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Football may be a team game, but the NFL is a star-centric league. That’s how the Los Angeles Rams, already Super Bowl odds leaders, moved into runaway-favorite territory with their blockbuster trade Monday to acquire edge rusher Myles Garrett.
Garrett, who at age 30 is coming off a season in which he won Defensive Player of the Year and broke the single-season sack record, is headed to LA in exchange for linebacker Jared Verse and a handful of picks (the latter of which the Rams famously do not value all that highly).
Garret not only had 23 sacks, but was top-four in both quarterback pressures and quick pressures (under three seconds), while having the fastest get-off time in the NFL. Garrett crossed the line of scrimmage in .70 seconds on average; the next-closest lineman was Nick Bosa at .74.
Normally, that level of talent would be expected to transform a struggling unit, an answer to an ongoing problem a team has not been able to solve on their own. In the Rams’ case, Garrett’s arrival is like adding rocket fuel to a Formula 1 car.
Los Angeles ranked fifth in pressure rate last season, and comfortably in the top half of the league in how quickly it got to the quarterback. The Rams were tied for seventh in sacks, and only the Denver Broncos generated more pressure on third down. In short, this is not a defensive unit in desperate need of Myles Garrett, but they got him anyway.
The response from bookmakers was seismic, moving the Rams from +800 to +600 and leaving the next-closest contenders — the Buffalo Bills and Seattle Seahawks — solidly behind at +1000. That’s not a massive gap overall, but considering it’s only June, this is significant.
For additional context, Austin Mock’s projection model gave the Rams a 14.1 percent chance of winning the Super Bowl before the trade. That moved to 17.1 percent after the deal.
It’s a reflection of the prevailing theory across the NFL at the moment, that defense — and specifically elite pass rushers — win championships.
Passing is king, and anyone who can meaningfully disrupt a passing gameplan to the degree Garrett can moves markets when they change teams. Some of the biggest Super Bowl odds bumps in recent history, excluding quarterback moves, have come from defensive trades. Fittingly, Von Miller’s in-season trade to the Rams in 2021 moved LA from +800 to +650, similar to Garrett’s impact. Khalil Mack singlehandedly lifted the Chicago Bears from 100-to-1 to 60-to-1 when he was acquired ahead of the 2018 season.
Garrett has had double-digit sacks every year since his rookie season, and has played at least 16 games for five straight years, making him a singularly proven talent that can push a contender into the stratosphere.
The last person to move odds this much in an offseason trade was Micah Parsons, perhaps the only challenger to Garrett’s crown as best defensive player on the planet, but a good portion of that response was due to the surprise timing of the deal, a week before the start of the regular season last year.
Part of the optimism stems from the Rams’ new contract certainty: they have Garrett locked into a $160 million deal through 2030 thanks to the Browns signing him to an extension last year. With Verse, Byron Young and Kobie Turner all set to earn what were expected to be sizable extensions themselves, LA put a gravitational center at the heart of its defense around which all other contracts will now orbit. The Rams got the majority of their sacks last season from the linebacking corps, and the lion’s share of those went to Young (12), while Turner led the defensive line with seven. Turning Garrett loose alongside those two is a terrifying prospect, since the three of them totaled 42 sacks last season. Verse being dealt means there is one less budding star to pay, and Turner and Young now play with more comfort around their upcoming contract status.
If statistics and financials aren’t enough to convince a bettor to put money down on the new runaway favorites, there’s also a dash of history. The last time the Rams made a move with such outsized ambition was in 2021, when they acquired Matthew Stafford via trade, and later acquired Miller before Week 9, ahead of them hosting the Super Bowl that season (which they won). Say, does anyone know where Super Bowl LXI is being held?
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