Why Rams Fans Should Have ZERO Reservations about Trading for Myles Garrett

The Myles Garrett trade sent the show reaching for history, and the name that kept coming up was a heavy one: Reggie White.

It started with a nervous caller. Shepard from Los Angeles worried the Rams were tempting fate by going all in twice, and Rich waved off the anxiety in his usual way, calling Garrett a player so good that Los Angeles just acquired the one man who could make Aaron Donald look in the mirror and ask, "Do I look fat?"

From there the comparisons got bigger. A voice on the desk framed it in basketball terms, likening it to the Lakers landing LeBron James a couple of years after Kobe Bryant, or to the Rams themselves following Aaron Donald with Garrett. It was called almost unfair.

Then came the White comparison, and the numbers did real work. Reggie White was 32 when he took his talents to Green Bay for a second act after a legendary run in Philadelphia, where he piled up 124 career sacks. Garrett, the show noted, has 125 and a half career sacks in Cleveland and is now heading into his own second act in Los Angeles.

Rich treated the comparison with the gravity it deserves. White's name, he said, is a huge manhole cover you rarely throw around. With Garrett, he does not stutter putting the two in the same sentence.

The résumés back it up. In Philadelphia, White earned six first-team All-Pro nods and one Defensive Player of the Year award. In Cleveland, Garrett has five first-team All-Pros and two Defensive Player of the Year trophies, and he is doing it at 30, about to turn 31, with good years left.

What makes it land for the Rams is the surrounding math. They are giving up a highly talented player and a first-round pick that could fall to 32nd overall in a draft loaded with quarterbacks. They do not need one of those quarterbacks, because they already spent a pick on Ty Simpson, the move that suddenly makes perfect sense. As Rich put it, the light bulb goes on.

The timing is the kicker. The Rams are doing this in a year they are hosting the Super Bowl, with the brass ring right there. To Rich, that is simply how you run a business in sports: when you have a chance to win it, you take it, especially when the player is not on his last legs or in the final year of a deal.

Rich could barely contain the implications for the rest of the division. Garrett is coming to the NFC West, where Los Angeles came agonizingly close last year before watching the team that beat them cruise to a title. The back-end defense still needs work, he admitted, but pressuring the quarterback was a problem too, and this checks that box emphatically. Somewhere, he joked, Brock Purdy and a rotating cast of Arizona quarterbacks just heard a noise behind them.