jones is “so good he would have made the difference on defense” (he would not have...), but due to the fact that the Rams do not seem to have had a cohesive plan.
(And by the way, if Jones did demand a trade, or was behaving in such a way that made him a locker room distraction, by all means Les Snead and Kevin Demoff, have the ability to leak that information to The Athletic, and they’ll put it out there for you no questions asked if that’s what you want people to know.)
On the topic of Ernest Jones and linebackers, his replacement could be the worst coverage linebacker in the NFL, if you trust PFF.
According to PFF’s tracking data, Christian Rozeboom has the second worst “Raw Separation Prevented”, meaning that eligible receivers in his area have the second-most room to operate of any linebacker in the NFL. That’s if you believe PFF, and I’ll leave that up to you.
Rozeboom is also in the bottom-20 for PFF’s “On Ball Grade”, a number unsurprisingly being led by Fred Warner and Foyesade Oluokun. The combination of the two, as you can see in the above graph, makes Rozeboom in the conversation for the worst coverage linebacker in the NFL through five weeks.
Ernest Jones did not make the chart, perhaps he does not have 50 coverage snaps yet.
