There really wasn’t a position on the Rams’ roster that couldn’t use a little bit of help. Though they did fill some needs in free agency, they left themselves open to drafting a player at just about any position depending on who was available at the time of their pick.
Some positions were bigger needs than others, though. Kicker, for example, was likely in the must-draft category.
After the draft concluded on Saturday, general manager Les Snead told reporters that kicker was one of the team’s “dire needs,” though he didn’t say what the other ones were.
“I think we go in and we write down, let’s call it – I guess we call it dire needs. One of them was a kicker,” Snead said. “We didn’t really handle that until the sixth so there is an element of strategy, monitoring that situation. How many you have draftable? When are they going knowing what teams might be really going probable to draft a kicker? There’s always a list of needs. Maybe there are medium needs, maybe there are less than medium needs and you try to, at that point, let the board say, wow, we still may need that position, but there’s a better player, at least subjectively at that moment in mind and you somewhat follow your board, follow your needs and that’s the puzzle.”
The Rams addressed their hole at kicker in the sixth round, taking Stanford’s Joshua Karty at No. 209 overall. He was the second kicker off the board after Will Reichard went to the Vikings, ensuring that they got one of the kickers they really liked in this class.
“The neat thing is there were a few kickers that we all liked,” Snead said. “I think a lot of the NFL teams liked. I think they all got drafted and the good thing is we kind of waited and there were less teams that needed kickers or that were willing to draft them, so it enabled us, to all of us, probably to get a quality kicker here in the little bit later portion of Day 3.”
Both Brett Maher and Lucas Havrisik struggled as the team’s kicker last season, and that was after the Rams cut Tanner Brown and Christopher Dunn – two undrafted rookies who didn’t pan out during the offseason.
The hope is that Karty can solve the team’s struggles on special teams, potentially for several years to come. He made 24 of 27 field goals from 40-plus yards in the last two years, which was an area that the Rams’ kickers struggled from in 2023.