New Look Details Rams’ Valuable Draft-Day Trade

The Rams pulled back the curtain on their April 24-26 draft operations in Episode 2 of the team’s Behind the Grind series and revealed important background details on the Night 1 trade that will shape the future of their franchise.

In the documentary, the draft fell almost exactly the way Les Snead and Sean McVay had hoped. The only exception seemed to be the bonus future first-rounder they didn’t expect to receive after trading out of the first round.

Entering that first round, Snead sat down with the team’s creative department to share the vision for his 14th draft as Rams general manager.

And serendipitously, referring to “26” as the No. 26 overall choice, he might as well have been referring to 2026 because the trade he consummated with the Falcons produced that additional first-rounder next year. Prior to the trade, Snead explained that the Rams’ depth and youth at several positions, as well as how they expected the higher-graded players to fall, allowed them to be ultra selective.

“Here's what we're doing at 26,” he shared before Night 1. “To really come make a difference on this team, you're going to have to tilt toward a position. … Here at 26, you're like, ‘You know what? These players, they're probably not going to be there. If they're there, let's strike.’

“You're not going to strike or attack or trade up for just anyone. It's going to be specific people, specific players, at specific positions. There was a lot of planning with, ‘You know what, the best thing for us to do is probably going to be to trade back.’ Because we have a lot of appreciation for some players that will be there at 26, but also that will be there somewhere in that second round.”

When all the players they graded worth a trade up had left the board, the documentary showed the Rams taking several calls from other teams. Without a second-round pick, dealt to Carolina last year in order to move up and take Braden Fiske, the Rams were certainly offering their first-rounder. But Atlanta offered the key poker chip no other team was willing to wager.

The Falcons wanted edge-rusher James Pearce at 26 so badly that they offered not only the second-round choice the Rams didn’t have (46 overall) but also a 2026 first-rounder and a seventh-rounder in 2025. McVay pointed out the evaporating clock before Los Angeles also flipped Atlanta a 2025 third-rounder (101 overall). Cameras showed the Rams’ draft room off-the-charts ecstatic after making the trade, which turned 26 into 46 and ended the first night for Los Angeles.

“This was one of those years I said, ‘You know what? The way the draft is, the way the players are, the way the board is, we're probably going to have to hit a single, we're going to steal second, we're going to get bunted over to third, and we're going to get a sac fly to score.’ The way it was all going, it was going to be one of those, let's call it, grind-it-out drafts.”

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