The Reason the Rams Produce Successful Executives Revealed

Sports Illustrated's Albert Breer explains how the Rams' three general manager system works.

"Earlier in the month, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers promoted Rob McCartney to assistant GM and Mike Biehl to VP of player personnel in the wake of losing assistant GM John Spytek to the Las Vegas Raiders," wrote Breer.

"Likewise, with the Tennessee Titans poaching their assistant GM, Mike Borgonzi, the Kansas City Chiefs promoted Mike Bradway and Chris Shea to assistant GM spots, Ryne Nutt and Tim Terry to VP of player personnel roles, and Marc Richards to director of football research and development."

"Those teams have won consistently, so promoting from within always made sense. But there’s a nuance in how both teams are now set up that deserves attention."

"The Buccaneers were actually already there, having Spytek and cap chief Mike Greenberg as co-assistant GMs—moving McCartney up simply maintained their structure. The Chiefs, on the other hand, moved toward that, replacing Borgonzi, who was GM Brett Veach’s right-hand man on just about everything, with two guys."

"The reality? GM jobs are getting awfully big, and so there are a couple of ways that you can divide the workload."

"What the Chiefs and Bucs have done is one version of it, where you have an over-the-top GM (Veach in K.C., Jason Licht in Tampa), and two assistant GMs—one leading the scouting department, the other basically overseeing everything else—reporting to him. The other would be where you divide the duties of the old GM, commit the GM to leading the personnel department and then have another exec overseeing the cap, analytics and other operations elements of the teams (the Lions, Rams and Carolina Panthers are set up that way)."

For the Rams, Les Snead is at the top. He runs the front office. He has a director of college scouting, essentially the second general manager. That was Brad Holmes for years until Holmes took the Rams' method to the Lions as general manager, turning around that franchise.

Then James Gladstone had that job until this offseason, when he took the same method with him to Jacksonville, includingRams' analytics director Jake Temme.

The Rams have been able to hit on draft picks throughout the entire draft because Snead is able to make calls with the numbers and the films being brought to him by knowledgeable individuals, individuals whose work takes stuff of Snead's plate, giving him the mental energy to make correct decisions.

It's an effective solution for a league and a team that cycles through thousands of prospects every year to find, on average, 5-10 picks annually.