Rams Had Been Trying to Trade for Myles Garrett Since 2022

The Myles Garrett trade looked sudden. According to Albert Breer, the Rams had been working on it for almost four years.

"This is going to sound crazy," Breer told Rich, but the Rams first called the Browns about Garrett "at the trade deadline in 2022." That was the first conversation between the two teams. The year was enough to draw a double take in the studio.

Breer laid out how the final stretch actually unfolded. Garrett got back from Japan and Korea on May 26th, by Breer's recollection. By then, the Browns were ready to communicate to him what was going on. "If this train is moving down the tracks, there's no sense in you showing up to this week of OTAs," Breer said, describing the thinking.

From there it moved quickly. Garrett flew to Cleveland on Friday and sat down with Andrew Berry and Jimmy Haslam on Saturday for one last meeting. Breer said it was "very amicable."

He also made clear how seriously the Browns took the decision. "I think the people inside the Browns organization, Rich, they view this as trading a Jim Brown or an Otto Graham."

So why did it happen? Rich noted that Browns fans are still a little turned around on the result, and Breer offered two explanations.

The first is simple persistence. After that 2022 call, "this time around, they just kind of kept chipping away at it," Breer said. "This was very real the whole time."

The second is Cleveland's own timeline. Breer pointed to a pivot about 13 months ago with the Travis Hunter trade. The core Garrett came up with, the group that went to the playoffs in 2020 and 2023, had aged out, and the Browns needed to get younger. The Deshaun Watson trade had taken such a chunk out of their ability to build youth into the roster that they needed volume of picks to get younger across the board. So they traded the pick that became Travis Hunter, and last year they put together what Breer called "a really good rookie class."

That left Cleveland with a roster full of 22 and 23 year olds. For the front office, Breer said, the Garrett deal was a way to "really supercharge the rebuild."

The haul fits that plan. Jared Verse lines up with the young core from an age standpoint. Add two firsts in '27, two seconds in '28 and two thirds in '29, and Breer's count is that Cleveland effectively has 12 top 100 picks over the next three years, before even getting into the comp pick formula.

For the Rams, the lesson is that patience eventually pays. For the Browns, it's a bet that a franchise icon was worth more as the fuel for a younger team.