THOUSAND OAKS – Disneyland. Hollywood. Miles of sunny beaches. To the list of Southern California attractions, add a cluster of temporary modular buildings tucked into the quiet suburbs of Ventura County.
Ndamukong Suh chose the Rams. A visit last month to their practice facility helped sway Suh, at age 31, to take a one-year contract, deep into a career that has stamped him as a dominant defensive lineman.
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It’s too early to list the Rams among the NFL elite. They’ll need a prove-it year, and a playoff run, in 2018 to deserve those accolades, but by at least one measure, the Rams have arrived. Top players now view the Rams as a destination, and Suh is the 300-pound pied piper who decided to bet on them, and himself.
“I’d say we’re in pretty good shape on paper but we have a lot to prove,” Suh said during Friday’s introductory news conference at Cal Lutheran. “I always play with a chip on my shoulder, and that’s really my focus, to come in here and put in a lot of work and make sure that I prove my worth.”
Suh cast an imposing presence Friday, seated between Coach Sean McVay and General Manager Les Snead, and likely will do so again when the season starts. Suh is expected to play nose tackle in the Rams’ 3-4 base defense, alongside Aaron Donald, the 2017 NFL Defensive Player of the Year.
The Rams’ offseason spending has been so prolific that they needed to make a roster move Friday simply to fit Suh’s one-year, $14-million contract under the salary cap. The Rams released cornerback Kavyon Webster, who has been recovering from Achilles and shoulder injuries, and shaved $3.5 million off their cap total.
The Rams remain open to re-signing Webster before the start of the season, but at this point, Webster is vying to be their third or fourth cornerback. The ability to add Suh and cut Webster was a no-brainer.
That didn’t make it a risk-free move. Suh has been a dominant defensive lineman over the past decade but, for the first time, he will be playing nose tackle in a base 3-4 defense. That’s a big change to make at age 31, but coordinator Wade Phillips shrugged at the idea that there might be a learning curve.”
“Last year when I came in, they said, gosh, you’re going to play a 3-4 and Aaron Donald, he’s not going to be able to play in a 3-4,” Phillips said. “So… It’s all about matchups.”
That’s what made Suh’s recruiting trip to Southern California last month so valuable. The Rams wooed him with an expensive dinner in Malibu, but the real work was done in front of a video screen.
Suh wanted specific input from every team about how they intended to use him. After visits with the Rams, New Orleans Saints and Tennessee Titans, Suh canceled a scheduled meeting with the Oakland Raiders and returned home to the Portland area, where he determined that the Rams provided the best fit, even if just on a one-year contract.
“To be able to watch film with the coaches was key,” Suh said. “That’s something that was important for me, each place I visited, was to watch film and talk to the coaches and see how they see me fitting in. Coach Phillips, I’ve seen him in Dallas and other places, do successful things with a multitude of different athletes. I think he will create a package that is best for every single player in this organization.”
Phillips clearly was key to Suh’s decision, and while McVay ultimately calls the shots in the locker room, Phillips’ presence will be very important on a team that has added a few strong personalities.
Suh and newly added cornerbacks Marcus Peters and Aqib Talib all have histories of on-field discipline issues, and there’s certainly a chance that putting them all in the same locker room could create a combustible situation.
Phillips, a laid-back Texan who has been in the NFL since 1976, seemed completely unbothered by the suggestion that he would have to “manage” a number of outspoken players.
“It’s not managing, though,” Phillips said. “I don’t manage players. I don’t handle them. I just work with players. … I want them to have personalities. A lot of them are really good because of their personalities. It’s a person-to-person business. It’s not a business that’s authoritarian, where it’s, ‘I say this and you do that.’ I explain why we’re doing things and let them know that I’m trying to get them better.”
At least on his introductory day, Suh certainly didn’t cut the figure of a public menace. He showed up in a suit and tie, smiled easily and introduced himself to every media member who wanted some of his time.
It’s official. ?#LARamspic.twitter.com/2ziFwTYygn
— Ndamukong Suh (@NdamukongSuh) April 6, 2018
Suh nodded toward his past, which included a two-game suspension for stomping on the arm of an opponent, but also said he didn’t believe it should forever define him.
“I think a reputation is something you create on your own but also gets skewed in different ways by other people,” Suh said. “I would say to anybody, to fans, come up to me as a normal human being and find out who I am and have a conversation with me. That’s what Coach McVay did, and that’s why we hit it off.”
That’s a large reason why Suh chose the Rams, and Ted Rath, the team’s strength and conditioning coach, is a friend of Suh who had been in his ear and touted McVay. That’s a big reason Suh chose the Rams, even though he reportedly had more lucrative offers from other teams.
This isn’t a one-off thing. Talib reportedly nixed trades (from Denver) to other teams out of a desire to join the Rams, and didn’t deny it recently when asked. Odell Beckham Jr., the target of brief trade talks between the Rams and New York Giants, reportedly said he wanted to come to Los Angeles.
Snead joked this week that prior to the 2017 season, the Rams’ primary selling point was weather. A franchise that hadn’t made the playoffs in 14 years couldn’t exactly sell itself as a winner.
Perception changed when the Rams hired McVay, and McVay hired Phillips, and players got a look at the whole package and started to get excited. Long before the Rams won 11 games and a division title last year, Snead said, players’ ears started to perk up around the league because the energy McVay brought.
“Sean was Sean before he even won a game,” Snead said. “I think a player could have vetted our team after the first team meeting, especially in OTAs, before we ever even won a game in ‘17, and I think our players would have said, ‘Look, you’d want to come play for this guy.’ ”