House Rams

The Wound

This house left Los Angeles for St. Louis in 1995, won a throne there in January 2000, and then left again — back to Los Angeles in 2016, abandoning a second city that had done nothing to deserve it. Two cities hold grudges against this house simultaneously.

Its more recent wound is smaller and sharper: last January it went to the conference championship and lost 31–27 in Seattle, four points from the final field.

The response to that was the loudest thing anyone did all offseason.

The Heir in the Room

This house did two things this spring and they do not agree with each other.

First, it traded for Myles Garrett — the reigning Defensive Player of the Year, twice a winner of it in three seasons, five times an All-Pro, thirty years old and arguably the best player ever moved in his prime. That is a house saying now. That is a house looking at a four-point defeat and deciding the answer is the most destructive man in the sport, immediately, whatever it costs.

Second, holding the thirteenth pick, with the reigning MVP returning and every observer expecting a receiver or a tackle — someone who could help win this year — it drafted a quarterback. Ty Simpson, out of Alabama, to succeed Matthew Stafford.

Stafford is thirty-eight. He has just been named the best player in the realm. He signed for fifty-five million across one year with rolling guarantees that let both sides reconsider every spring, which is a contract that says we’ll see in legal language.

So the arrangement is this: the finest season of a long career, played in a building where the man hired to replace him is sitting in the same meetings, learning the same offense, waiting. Simpson is not even the Understudy yet — he is competing with Stetson Bennett for the right to hold the clipboard.

Nobody has done anything wrong. That is what makes it uncomfortable. The house is right to want the throne now and right to plan for after, and the lord has to walk past the evidence of the second thing every day while delivering the first.

The Lord

Matthew Stafford, thirty-eight, the reigning MVP, in what everyone involved is quietly treating as the last real chance.

The Knights

• Myles Garrett — on the Watch. The best defender alive, bought with Jared Verse and three future first-class picks.

Ancient Grudges

• House 49ers. The oldest rivalry in the West, over a hundred and fifty meetings, and genuinely unpleasant.
• House Seahawks. Four points, last January, and it is very fresh.
• House Saints. They know what they did.

What Changed This Spring

Garrett in, at enormous cost. Simpson drafted thirteenth as the succession. The realm responded by installing this house as the favourite to win everything.

Prophecy

Now. Not next year. The oldest lord in the realm and the best defender in it, in the same building, for one season.