One team was predictably absent from the top of the latest NFL draft: The Los Angeles Rams. Their last first-round pick was in 2016. They don’t have another until 2024. They traded away all of their first rounders from 2017 to 2023 in a series of megadeals, including one this offseason in which they traded their last first rounder—No. 1 overall pick Jared Goff—for quarterback Matthew Stafford.

But there’s something unusual about this team that’s practically invisible at the NFL’s most visible offseason event. The NFL offseason revolves around the Rams. 

Other teams pilfer their coaches and executives. They swing blockbuster deals. The Rams have won enough, in different enough ways, that when other teams hit the reset button, they want to steal the Rams’ playbook in more ways than one. 

“We’ve had a lot of turnover for all the right reasons,” coach Sean McVay says. “Those are positive problems if you’re having guys leave for better opportunities.” 

The Rams were a moribund franchise for years until they made the bold decision to tap Sean McVay and make him the youngest coach in modern NFL history. Four years later, he’s still the youngest coach in the league. The difference now is that his résumé includes a Super Bowl appearance and a 43-21 record. 

One of the NFL’s worst teams quickly became one of the NFL’s best teams under McVay and general manager Les Snead. The idea of hiring a young and unproven coach—particularly one with a connection to McVay—became the hottest thing in football since the wildcat.  

“In an era where people are looking for turnarounds, we are a turnaround,” team president Kevin Demoff says. 

Three of McVay’s former assistants have gone on to become head coaches in the last three years, and the latest didn’t even have to move stadiums. The Los Angeles Chargers, who share SoFi Stadium with the Rams, hired former defensive coordinator Brandon Staley this offseason after just one season under McVay.  

When general manager Les Snead swung the deal for Stafford, he was negotiating with someone he knew pretty well: new Lions general manager Brad Holmes, who just weeks earlier had been the Rams’ director of college scouting and became one of the league’s rare top decision makers who is Black. The Rams received two compensatory third-round picks when Detroit hired Holmes under the NFL’s new initiative for developing minority coaches and GMs. 

That’s only the beginning. There were eight other coaches or executives who were poached for other jobs around football, including the Seahawks’ new offensive coordinator and the Packers new defensive coordinator. Even the Rams’ assistant equipment manager was lured away by the new regime with the Texans. 

It’s a notion the Rams embrace despite having to spend every offseason sorting through stacks of résumés every winter to find replacements. 

“I’ve said to our group, ‘We’ve got to be a teaching hospital, where future bright young doctors want to get a rotation spot,” Snead says. “You’ve got to train people to step up.” 

The most telling case was with a coach who they let leave even though they didn’t have to. After the 2017 season, then-Rams offensive coordinator Matt LaFleur interviewed for the Tennessee Titans head coaching job. He didn’t get it. But they offered him a different gig: Titans offensive coordinator. McVay could have blocked the lateral move, according to league rules. It would have been normal—even expected—for him to do so. 

He didn’t. McVay, a former offensive coordinator himself, calls the Rams’ plays on offense. Keeping LaFleur would have meant keeping him from gaining that experience elsewhere. And following one season with the Titans, LaFleur was named the head coach of the Green Bay Packers. 

“It wasn’t the best thing for the Rams,” McVay says. “But it was best for him.” 

It isn’t purely unselfish. McVay says it helps him recruit higher-quality coaches when they know he supports their careers. He also adds that the more coaches who come through, the more new ideas that flow in. 

McVay also understands better than anybody the value of this type of institutional support. It’s why he’s here in the first place. His grandfather, John McVay, was a coach for the Giants and then an executive with the 49ers during their Super Bowl years, which gave his grandson a world-class early education into the sport. Then he was brought along by the likes of Jon Gruden. He rose the ranks so quickly he made history because a collection of elite football minds put him in the football jet stream. He was firsthand proof of the value of deliberately nurturing talent on a coaching staff. 

That’s why he has a collection of acolytes who spent last weekend in draft war rooms across the league. But those guys aren’t the only reason the Rams have outsized gravity this time of year. It also has to do with the reason they never seem to have a first-round pick. 

Even before Tom Brady hoisted his seventh Lombardi Trophy in February, Snead had engineered the biggest trade of the offseason. He sent Goff and two first rounders to the Lions for Stafford. It cost two early picks because the price was twofold: the Rams wanted to acquire Stafford and unload Goff, whose star had dimmed from the days when the Rams awarded him a lucrative contract. 

It’s a brazen bet that Stafford will play well enough and the rest of the team will be good enough without the draft capital they gave up. It’s also a belief McVay can mold midround picks into quality assets the way he does with coaches. 

It isn’t a risk they’re unfamiliar with. No team swings more deals for big players than the Rams. Over the last several years, they’ve traded for Stafford, wide receiver Sammy Watkins and three star cornerbacks in Jalen Ramsey, Marcus Peters and Aqib Talib. 

It’s a tactic to win football games. It’s also one that neatly dovetails with their new home in LA, where splashy moves fit right in with their surroundings. 

“Winning is important here, like it is in every market, and being entertaining is important,” Demoff says. “You have to understand your audience.” 

Write to Andrew Beaton at andrew.beaton@wsj.com

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