The Los Angeles Rams might soon need to think about the future of their quarterback room. Matthew Stafford will be 38 when the 2025 season is over and has already mentioned that retirement might be on the table.
Fortunately, the Rams have a lot of options if and when Stafford leaves. The team possesses two first-round picks thanks to a 2025 draft-day trade with the Atlanta Falcons, which gives them a lot of flexibility in finding a successor. L.A. could use the picks to move up in the draft to take a rookie or trade the picks to acquire a veteran starter. Additionally, the Rams could look at free agency for a potential quarterback, or even roll the dice with backup Stetson Bennett (and/or Jimmy Garoppolo, who is an impending free agent himself).
The Ringer’s Diante Lee, though, predicts the Rams will look at the veteran starting quarterback market instead of the draft because of general manager Les Snead’s history. Snead did it with Stafford in 2021, so it stands to reason he could do it again after Stafford retires to capitalize on a roster that is young and ascending.
Lee even has someone the Rams should target first: Jacksonville Jaguars quarterback Trevor Lawrence.
Los Angeles’s roster is built to make deep playoff runs right now, which takes several unproven quarterback options off the table. I’d also imagine that the Rams want to avoid being on the quarterback carousel again in a couple of years, so finding a quarterback already on a long-term contract would be a major plus. So if the Rams need to replace Stafford right away, the best option might be Trevor Lawrence, a highly talented player who’s under contract for several years—and who wouldn’t put any weighty contract guarantees on their books. After a trade, Lawrence’s contract would basically be a series of roster bonuses that pay him less than $50 million per season through 2028, a big discount for a starting quarterback of his age with high potential.
It bears repeating that any trade for Lawrence has such severe ramifications for Jacksonville that it’s probably not worth it for the Jags to deal, but if there’s one quarterback trade to melt our collective brains, this would be it.
A trade for Lawrence could be very similar to the Stafford deal for another reason: Much like Detroit Lions general manager Brad Holmes worked with Snead in L.A., Jacksonville general manager James Gladstone is also a former Rams front office executive. Gladstone worked for Snead in various roles from 2019 to 2024 before taking the job with the Jaguars, and the team’s head coach, Liam Coen, also worked for Rams head coach Sean McVay.
Those connections could create an easy line of communication between the two teams if a trade were ever to manifest. The biggest issue for the Jaguars, though, is that there is no clear successor for Lawrence. Jacksonville traded its 2026 first-round pick to the Cleveland Browns to move up and take Travis Hunter in the 2025 NFL Draft, and it might be difficult to find a good replacement elsewhere considering how well Lawrence has played lately.
But, if the Rams move both their first-rounders for Lawrence, the Jaguars could get a nice top-10 pick back depending on how the Atlanta Falcons end the season.
We have a long way to go before the 2026 offseason, but this is an intriguing idea for the Rams’ future-building plans.