How the Rams Remodeled Amid False Narratives and Built Another Super Bowl Contender

Les Snead lays out his football-biology experiment, precisely as he and Sean McVay want it played, like when Los Angeles is at its best.

Rams head coach Sean McVay and general manager Les Snead follow an eight-bullet-point list that defines how they have built their team. / Jayne Kamin-Oncea-Imagn Images

In Les Snead’s office, behind the minimalist standing desk, opposite the bookshelf filled with volumes on greatness, process and history, there is a list. It’s just eight bullet points long, each scribbled in black Sharpie, all caps and fairly neat handwriting for a sports executive. The header, just above the list, is underlined in red. It says: 

FOOTBALL BIOLOGY

Those words, only 46 total, are short and straightforward, one concept building into the next, all concepts forming a greater whole. Those words also come wrapped in infinite complications, the kinds that separate good football teams from great ones and champions from all the others.

Snead began mapping out this football-biology experiment four seasons ago, in the same months the team he built in Los Angeles won Super Bowl LVI in February 2022. In those 46 words, he formulated an organizational philosophy, one implemented from that season through this one.

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Back in early 2022, after the triumph, celebration and exit interviews, on the same day he would depart team headquarters for the beginning of a gloriously shortened offseason, Snead looked over his list one last time. He added a box at the end. It then read, in full:

• Organism (thriving)

• Must have COLLECTIVE competence

• Must remove INCOMPETENCE

• Must have collaboration

• Must have competition

• Competition assists in cleansing incompetence

• ALPHA cells must do what is best for the COLLECTIVE

• Transformation of organism occurs when Stress & Heat is applied

• Dying, Sick, Healthy, Elite

And there it was, football biology, the elements that formed the kinds of players Snead wanted to pursue. Had pursued. Would pursue, in that offseason and every subsequent spring.

His Rams had lost Super Bowl LIII and won it three seasons later. The GM who built both teams better understood what he wanted, what mattered and how to form not an individual dream team but a collective that played better together when stocked with the preferred football biology in question. If that meant F--- Them Picks, a prominent theme during the championship season, owing to myriad, high draft selections that Snead had traded to assemble a roster capable of winning the whole thing, well, so be it. The general manager even wore a T-shirt emblazoned with that phrase to the victory parade.

The philosophy he formulated over that season became an illustration resembling a science experiment and hangs next to that whiteboard on Snead’s office wall. It’s laid out in the Rams’ colors—royal blue background, gold letters, white diagrams—with a rendering of a football player at the center and FOOTBALL BIOLOGY running up the left side in large font. It’s Rams football, precisely as Snead and his head coach, Sean McVay, want it played. Like when Los Angeles is at its best, in that season or in this one.

“The premise is, in your body, you’re gonna have these alpha cells,” Snead says of that seventh bullet point. “A cancer in the locker room is [when] a cell goes rogue. The point being, football is an ecosystem. Right?”

Among the most complicated on earth.

Snead then launches into the remainder of a three-minute-long answer. The gist: He will be on the right side of that evolution, his roster stocked with alpha cells that have not yet or will never become cancerous, per his metaphor. “What’s best,” he says, “for the collective.”

Most watch the Rams in 2025 and see an antithetical approach to the one adopted by Snead, McVay and all others in 2021. Love Them Picks should be the Rams’ new ethos. But while F--- Them Picks provided a catchy catchphrase, not to mention a defiant, deserved middle finger to Snead’s critics, the phrase itself, and the framework around it, are both actually misleading.

“That’s the other thing,” Snead says inside his office in mid-November. The approach in 2021 vs. in 2025 is “not as different as you think.”

The GM suggests more research, then says, “In a lot of ways, I imagine the approach has been the same.”

Rams defensive end Kobie Turner (91), linebacker Jared Verse (8) and defensive end Braden Fiske (55) are three of Snead's best draft picks. / Jayne Kamin-Oncea-Imagn Images

‘I didn’t come up with it’

The day before our meeting in Woodland Hills, Calif., Snead broke from his typical, in-season routine. Instead, he attended “Take your husband to work day” with his wife, Kara. She’s consulting for a scripted TV show about a professional football league that’s in production. Les accompanied her to the Paramount lot. He spoke with actors Christopher Meloni, Mandy Moore, Chace Crawford and Chloe Bennet. He watched the crew film a scene in which decision-makers cut a player from their fictional league. He swapped notes on releasing players. He wasn’t starstruck, though. He wanted to know how they made television shows.

Twenty-four hours later, his takeaway centers, naturally, on those processes he heard about and watched unfold. Les saw precision, a surrendering of results to process, intentional preparation and adaptability. That staff reminded him of the Rams’ offensive coaches. Some of their processes recalled parts of his own approach.

He’s asked, in that office, after the day on set, with that science diagram hanging over his left shoulder, while he stands and paces, then sits, stands and resumes pacing, whether he finds descriptions of his approaches in 2021 and 2025 to be true. Most who’ve written about those Rams seasons in relation to each other describe the approaches as opposed to each other. For instance, from 2016 through 2022, Los Angeles ranked fifth in the NFL in total money spent on offseason transactions. The Rams also traded their first-round pick in each season from 2016 through 2021.

This approach, the continuum, netted L.A. two Super Bowl appearances and one title. Sure, the Rams went 5–12, cementing their first nonplayoff season since 2016 with their first losing record since then, too. Still, the remodel continued.

Snead is told that the Rams drafted 27 players on their 53-man roster this season. Does he love draft picks, then? Did he always? “I tell people all the time,” he says, regarding F--- Them Picks, “[the slogan is] cool, fun moment, but I didn’t come up with it.”

He didn’t believe it, necessarily, not beyond his own fearlessness to trade high draft picks for elite talent, when the situation—right team, right season, right run—demanded calculated risk. But while Snead did make high-profile trades, he made most of those before the championship season. While he also began, yes, collecting picks, whether compensatory for players who departed or trading back in other drafts. At one point, Snead recalls someone pointing out that Los Angeles had the third- or fourth-highest tally of picks in the NFL.

What’s often presented as binary approaches—freewheeling gambler or draft builder scared straight—Snead sees more as a continuum. An approach that’s grounded in FOOTBALL BIOLOGY but adapted to the circumstances of any season. Which explains the 2022, ’23 and ’24 seasons in relation to the current one.

“I tell people all the time, [the slogan is] cool, fun moment, but I didn’t come up with it.”

- Rams GM Les Snead

These Rams feature not only the 27 drafted players but also the 13 starters Los Angeles chose itself. And, while there are high-profile offensive players among that group—Puka Nacua, Tyler Higbee, Rob Havenstein and Kyren Williams—the Rams are back in Super Bowl contention because of Snead’s defensive overhaul from the title season to now. Which is why he prefers to describe the three seasons between the championship and this one not as a rebuild but a remodel.

The entire Los Angeles defensive line was hand-selected: Jared Verse (2024, first round), Braden Fiske (2024, second), Kobie Turner (2023, third) and Byron Young (2023, third). While Snead spent high draft selections in recent seasons on that part of his remodel, he also stocked the Rams with depth from players selected later in the draft, which allowed L.A. to sidestep the everyone’s-gone conundrum familiar to teams that actually do gamble on one super season, whether they win or fail. He still paid Matthew Stafford to come back two seasons ago. He still signed elite wideout Davante Adams. He still extended Kyren Williams, Tutu Atwell and Alaric Jackson. Thus: the continuum at work.

That defensive front is beyond the traits Snead and McVay value highly—a defense that’s disruptive even if only rushing its front four. Most Super Bowl winners this century deployed defenses with only that—the ability to disrupt, without too many blitzes, while sending additional players into coverage.

He points to Week 2 of last season—a 41–10 blowout loss at Arizona, in the Rams’ first season after Aaron Donald retired—as the first time he noticed how special that group could be. Kyler Murray played as well as he could play that day, but Snead’s drafted front four was still disruptive.

“They will evolve as they become more disciplined,” Snead thought then. He realizes the nature of his comparison, a savage blowout loss into an early turning point. “There was actually a rose there,” he says. “Now, a lot more thorns went into that rose bush.”

Rams wide receiver Puka Nacua is one of Snead's biggest hits as a fifth-round pick in 2023. / Gary A. Vasquez-Imagn Images

The narrative that’s still being corrected

Snead was right, by the way. More right than even he expected. Because those 2021 Rams—a team supposedly built for the future, dismissed, not part of the organizational calculations—well, that roster featured 32 players the Rams drafted, or five more than this season. The drafted Rams made for two fewer starters that season, but even then, there were 11. And for those who might note that these Rams haven’t drafted, say, Aaron Donald or Cooper Kupp, they also drafted Nacua and that defensive line.

The numbers point not to antithetical approaches but the same approach, throughout.

McVay, when told this numerical comparison last week, laughed through the phone line. “We kind of just joke with it,” he said. “Because we had traded capital for some of the big resources, and it became a fun narrative. But we never really believed that. We knew how important those picks were. It’s really about maximizing all avenues to acquire talent. They’re all damn important.”

“Because we had traded capital for some of the big resources, and it became a fun narrative. But we never really believed that. We knew how important those picks were. It’s really about maximizing all avenues to acquire talent. They’re all damn important.”

- Rams coach Sean McVay

He paused. Laughed again. “But don’t let a good little narrative get in the way of having some fun and making a T-shirt, right?”

This, yes, consistency in approach is not lost on those who are part of how Snead shapes football teams. Like Nacua, for instance. As a fifth-round find in 2023, his draft class alone featured Steve Avila (37 starts at center), Young (26.5 career sacks), Turner (22.5 career sacks) and 14 total players that amplified the Rams’ roster depth, which has been critical this season. “Out here, being new to the NFL, new to California, (I saw) the love of football that you could feel from all of these guys. Our guys stick together. You build that deeper relationship.”

McVay completed the second part of the Rams’ 2025 transformation, turning the players that Snead and his team chose, like from the ’23 draft class, into the collective of FOOTBALL BIOLOGY that has made Los Angeles the odds-on Super Bowl favorite through 15 weeks, just like Nacua laid out above.

In McVay, Snead sees an endless growth cycle that hasn’t ever stopped. He’s a New Year’s resolution type, Snead says, except that McVay completes his resolutions. “I tell people he may have one every week,” Snead says.

He’s asked, ballpark, what percentage of people in his life display that follow-through. That percentage, he says, is tiny, closer to one percent than 100.

Hence, this season and the narrative that’s still, somehow, being corrected. Stafford told SI that part of the reason he continues to play football—and for the Rams—is because of the roster Snead constructed and the biology at play. Stafford says he could sense this season at the end of last season. “I felt good,” he says, “about our team.”

That feeling started with the approach Snead deployed in 2021 and in 2025. Love Them Picks. Somebody really needs to get these guys some T-shirts.

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