Secondary was a major reason the Los Angeles Rams fell short of the Super Bowl this season. Pro Football Focus believes signing cornerback Jamel Dean would “just make sense” for the Rams in free agency.
PFF’s Dalton Wasserman shared his reasoning for Dean to Los Angeles in his Feb. 13 column:
“For the season, they ranked third in the NFL in PFF coverage grade, but from Week 13 onward, they ranked just 19th. Struggles at cornerback, where a cast of characters played for Los Angeles all season, left the Rams with an incomplete defense that cost them in big moments.
Tampa Bay’s Jamel Dean is arguably the top cornerback on the market. He earned a 75.9 PFF coverage grade this season while picking off three passes. He is still just 29 years old and has earned at least a 72.5 PFF coverage grade in each of his seven NFL seasons. Dean has historically excelled in zone coverage, which fits with a Rams defense that runs zone at the second-highest rate in the NFL.”
For whatever reason, the Rams’ front office felt the defense would be just fine without a high-level player in the secondary. That hasn’t been the case since the team parted ways with Jalen Ramsey. It’s painfully obvious after watching L.A. this season that the secondary, led by a group of mostly solid, but not long-term starting-caliber guys, was only going to hold up for so long, given that it was nowhere close to being a championship-caliber unit.
Dean has a championship pedigree, having won a Super Bowl with the Bucs in 2020. During his seven years in Tampa Bay, Dean has recorded 359 combined tackles, 61 passes defensed and 11 interceptions in 96 career games. In 2025, he even allowed a 49.2 completion percentage and a 63.1 passer rating in coverage, both his lowest marks given up since his stellar 2021 campaign.
At one point, Dean was even the highest-graded corner in football:
After two years of mostly standing idly by during the free agency period, Los Angeles must sign a big-ticket player this offseason. Adding Dean from Tampa Bay would be a boon for the secondary and, as PFF so elegantly put it, the move would “just make sense.”
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