Myles Garrett Is A Ram After The Browns Made The NFL Trade Nobody Thought Would Actually Happen

The Cleveland Browns traded Myles Garrett to the Los Angeles Rams on Monday, the two-time Defensive Player of the Year, the holder of the NFL's single-season sack record with 23 in 2025, and the player that Browns general manager Andrew Berry had called "a career Brown" as recently as March, in exchange for pass rusher Jared Verse, a 2027 first-round pick, a 2028 second-round pick and a 2029 third-round pick.

The trade was announced Monday June 1 after 4 PM Eastern time, a specific timing choice driven by the NFL calendar's dead cap accounting rules.

The Browns had restructured Garrett's contract in March specifically to make a June 1 trade more manageable, moving option bonus payments to push the dead cap from a $64.5 million single-year hit to a split of approximately $40 million across 2026 and 2027.

Every piece of the trade's timeline, from the March restructure to the June 1 announcement, was engineered to make the financial reality of moving the best defensive player in football as digestible as possible for the team doing the moving.

It is the third time in NFL history that a Defensive Player of the Year award winner changed teams the following season.

The prior two were Deion Sanders in 1995 and Dana Stubblefield in 1998. ESPN's Bill Barnwell wrote Monday that there is a reasonable argument that Garrett is the best player to be traded in the modern NFL during the prime of his career.

The Player The Browns Said They Would Never Trade

The specific irony of this trade is the distance between what the Browns said they would do and what they eventually did. Garrett signed a four-year, $160 million extension last offseason, a contract that runs through his age-35 season in 2030 and that was accompanied by language from the organization about its commitment to building around him.

When Garrett made a trade request, the Browns rebuffed it. When reporters asked about his availability, Berry produced the career Brown line.

The Rams kept calling. They were, according to ESPN reporting, the only team that continued pressing Cleveland on a deal after most of the league accepted the Browns' public position.

They called during the NFL Combine. They called during the draft. They called in May. Each time, Cleveland said no, until the Rams offered a package that Berry eventually determined he could not refuse.

The package they offered made the math clear. The Browns receive Verse, a two-time Pro Bowl pass rusher who won the 2024 Defensive Rookie of the Year award out of Florida State and who will cost Cleveland only $4.1 million in cap space in 2026 on his rookie contract, plus three premium draft picks.

Cleveland now holds two first-round picks in the 2027 NFL Draft, a second-round pick in 2028 and a third-round pick in 2029.

The Browns have also privately calculated that the trade saves them approximately $30 million in cash compared to keeping Garrett through the duration of his contract. Verse is not eligible for a contract extension until after the 2026 season, meaning Cleveland has time to evaluate him before making a commitment.

The organization told reporters Monday it is "fully prepared to pay Verse when the time is right."

For a team that has been rebuilding since the failed Deshaun Watson era and still has no clear franchise quarterback, the incoming draft capital is the foundation of a different future than the one Garrett's contract represented.

What Garrett Brings To The Rams

The Los Angeles Rams enter the 2026 season as one of the most loaded offensive rosters in the NFC, Matthew Stafford, the 2025 MVP; Davante Adams; Puka Nacua; Kyren Williams; Trent McDuffie and Jaylen Watson in the secondary.

The one area where the roster had genuine questions was the pass rush. Garrett eliminates those questions in a single transaction.

He set the NFL single-season sack record with 23 in 2025. He has won Defensive Player of the Year twice in the past three seasons.

At 30 years old, he is operating at the peak of his career, not a player who was dominant in his prime but is declining, but a player who may be as good right now as he has ever been.

Rams defensive coordinator Chris Shula now has the league's best defensive weapon to deploy in what was already one of the better defensive systems in the NFC.

The Rams ran dime packages, six defensive backs, at the highest rate in the NFL in 2025, a scheme that is particularly effective when the pass rush can generate pressure without needing additional rushers. Garrett generates that pressure consistently enough to make the scheme work even more effectively.

His contract runs through 2030 at $160 million total. His 2026 cap hit for the Rams is $23.47 million, which reduces their $27.4 million in cap space but does not eliminate their flexibility.

The Rams are giving up their 2027 first-round pick, which they can afford to do because their QB succession plan is handled through the Ty Simpson pick and the Matthew Stafford extension, and two additional picks in subsequent years.

The specific decision to draft Ty Simpson 13th overall in the 2026 NFL Draft, which was criticized at the time as an unusual priority, now makes complete strategic sense.

Having a quarterback successor in house freed the Rams to spend a first-round pick on a pass rusher who is already one of the best players in the NFL. Les Snead and Sean McVay pushed all their chips into the middle on Monday, and Myles Garrett is what was in the middle.

The Day Two Other Blockbusters Also Happened

The Garrett trade landed on the same Monday that AJ Brown was traded from the Philadelphia Eagles to the New England Patriots, the receiver deal that the entire NFL had been waiting for since April, also timed for June 1 because of dead cap accounting.

The Eagles received a 2028 first-round pick and a 2027 fifth-rounder for Brown, who joins Drake Maye and coach Mike Vrabel, who coached Brown in Tennessee, in New England.

June 1 has historically been one of the most active single days on the NFL transaction calendar because of the dead cap splitting that makes previously unthinkable trades suddenly manageable.

Monday delivered two unthinkable trades on the same afternoon, Garrett out of Cleveland and Brown out of Philadelphia, in what may be the most consequential single-day transaction period in the NFL since the offseason opened.

The Rams now have Garrett and Stafford. The Browns now have Verse, two 2027 first-round picks and a different future than the one they had been promising publicly. The Patriots now have AJ Brown and Drake Maye.

The NFL's offseason is not over. But Monday's transactions will be discussed when the season's first games are played in September.