National Football League

Rams GM calls Matthew Stafford, Aaron Donald, Cooper Kupp 'pillars'

Published Mar. 10, 2023 7:09 a.m. ET

The Los Angeles Rams are roughly $16 million over the salary cap entering the NFL league year, but a few players won't be moved in order to help them create cap space.

Rams general manager Les Snead said Matthew Stafford, Aaron Donald and Cooper Kupp are the "weight-bearing walls" on their roster, indicating that they won't be traded.

Snead specifically pointed out Stafford as a player who will be a part of the Rams' future. The 35-year-old quarterback missed eight games this past season after going into concussion protocol twice and suffered a spinal cord contusion en route to a 5-12 finish.

"I think we’ll definitely rely on Matthew, he’s definitely one of our pillars," Snead said. "He’s definitely someone we’re going to rely on, [who] we’re gonna have to rely on as we do remodel this."

The word "remodel" was a common theme of Snead's pre-free agency press conference on Thursday. Snead explained why he's looking to "remodel" the 2021 Super Bowl champs instead of "rebuild" them.

"In a rebuild, you would just bulldoze the house down and begin rebuilding from the ground up," Snead said, adding that Stafford, Kupp and Donald are the kind of players you "remodel" around.

With those three players off-limits though, others will have to be moved. Linebacker Bobby Wagner has already been released, saving the Rams $5 million. It's been reported in recent weeks that Jalen Ramsey and Leonard Floyd are likely to be traded or moved soon while Allen Robinson has been given permission to seek a trade.

Snead notably didn't call Ramsey, Floyd or Robinson a "pillar" for the franchise moving forward, but when asked if they were trading those players, he said that he wanted to "keep the specifics of those in-house."

However, Snead didn't deny that he's been active in trade talks in the early parts of the offseason. He estimated that he's already taken trade calls on "probably nine players."

Snead anticipates that this will be an active offseason in Los Angeles.

"We're trying to assess situations, figure out how to get under the cap [and] what's the best way to do that," Snead said. "... We've had calls on a lot of our players. Probably other places trying to figure out what are we doing bigpicture and things like that. It's been a busy offseason discussing players."

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