The Football Film Room Show Transcript with All-22 Highlights
Episode #30 - Rams Trade for Myles Garrett
Below, I’ve posted the transcript of the most recent Football Film Room podcast and included clips of the plays I talked about in the episode.
Feel free to read the transcript on it’s own or use it (and the plays I included) to follow along with the podcast to get more context for what I’m talking about.
In this episode, I discuss the following:
Rams trade for Myles Garrett
Aaron Donald coming out of retirement?
The Patriots trade for A.J. Brown
Cam Ward’s rookie season review
The Titans’ 2026 outlook
Here is a direct link to the podcast, and below that you can find the transcript and plays:
The Football Film Room Show - Episode #30 Transcript
Welcome to the Football Film Room Show. I’m Nick Kehoe and we’ve got another great episode for you today. We finally have some action for the first time since the NFL Draft.
We’ve got trades galore! A.J. Brown going to the Patriots. Myles Garrett going to the Rams. Aaron Donald is now thinking about coming out of retirement and rejoining the Rams because he sees how good they look on paper.
So we’ll get into all that. We’re going to do a bit of a deep dive on Cam Ward, his rookie season, what the Titans’ outlook is for the 2026 season.
But before we do any of that, I want to go into the biggest news of the week, and that is certainly that Myles Garrett trade.
Rams Trade for Myles Garrett
Now we thought it was going to be A.J. Brown going to the Patriots, even though that was somewhat of a foregone conclusion and had been really for, what, three months, four months, five months or so.
So we thought that was going to be the biggest news of the day, but man, the Rams trading for Myles Garrett, that that is the biggest move this offseason, hands down.
And I’ll be honest, Les Snead, this Rams club, they’ve got me on a bit of a roller coaster this offseason. Back in March, I was singing their praises, talking about how I love the fact that they were going all in.
They recognized they were in a Super Bowl window, and instead of being a bunch of idiots like the Packers were in 2020 and drafting for the future instead of pounding down the door to get into the Super Bowl, they went out and made a trade, a big trade for Trent McDuffie to address the number one hole in their team, the cornerback position.
Then they immediately signed Jaylen Watson. So instantly they went from their biggest weakness on defense becoming a strength.
And then we got into the draft and we thought, okay, man, they’ve got that 13th overall pick. What cool stuff are they going to do with that? They’re going to go draft a receiver? Maybe a freak talent like Kenyon Sadiq, tight end out of Oregon. The question was, what else are they going to do to knock down this door and get back to the Super Bowl?
And then what did they do? They drafted their quarterback of the future, Ty Simpson. And we all saw it. No matter what the Rams say, it seemed like Sean McVay wasn’t exactly thrilled. He came out and gave an explanation for why he was looking so glum after they made that pick. Who knows what the real reason was, but I can imagine he was sitting there thinking, I’m not worried about three years from now, I’m worried about right now. Let’s go and get a piece that can help us win the Super Bowl right now.
So it seemed like the Rams were back into, well, we don’t want to go quite all in, we want to hedge our bets and maybe start thinking about the future.
But it turned out they’ve been trying to make this trade for Myles Garrett for a while, and in case there was any doubt, they are absolutely 100% all in on this season and getting back to the Super Bowl.
And right now on paper, they absolutely should be the Super Bowl favorites. Doesn’t mean it will happen. You need a lot of luck, a lot of things bouncing your way, need to stay healthy. But if you were a betting man, you’d have to say the Rams, with the reigning MVP in Matthew Stafford and the best defensive player in football, they’ve got the best shot at getting to Super Bowl LXI.
Now, you don’t need to be a football expert to understand that Myles Garrett is good. So I’m not going to insult your intelligence. You know he’s a game-wrecker. He’s the most dynamic pass rusher in the game. His combination of speed, power, bend, moves, use of his hands, everything you need as a pass rusher, he is one of one in the league right now:
He broke the NFL sack record while playing for a bad Browns team that rarely held the lead late in games, which meant he didn’t have as many opportunities as other pass rushers did to pin his ears back, knowing that the offense is one dimensional, knowing that the offense has to catch up, they have to throw every down. He didn’t have many opportunities like that, and he still broke the record.
On top of that, he’s one of the most chipped, double-team defenders, and you can go check out my breakdown on footballfilmroom.com. He has a lot of sacks where he’s fighting through double teams, just going through the gauntlet and getting to the quarterback quickly:
But aside from his talent, I think the biggest thing to point out about Garrett is what he does to opposing teams, what he does to their game plans. Protections have to be aware of him at all times. Quarterbacks have to be aware of him at all times.
Very often teams have to keep in a tight end or running back or they have to chip, and that reduces the amount of receivers who can go out into routes. And that makes the secondary’s job easier. That makes the entire coverage scheme’s job easier in terms of defending route concepts.
So that’s one area where he’s impactful. The other area is, of course, the offensive line, the protection. Myles Garrett is lined up outside over the left tackle. You can leave your left tackle on an island, but you do so at your own risk. Most teams are going to end up sliding his way, having their guard be a little bit more aware of him than any other defender in the area.
And if you aren’t just doing a conventional four-man rush as a defense, you can use that to your advantage, knowing that Myles Garrett is to one side of the protection. You can anticipate that they’re going to slide his way, and then bring blitzes from the other side.
So Garrett isn’t just going to be a game wrecker on his own in terms of his ability to get to the quarterback. He’s going to open things up for the rest of the Rams defensive line and for the rest of the Rams pass rush.
And Chris Shula, defensive coordinator, he already does a lot with this scheme. He’s a very diverse defensive coordinator in terms of what he throws at an offense, the combination of coverage, blitz, personnel, etc.:
The Rams last year were number one in stunt percentage and number five in simulated pressure percentage. So they didn’t send more than four very often, but the way that they sent four was not via the traditional four-man rush.
But he does a lot of imaginative things. Popping on the Rams tape every single week is always fun. Looking at that all 22, seeing how Shula decided to deploy his defense:
And we’ll see how he plays this. Who knows if he dials it back and says, hey, I’ve got Myles Garrett. Let’s not take a risk on, you know, stunting out of a running lane or giving the quarterback an escape lane. Let’s not run the risk of simulated pressure and somebody missing an assignment and dropping a guy into coverage who’s probably better as a pass rusher.
Maybe they just say, hey, we’re going to play a little more straightforward, go with a four-man rush, keep everything in front of us, and make the offense drive the length of the field, knowing that hey, eventually they’re going to make a mistake, eventually Myles Garrett’s going to get to somebody and force them into a second and long, third and long situation.
Or perhaps he’s going to use Garrett to his advantage and throw intricate blitzes to the other side of the defensive line, knowing that the offense is going to be giving Garrett extra attention.
So they’re going to have a ton of options, and you pair that with the fact that he’s also going to have a lot more options than he did a year ago in his secondary, because of the presence of McDuffie and Jaylen Watson, and this Rams defense, they’re going to be like a chameleon, or they’re going to have the ability anyway to be like a chameleon.
They can adjust to any opponent week to week, situation to situation, and they’re going to have a lot of different ways on defense to shut down the opponent.
And that’s an important thing, because the Rams last year, look, they of course had talent, and Jared Verse was a really good pass rusher, he’s a really good young player. But a little bit of what made the Rams successful on defense was the fact that they used smoke and mirrors to a certain extent, and they leaned on the offense to do its thing every single week.
Eventually a team like the Seahawks that saw them three times last year, they were able to figure them out. They really broke through at the end of that second game when they had that comeback win in Seattle on a Thursday night. And then the NFC Championship game, Sam Darnold picked them apart:
So scheme, smoke and mirrors, that can only get you so far. To win a championship, at some point it can’t just be about the X’s and O’s. It’s got to be about the Jimmys and the Joes, the players on the field. They need to be able to make plays (and this is true on both sides of the ball) when the other team kind of knows what’s coming.
But as I said, the Rams now have talent out the, you know what. They’ve got good scheme. So I don’t think the talent’s going to be held back by poor scheme, obviously.
What a lot of people, I think, aren’t focusing that much on is that Garrett is a really good run defender as well. He’s an upgrade over Verse in that area, and that was another place where the Rams defense did struggle. That was one of the soft spots of their team. That’s where offenses could attack, could have some consistent success. So he helps them everywhere.
And here’s the last part of all this. The way teams beat the Rams last year, the way the Seahawks beat them, was by standing toe-to-toe with them offensively and throwing haymakers. No one went into a game against the Rams and Matthew Stafford and Sean McVay and that offense and said, we need to hold them to 10 or 14 points and win a low-scoring game. That just wasn’t in the cards.
When you play the Rams, you’ve got to hope to contain them, maybe keep them in the 21 to 24, 27-point range, and then your offense has to do their job.
Well, that approach of trying to beat the Rams by out-dueling them offensively, that just got a lot harder. Because I don’t know how many teams are going to be looking forward to the prospect of throwing on down after down with Myles Garrett pinning his ears back and getting after the quarterback.
And Garrett, like I said, he hasn’t really had that opportunity throughout most of his career. He hasn’t been on teams that have taken early leads and made offenses one-dimensional for a large portion of the game. He hasn’t had that chance, and he still set the NFL record for sacks last year.
So just as a football fan, I’m not a Rams fan, I’m excited to see what this looks like. Because we’ve seen franchises try to put together super teams in the past and they’ve fallen flat on their face.
This doesn’t appear to be that type of thing. This doesn’t appear to be that type of organization, from the coach in Sean McVay to the quarterback in Matthew Stafford, where expectations are just going to be so ridiculous and sky high the team’s not going to be able to meet them. I’m not saying they definitely will go to the Super Bowl, but this has the making of a super team that is going to be able to live up to the hype.