Is Les Snead’s recent draft success due to Rams selecting better athletes?

The Rams have drafted better athletes over the past few years. Has that led to better overall success?

There is no denying the success of the 2023 draft class for the Los Angeles Rams and general manager Les Snead. Between Steve Avila, Puka Nacua, Kobie Turner, and Byron Young, the Rams found a future at several different positions. That doesn’t even mention players like Davis Allen who could take a step and become a primary contributor over the next few seasons. By the initial looks of things, the 2024 class also brings a lot of promise.

The 2023 class was much needed for Snead after a few poor classes that resulted in the roster thinning out behind the star players. Much of that was due to the “F them picks” mantra that the Rams embraced to win a Super Bowl. However, some of that was also just bad drafting. Hindsight is always 20/20 when it comes to the draft and without listing specifics, which most are likely very aware of at this point, there have been some pretty bad misses.

Pro Football Reference has a metric called “drafted approximate value.” This metric weighs the approximate value for a player but only takes into account the value accumulated on the team that drafted them. Last season, the 2020 draft class played out the final year of their rookie contracts. The Rams’ 2020 draft class had an average drafted approximate value of 5.4. That was by far the worst in the Snead era up to that point. With a final year on their rookie deals, the 2021 class isn’t looking much better with a current average drafted approximate value of just 4.3.

Since 2017, the Rams have been seen as a team that’s hard to gauge exactly what they look for in prospects. They notably selected Cooper Kupp and Puka Nacua after they ran less than stellar 40-times at the NFL Combine. However, the Rams had reliable GPS testing that highlighted Kupp’s game speed and Nacua ran one of the fastest “gauntlets” in Indianapolis.

However, that’s also not to say that the Rams don’t look at specific test scores depending on the position or that they ignore testing results entirely. As The Athletic’s Jourdan Rodrigue noted, the Rams do look at athletic testing scores. It’s part of their process and data that they weigh in their system. Said Rodrigue,

“Once purely an information-storing program to help keep team personnel organized, the constantly updated JAARS ( Joint After-Action Review System) now helps the Rams build out and combine hundreds of thousands of data points that form the DNA strands of any one prospect’s profile…JAARS tabs, which have movable sliding scales, contain information on anything from character and mental assessments to medical history, athletic testing results and the composite scores built by weighing the different results together. The number of total tabs along a row varies by position — some weigh over a dozen different physical traits.”

Every year, RAS or Relative Athletic Score is a widely shared metric with draft prospects and their regards to their athletic testing. Throughout the Sean McVay and Snead era, the Rams have typically drafted what most would consider “average” athletes in comparison to the rest of the NFL. Both the 2017 and 2018 classes had an average RAS of just 6.3 and 6.7. The 2022 class that consisted of Logan Bruss, Cobie Durant, and Derion Kendrick had an average RAS of just 5.8. It was the lowest average RAS drafted by Snead since the 2016 class which averaged a 5.2 and Tyler Higbee remains the saving grace of that haul.

However, that seems to have shifted over the last draft classes where the Rams have drafted better athletes with better overall testing. The 2023 class had an average RAS of 8.1. It was the highest of the Les Snead era. That group was led by Steve Avila and Byron Young in the early rounds and both Tre Tomlinson and Jason Taylor II tested well later in the draft.

That also continued into the Rams most recent draft class. The Rams started by taking Jared Verse who had a 9.6 overall RAS. Next was Braden Fiske who posted a 9.89 RAS at the Combine. While Verse was regarded smaller in size, he posted a broad jump in the 92nd percentile, displaying the elite explosiveness that only confirmed the tape. The same can be said about Fiske who posted explosive scores in the 90th percentile or higher, but was considered to have average size.

It’s an overriding theme that could be seen throughout the Rams 2024 draft class. The exception was Kamren Kinchens who posted a 2.42 RAS, but the tape shows a good player and was worth ignoring the testing. With Kinchens, the average RAS of the 2024 Rams draft class is 7.7 which is the third-highest in the Snead era. Without him, it was an average of 8.51. For that to occur in back-to-back draft class, it’s certainly worth noting.

There is something to be said about the Rams finally having a first-round pick this year or a high second round pick last season. Better athletes tend to be better players which tend to get selected earlier in the draft. However, the higher athletic scores is also the case with some of the mid-round and late-round selections.

This isn’t to say that the Rams only look at athletic testing scores when it comes to the prospects that they’ve selected over the past two years. Kobie Turner posted a slightly above average RAS of 7.1 whereas Nacua had a RAS of just 5.1. It doesn’t take good athletic scores to make a good player. However, it has seemed to take some more importance in their process than in the past. As mentioned, the 2023 and 2024 draft classes have been two of the most athletic under Les Snead. It will be interesting to see if that continues into 2025.

The 2023 class was one of the more successful draft classes under Snead in a few years and by the initial looks of it, the 2024 class has a lot of upside as well. It’s fair to wonder if selecting better overall athletes is part of that reason.