Were Sean McVay and Les Snead ACTUALLY Not On the Same Page For the Selection of QB Ty Simpson

The Los Angeles Rams' decision to use the 13th overall pick on Alabama quarterback Ty Simpson was less a question of front-office discord and more a calculated bet on the franchise's next decade, NFL Network insider Ian Rapoport told The Rich Eisen Show, pushing back hard on the notion that head coach Sean McVay and general manager Les Snead arrived at the choice from different rooms.

"The Rams are a very well-run organization. They're Super Bowl contenders every year," Rapoport said. "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. I do not believe it. They are excellent at their jobs."

What Rapoport conceded he only pieced together late in the week was that Simpson had been firmly in play at 13 the entire time, even as the rest of the league assumed Snead would be looking elsewhere. "The Rams were definitely considering Ty Simpson at 13, which I only really learned probably earlier this week," he said. "I had known for a while that Les believed he was a first-rounder, but I didn't really connect the dots of like, the reason I know is I'm going to take him there. I didn't realize that probably till Monday or Tuesday this week."

The more delicate piece, Rapoport argued, was the optics of the moment for Matthew Stafford, the 37-year-old MVP-caliber quarterback who has yet to finalize an extension and whose buy-in remains the load-bearing wall of the Rams' Super Bowl window. McVay's restrained body language at the Simpson press conference, in Rapoport's read, was a deliberate courtesy.

"My read on this was Sean McVay being like, I have to understand all parts of this. And if he's up there giddy being like, woohoo, we got the franchise quarterback, their actual franchise quarterback is like, you know what, maybe I won't sign," Rapoport said. "I think Sean McVay, who cares deeply, deeply about Matthew Stafford, I believe that 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 his own pre-draft reporting kept hitting the same wall when he polled Rams sources about needs. "We don't need a starter," he was told. "They do not have needs." That, he argued, is precisely how a roster this complete ends up taking a quarterback. With two first-rounders this year, no path back into the top fifteen next year, and a quarterback-rich 2026 class out of reach, the only move that scanned was a future-tense one. "If Ty Simpson is good, and it was a small sample size, but some people think he's really good, then we're going to be talking about the Rams for 20 years."