NFL Insider Ian Rapoport Talks Rams/Ty Simpson, Eagles, Cowboys & More w/Rich

NFL Network insider Ian Rapoport sat down with Rich on The Rich Eisen Show in Pittsburgh and tried to settle the question that ate up draft-night Twitter: are the Rams actually on the same page about taking Alabama quarterback Ty Simpson at thirteen overall?

Rapoport's answer was yes, with a caveat about why Sean McVay looked the way he looked at the podium. "There's no way that they go out there and make a first-round pick or any pick without the head coach and the general manager being on the same page," Rapoport said. "I do not believe it. They are excellent at their jobs."

What the optics were really about, Rapoport argued, was Matthew Stafford. The Rams' MVP-caliber starter has not finalized his extension and is watching a rookie quarterback get drafted into his room. "Sean McVay loves Matthew Stafford," Rapoport said. "Part of him being out there like that was like, Stafford is watching, which I'm sure he is, and I need to make sure to walk the fine line of being happy for the pick, but not dancing on the grave of a quarterback who's not dead yet."

Rapoport said he spent the three weeks before the draft unable to figure out what the Rams would do because they kept telling him there was nothing they needed. "We don't have any needs," he said Rams sources told him. "They don't. The roster is good." That, in his read, is exactly why Simpson made sense. "They had two first-rounders this year and they traded one of them. They're not getting up to take a quarterback and they're going to be good. So next year in this quarterback-rich draft, who are they going to get?"

The other story he could not stop unspooling was the Mykel Williams sequence in Philadelphia. The Steelers had Williams on the phone, calling him as a courtesy ahead of their pick, when the Eagles traded up and Williams' agent had to physically intervene. "He hung up on Omar," Rapoport said of the call to Steelers GM Omar Khan. He sees the trade as the closing argument on AJ Brown's future in Philadelphia. "I've thought that AJ Brown is gone, and now I really, really think that AJ Brown is gone."

Rapoport also flagged the Giants getting Abdul Carter at five and Maui Noah at ten as the cleanest top-ten work of the night, defended the Jets taking tight end Mason Taylor over a wideout, and previewed Day 2 with three quarterbacks he expects to come off the board: Jaxson Dart, Tyler Shough, and Shedeur Sanders. "I could convince myself that with a year or two, these guys are franchise guys," he said.