HERMOSA BEACH — No. 19 overall pick Jared Verse, a member of the Los Angeles Rams for less than 24 hours, had just arrived at his hotel near the team’s draft house on Friday afternoon when he got an urgent message from a team employee: We have to get to the house!
The Rams, who had been working the phones all morning to try to trade up from their 52nd pick, had just agreed to terms with the Carolina Panthers to get up to No. 39. And their target was defensive lineman Braden Fiske, who played alongside Verse at Florida State.
Could Verse and his parents get to the draft house in time to call Fiske? It took a race through local traffic and a literal sprint up the winding three-story staircase to the war room to do it, but when Fiske picked up his phone, he heard his former (and current) teammate.
“They said, ‘You want to meet your new teammate?’” said Verse, laughing as he recounted the story on Friday afternoon.
“I’m like, ‘Oh, who is it?’”
“‘Fiske!’”
Verse had to check to make sure.
“‘Fiske, is that you?’ … We just keep talking! You could hear how much it meant to him in that moment, to be a part of it,” Verse said. “Even just getting drafted, but (also) me being (a part of it), one of my close friends. Someone I’ve grown a relationship with not just on the football field but as a person, someone who I just hang around. … Having him be out here with me, me being out here with him — it’s just out of this world.”
Braden Fiske started his career at Western Michigan before playing one season at Florida State. (Kirby Lee / USA Today)
At face value, the trade terms to get Fiske at No. 39 look steep. The Rams sent No. 52 (their original second-rounder), No. 155 and a future second-round pick to Carolina.
But multiple team sources — including earlier in the day, before the second round began — identified Fiske as the Rams’ top target heading into Day 2. The Rams already knew they would not get any of their top-ranked players without making a trade to a higher pick. An early run on defensive linemen increased the urgency to get to Fiske and likely increased the trade terms.
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“We spent, really all of last night and all day today, trying to get up (higher in the round),” general manager Les Snead said. “And finally it happened.”
The Athletic’s lead draft analyst, Dane Brugler, noted in his scouting report of Fiske that he’s a “throwback brawler” who doesn’t wear gloves when he plays and has significant athleticism, power and twitch despite lacking a deep arsenal of countermoves. The Rams liked Fiske’s attitude toward the game as well as his athletic traits — but specifically had a vision for the way Fiske and Verse played off each other in college.
Snead said the identification of the two players as a possible pairing happened back in February, as coaches started getting involved in the pre-draft process.
“What you do know is those two players play urgently and violently,” said Snead, “and you just knew, ‘OK, pairing them with Kobie (Turner), Byron (Young), the rest of our defenders … that would be fun.’”
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Entering the draft, the Rams couldn’t have predicted picking Verse, another top player in their evaluations, at No. 19 — that depended on a unique run of 14 offensive players, including six quarterbacks, to open the first round. But once they got Verse, they opened back up their discussion of the combination of the two players.
“We don’t say games to each other anymore,” said Verse, of the rush patterns and move combinations defensive linemen run with each other to affect the quarterback. “We just kind of look at each other, ‘Oh, you want to run this? I got you.’ … We talked about it, ‘Imagine if we go to the same team? That would be so cool.’ And now it happened!”
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Verse and Fiske, each once transfers from smaller programs, both said they always challenged each other to work harder in Tallahassee.
“The way he works, that’s something that I saw right away,” Fiske said. “I mean, just from a competitive standpoint, I wasn’t going to let someone outwork me. That’s something that made us gravitate toward each other. The closer we got, the harder we worked. He was someone who was in the building with me until seven, eight o’clock at night just watching film, breaking stuff down. … From day one, I knew, ‘OK, this is the guy I’m going to be around because I can see the way he works.’”
In the first two days of their 2024 draft, the Rams placed a premium on building their new identity along their defensive line — in a post-Aaron Donald world.
Nobody will ever replace the all-time great and future Hall of Famer, but it’s clear the Rams believed they needed to spend high capital on multiple players to ensure production in the pass and run game.
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“He’s got very big shoes,” Verse said, “that was a game-changer. There’s not a lot of players out there who were game-changers, that is a game-changer. That is somebody who you have to game plan for, or you will lose.
“I have my own set of shoes, though. I have my own things that I have to do. I am a whole different player than he is. I want to have the impact that he has on the game, but day by day I am working just to become the best me.”
(Top photo of Jared Verse: Courtesy of Los Angeles Rams)
