What are Les Snead’s draft tendencies?

Les Snead has been the general manager of the Rams since 2012, starting in St. Louis, staying with the team as they moved to Los Angeles, and then again as they fired Jeff Fisher and replaced him with Sean McVay. He has drawn praise for his aggressive trades and exception draft picks like Aaron Donald, but criticism as of late for the Rams’ salary cap issues and the cost paid to not have players such as Todd Gurley and Brandin Cooks.

Snead is now preparing for his ninth draft with the team next week, again doing so without a first round pick. It would not be surprising to see Snead try and get aggressive again, especially now that he has two second round picks because of the Cooks trade. Over at NFL.com, they posted an interesting video quickly outlining the draft history of each NFL general manager.

What did they have to say about Snead?

I wouldn’t say it was emphatically in-depth or anything, which is fine as they were hammering in 32 teams in a 20-minute video. Here’s the two takeaways:

70 players, 5 Pro Bowlers (7%, the video says that 10% is “good”)

Has made 7 first round picks and 7 first round trades

The Pro Bowl stuff is fine. I mean, think of the players the Rams have drafted who haven’t made a Pro Bowl: Trumaine Johnson, Michael Brockers, Alec Ogletree, Cooper Kupp, Lamarcus Joyner, Taylor Rapp, Tyler Higbee.

Some really good players. Some young players who haven’t had much of a chance yet to make a Pro Bowl. It’s early yet and the Pro Bowl qualifications go way beyond how good a player is and we know that.

We know that Snead is aggressive and we know that he seems to prefer consolidating his draft resources into upper-tier players over maybe spreading it out and hoping for depth and more scratch tickets. Snead has used the draft to come away with players like Marcus Peters, Jalen Ramsey, Aqib Talib, Dante Fowler, and so forth. Now that the Rams have two second and two third round picks, the idea of them making deals on day two would not be a wild fantasy.

We also know he isn’t afraid of not drafting until round three, which happened in 2017, 2018, and almost 2019.