What if Rams don’t show improvement before the trade deadline?

If you’re dying to know what the L.A. Rams will do if they lose their next two or three games after the bye week, at least you’ll have a recent season to base your answers off of as a model. In 2022, the Rams felt similarly cursed by injuries, quickly lost their grip on a 2-1 start, and eventually put almost all of their important players on IR by December.

Now the Rams are 1-4 after a 24-19 loss at home to the Green Bay Packers and though Sean McVay might not be compelled to have players fake an injury to get stashed on IR, Les Snead could end up working the trade phones in a similar effort as 2022 for the team to start looking towards next year before salvaging what’s left of this year.

The Rams now find themselves tied with the Carolina Panthers for the worst record in the NFC, meaning that L.A. needs not only a win streak, but to climb over at least eight other teams in the conference in order to make the playoffs.

We see at least one team rebound from a start as bad as 1-4 every season, but are the Rams going to be that team this season? Did they already use their last “mulligan pass” in 2023?

The Rams come back from the bye week with a home game against the Las Vegas Raiders and then have a four-day turnaround to host the Minnesota Vikings on Thursday night football, prior to a Week 9 road trip to Seattle to play their third divisional game of the season. Then the trade deadline is on November 5th, after the Rams play the Seahawks.

That will give Les Snead and Sean McVay three more games and four more weeks prior to the deadline to decide “Who are we?” and “What do we want to accomplish with the rest of our season?”

If the Rams lose two of the next three, they’ll be 2-6 at the trade deadline.

If the Rams lose three of three, they’ll be 1-7.

And if the Rams win two of three, they’ll be 3-5.

Only a three-game winning streak would have the Rams back to .500 prior to the trade deadline.

Well, if the Rams are going to be willing to take phone calls on some of their veteran starters and look ahead to 2025, it’s in Snead’s best interest to begin fielding offers as soon as possible. The longer L.A. waits, the less valuable every trade-able player on the roster is.

These are some of the options on Snead’s roster.

Trading a quarterback of Matthew Stafford’s caliber in the middle of a season is highly unusual. Teams with respected veteran quarterbacks have seasons like this all the time and still never trade their starting quarterback to another team, but Stafford’s case is at least rare enough to be worth talking about because in case any of us forgot, only three years ago he asked a bad team to trade him to a good team. An amicable split could be good for both sides, especially for Stafford if he gets a chance to go to a playoff team, but there are so many obstacles in the way right now that a trade is unlikely.

Stafford is making a $23.5 million base salary in 2024, meaning he earns $1.38 million per game. That means that Stafford has $16.6 million left on his salary in 2024, so a team would have to have at least as much cap space as what he’s owed for the rest of the season. There are several teams with that much cap space, however it could be unlikely that any of them want to trade for a quarterback.

I’m sure the Browns would love to have Stafford and technically they could afford it—the Rams could also reduce Stafford’s salary by converting his salary into a signing bonus to make him affordable to almost any team—but they made such a huge financial error with Deshaun Watson that it is unclear how they’ll get out of the last two years of his contract.

To trade a quarterback like Stafford during the season, you’d need a good team with a bad quarterback or an injury. The Raiders are 2-3 and just benched Gardner Minshew for Aidan O’Connell, so that’s a franchise that I can guarantee will come up again as a possible destination for Stafford, just as they were a couple of weeks ago. But how soon can a quarterback help a new team? When Carson Palmer was traded to the Raiders in October of 2011, he started almost immediately and he was picked off 7 times in his first three starts and 16 times in 10 starts.

Matthew Stafford is having one of the worst starts to a season in his entire career. How confident are teams going to be that not only will Stafford improve with a new team, but that he’ll be able to do it in time to help that team make this year’s playoffs? And what’s the worth to a team in trade? What would the trade compensation need to be to make trading Stafford worth it?

Quarterbacks like Stafford don’t get traded midseason and while getting traded to the Rams was also in a way unprecedented, getting traded by the Rams within the next month would be ten times as surprising.

The much more obvious player to put on the trade block would be Cooper Kupp, although that would necessitate Kupp first proving that he’s healthy enough to play, the Rams proving that they’re willing to help eat his salary, and a team willing to give up a considerable draft pick for a receiver who hasn’t been consistently healthy for years.

Kupp’s 2024 salary is $15 million and that means he’ll be owed a little less than $1 million per game for however many games he has left in the season. In any case, it seems that Kupp probably would only be traded if the Rams changed his salary.

At this point, the only reasons to trade Kupp would be that a) he asks for it and b) the Rams just want to give the ball to Jordan Whittington more.

It would not be to get a good draft pick because Kupp isn’t likely to get anything more than a 2025 fifth round draft pick in return. He’s just not that valuable, as the acquiring team knows that it is only a rental for the rest of this season and playoffs. Knowing that Kupp has missed games in three straight seasons due to injury, including right now, a playoff caliber team might just throw a late day three pick at L.A. as a shot in the dark. And the Rams would accept only if Kupp said he wanted to go to a playoff team and L.A. wanted to see more of what they have in Tutu Atwell and Whittington.

And the Rams may not have anyone else worth discussing as a trade option.

The Rams aren’t going to trade their good young players. Those are the ones who are good and young and cheap!

They could just release Tre White outright, nobody’s going to trade for him. They could certainly listen to an offer for a player but the only two that make any sense are Stafford and Kupp. And trading those players wouldn’t necessarily be to make the team better or to get cap relief or to acquire good draft picks. It would just be because the Rams kept pushing in the direction of a youth movement and are cutting to the inevitable by parting with two players who they seem certain to part with in 2025 if this losing streak continues.

You don’t panic at 0-2. You don’t panic at 1-3.

But you surely start to consider what’s best for your future when you start 1-5 or 1-6, and that’s almost where the Rams stand after falling to 1-4. Don’t act too late...

Hope could be what saves the Rams...and also what destroys them.