When the Rams traded Marcus Peters to the Ravens and put Aqib Talib on injured reserve over the last two days, you knew something else was coming at the cornerback position. General manager Les Snead and head coach Sean McVay have been too aggressive through their tenures to let their secondary go to a bunch of young guys with undetermined futures.
And in true fashion, Snead and his crew went all in once again, trading their first-round picks over the next two years, and a fourth-round pick for the services of ex-Jaguars cornerback Jalen Ramsey. Ramsey, who hasn’t played since Week 3 and has openly expressed his dissatisfaction with his former franchise, should have a quick reversal of fortune regarding his recent back issues. And in a schematic sense, it’s a perfect fit between scheme and player regarding what the Rams want to do.
Defensive coordinator Wade Phillips, who’s used to dealing with mercurial personalities (Peters certainly qualified), now has another perfect cornerback for the type of aggressive man coverage he likes to see on the field. And in his time with Peters, Phillips also is used to a top-level cornerback who can be just as lockdown as he is inconsistent.
That’s the thing. The Rams have a defensive star who can shut down opposing top receivers and may be the missing piece that makes for at least a deep playoff run, if Jared Goff can manage to play with any credibility this season. They also have a player with obvious physical assets and obvious physical limitations (not to mention some really interesting personality quirks), and that team will have to work around all of that. They also will have to pay him sooner than later, as his current contract runs through 2020.
Ramsey, the Jaguars’ fifth overall pick in the 2016 draft out of Florida State, has become one of the league’s better matchup corners in specific situations. He’s also been tested by opposing offensive coordinators to defend quicker receivers on short, varied angular routes, and that doesn’t always go so well. Given Ramsey’s alpha personality and competitive temperament, it’s not surprising that he had a couple of flare-ups in Jacksonville’s 13-12 loss to the Texans last Sunday. Ramsey has been straddling the balance between competitive equipoise and incendiary displays of that temperament throughout his career.
This particular incident with head coach Doug Marrone, however, presaged a trade request from Ramsey. Marrone hadn’t challenged a DeAndre Hopkins catch, and Ramsey was not amused.
“Let’s be clear about something in regards to that: I didn’t leak that information,” Ramsey said regarding the trade request. “Me and my agent [David Mulugheta], we are not the ones who leaked that information. And I was very strict about that because I did not want it to get out. I didn’t want to be a distraction. I didn’t want everybody asking my teammates all type of questions throughout the week, so let me real clear about that.
“Me and my team, we was not the one that leaked that information because I thought about my teammates. I thought about stuff like that, so y’all need to ask the other side or whoever.”
There is also the matter of Ramsey’s contract situation. Ramsey is in the fourth year of a rookie contract that is paying him $3.6 million in base salary with a $7.4 million salary cap hit. His fifth-year option would cost the Rams $13.7 million in base salary, per OverTheCap.com. If they want to make Ramsey happy, Ramsey will never see that fifth-year option.
Ramsey’s second contract will undoubtedly make him one of the NFL’s highest-paid cornerbacks, putting him in the same neighborhood as Miami’s Xavien Howard (five years, $75.25 million), Washington’s Josh Norman (five years, $75 million), Trumaine Johnson of the Jets (five years, $72.5 million), Minnesota’s Xavier Rhodes (five years, $70.1 million) and Arizona’s Patrick Peterson (five years, $70.05 million). Given Ramsey’s age (he’ll turn 25 on Oct. 24), his athletic potential, and the promise of inflated salary streams with a new collective bargaining agreement, it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility the Rams to have to push Ramsey over the $80 million mark on a five-year deal. That’s a major nut for a team that just invested $110 million in their franchise quarterback, and have cap hits of $36,042,682 in 2020 and $32.5 million in 2021 for Goff.
These moves also come with real-life risks. Ramsey’s personality is one.
Ramsey has done a lot to establish himself as one of the NFL’s best cornerbacks. He’s also (in chronological order) called Steve Smith an “old man”; gotten himself kicked out of a game for an altercation with Raiders receiver Johnny Horton; cried on the sideline during a nine-game skid because he was tired of losing; called for a clean sweep of the defensive coaching staff more than once; gotten himself kicked out of a game for an altercation with Bengals receiver A.J. Green; directly criticized defensive coordinator Todd Wash for his lack of adjustments to New England’s offense in the second half of the 2017 AFC championship game; and gotten himself suspended for a week alongside former Jacksonville defensive end Dante Fowler Jr. after a bizarre rant directed at the media.
He was also featured in an August 2018 GQ article in which he called Buffalo quarterback Josh Allen “trash,” Atlanta’s Matt Ryan “overrated” and a product of Kyle Shanahan’s offensive system, and Pittsburgh’s Ben Roethlisberger “decent at best.”
After a November 2018 game against the Colts in which he was responsible for multiple coverage errors, Ramsey posted this on Twitter:
Soooo … yeah. The Rams know what they’re in for, and will hope to adjust accordingly. Phillips should keep Peters on an old-school schematic methodology in which pure outside cornerbacks are regarded as such. Moving Ramsey around to multiple positions in a base dime won’t do either side any favors.
There are four plays from Jacksonville’s Week 2 loss to Houston that encapsulate what makes Ramsey great, where his liabilities lie and how he should be used in the near term.
Where Ramsey provides optimal value as a player is his ability to take the league’s best receivers up the field, without safety help, at a dominant level. Here, he has the speed, flexibility and physical nature to hold Hopkins, the league’s best receiver, to an incompletion when most outside cornerbacks would have melted down somewhere along the route. Like Richard Sherman in his prime, Ramsey lives in a world that perfectly aligns technique and the predisposition to — if not intimidate, (a corner is not going to intimidate a guy like DeAndre Hopkins no matter what he does), at least hold the hand-fighting to a draw. Phillips’ defense has struggled a lot this year with calls between his cornerbacks and safeties as they’ve played more zone to accommodate Peters, and this should change as quickly as possible — especially if Talib is able to return later this season, because Talib is very much the same kind of player.
But this play later in the first quarter, followed with a minor Ramsey meltdown as it was, shows where he’s vulnerable. Hopkins is off the field for this play, and Ramsey is asked to cover receiver Kenny Stills in the slot. Stills crosses Ramsey’s face on an out route after moving him inside, and bigger cornerbacks don’t generally fare well in these circumstances — there are too many lanky moving parts to get in position in too short a time.
Another way to counter cornerbacks of Ramsey’s stature is to foil him with route combos and more quick angular stuff. Here, the Texans get a seven-yard gain from Hopkins on a quick slant, predicated with free space via a legal push-off.
But when Deshaun Watson tries to go deep to Hopkins again in the third quarter, it’s more of the same: Ramsey mirrors Hopkins’ route and adjusts perfectly to jump the play. The only thing preventing this play from becoming six points for the Jaguars is Ramsey’s drop.
There are also focus issues to deal with, like in this Week 1 touchdown pass from Patrick Mahomes to Sammy Watkins in which Ramsey covered Demarcus Robinson, stopped after Watkins caught the ball and watched as Watkins ran right through the middle of Jacksonville’s defense. Jacksonville’s defense was plagued with communication and placement errors last season, and Ramsey was as much as part of that as anyone else.
Ramsey’s metrics follow his assets and liabilities. In 2018, he allowed 53 catches on 97 targets for 749 yards, 246 yards after the catch, two touchdowns, three interceptions and an opponent passer rating of 73.8 as an outside corner, per Pro Football Focus. As a slot cornerback, Ramsey allowed seven catches on nine targets for 96 yards, 30 yards after the catch and an opponent passer rating of 111.1 from the slot.
Through three games in 2019, Ramsey allowed 15 catches on 24 overall targets for 192 yards, two touchdowns, and no interceptions. From the slot, he’d allowed two catches on two targets for 10 yards, and shown the liabilities seen above.
Ramsey is a player with a thoroughbred mentality. As long as the team he’s on understands that and uses his skills accordingly, the relationship should flourish. Under those circumstances, Ramsey is worth what it took to procure and keep his services. Anything else could be a disaster; or at the very least, another instance in which his talents are minimized and his personality is magnified – in all the wrong ways.
