“It’s an honor and a blessing to be in this building,” Myles Garrett said at his introductory press conference as a Los Angeles Ram after the team swung a blockbuster deal Monday for the unanimous 2025 NFL Defensive Player of the Year.
“I have a lot of respect for all the guys here from the coaching staff, management and many of the players that I’ve got to see firsthand,” Garrett continued. “It’s a very quality team, quality business and I like the way things operate and I’m looking forward to helping bring a championship here to L.A.”
Those might seem like the typical platitudes any player says when joining a new club, especially one with a high profile and even higher expectations. But then again, Garrett is coming to L.A. from the Cleveland Browns, where he genuinely never got to see a quality business operate before.
Yes, that sounds harsh — but Garrett’s Cleveland career was basically a nine-year experiment in how much dysfunction (or rather, how little) one generational defensive star can actually compensate for.
In his previous nine years as an NFL player, all spent with the Browns, Garrett had 125.5 sacks, easily the most in football. He also compiled 123 points of Approximate Value (AV), Pro-Football-Reference’s all-in-one value metric for NFL players, which ranked fifth in the league behind four quarterbacks (Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, Jared Goff and Lamar Jackson) and ahead of the next-highest defender, Pittsburgh’s Cam Heyward, at 120. At the same time, Cleveland had the NFL’s sixth-worst record over that span, finishing with a negative Simple Rating System (SRS) score eight times in nine years:
Overall, Garrett’s teams have had an average SRS of -2.8 if we weight each season by the amount of AV he had in it, including a Defensive SRS of -0.4 — meaning the average Garrett team was a half-point per game worse than average on defense alone, despite Garrett setting a new official NFL record for sacks last year and recording the third-most sacks ever in a player’s first nine seasons.1
In modern NFL history, it’s pretty rare to find players this great who weren’t at least surrounded by an average level of respectability. Through age 30, Garrett ranks sixth out of 44 post-merger defensive players in total AV — trailing Lawrence Taylor, Ray Lewis, Junior Seau, Derrick Brooks and Aaron Donald — but he’s one of just four in that group (along with Fletcher Cox, Deion Sanders and Cortez Kennedy) who played for subpar defenses at the same time, and his -0.4 DSRS is the lowest of the bunch.
Other great defenders in the 100-AV club were eventually on worse teams. Hall of Fame cornerback Aeneas Williams, for instance, only played for three above-average defenses in his entire 14-year NFL career. Lavonte David and La’Roi Glover played for worse units than Garrett has as well.
We also know that even the most dominant individual defenders have a hard ceiling when it comes to lifting an entire team, or even just his own defense. Football is the ultimate weak-link sport. An elite edge-rusher — even a “game-wrecker” capable of 23 sacks — can’t play safety, cover the slot or, most certainly, fix a terrible offense. And even if they could just fix a defense, that success is notoriously short-lived anyway.
That doesn’t mean that Garrett is somehow overrated, or that the Rams’ bet on him was a bad one. L.A. smartly went all-in to maximize their star power while QB Matthew Stafford is still effective, as he’ll be entering his 18th NFL season at 38 years old. As Bill Barnwell points out, the Rams have additional urgency to take advantage of players like Puka Nacua, Kobie Turner, Byron Young and Braden Fiske outperforming cheap rookie contracts while they still can.2 And the market clearly thought the Garrett deal significantly juiced L.A.’s Super Bowl odds — check out the big spike in their Polymarket championship futures on Monday:
The Rams were already the kind of team that could plausibly win a Super Bowl if a few things broke right. (They almost beat the eventual Super Bowl winner in each of the past two playoffs.) Garrett is the kind of player who makes those breaks more likely to happen.
But liberation comes with pressure. In Cleveland, Garrett could be great even when the team around him wasn’t, because there was only so much one defensive player could reasonably be expected to fix. In L.A., that excuse is gone. Instead of existing mostly as its own achievement, Garrett’s greatness must now mean something in January and February.
The Rams are giving Garrett the “quality business” he praised on Monday, something he never really got from the Browns. Now we get to see what happens when arguably the best defender of his generation finally gets a team worthy of his talent — and whether he can meet the expectations that come with it.
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Trailing only Deacon Jones and Reggie White — that’s the kind of player Garrett has been in his career thus far!
Jared Verse was in this group as well, until he was shipped away in the Garrett deal.