How the Seahawks won the draft among NFC West teams
By Andy Excell
Rams draft
Rams draft needs
- Center
- Safeties
- Defensive ends
- Linebackers
- Wide receiver
Even more so than the 49ers the Rams already had an excellent roster going into the draft. The one pressing need they had was at Center, and for some reason they chose not to address this in the draft. Austin Blythe left via free agency, and yet they have not sought to replace him thus far.
That leaves them with the choice of Brian Allen, who has missed the last two seasons with a knee injury and only played 37 snaps the season before, Coleman Shelton who they picked up from Arizona as depth cover during last season and undrafted free agent Jordan Meredith out of Western Kentucky.
Surely a team gearing themselves up for a Super Bowl run needs better options than that at a key position.
Like the Seahawks, the Rams had no pick in round 1 and followed the Seahawks path by selecting a small but quick wide receiver in Tutu Atwell. As this was the pick after the Seahawks took D’Wayne Eskridge, it will be very interesting to see which one makes a bigger impact in 2021.
So that was need number 5 ticked off the list, in round 3 they crossed off a need at need number 4 by taking the hard tackling linebacker Ernest Jones.
With their three fourth round picks, they took Bobby Brown as defensive tackle, Robert Rochell at corner and tight end Jacob Harris. None of these were on the need-list but all these players could be valuable additions, to an already elite defense or in the case of Harris, could be an under-the-radar star in the making at TE.
In round 5 they took the defensive end they need in Earnest Brown out of Northwestern, so a decent fifth round pick there. No pick in round 6 but 3 in the final round of the draft..
They took RB/special team specialist Jake Funk, WR Ben Skowronek who has the size to offer something different to their existing WR’s, particularly in the red zone and OLB Chris Garrett who was prolific at div II level in college.
Overall I like who they have picked, but why they did not pick up a center just makes no sense to me. They do have $7.5 million in cap space according to spotrac, so they may be looking a the Austin Reiter’s of this world via free agency.