Josaiah Stewart Has Never Done This Before. The Rams Need Him to Start Now.
The depth chart at defensive end tells you everything you need to know about where this team is vulnerable: Josaiah Stewart, listed first, with no proven alternative behind him who has logged meaningful snaps in a real game. That's the situation the Rams inherit the moment Myles Garrett goes to IR. Not a rotation problem. A succession problem.
What makes this genuinely alarming isn't the injury itself — every contender absorbs injuries — it's the context surrounding it. I wrote last week about how the Rams constructed their entire defensive identity around Garrett, a singular talent whose arrival was supposed to solve the pass-rush question that plagued them through their 2025 wild-card run. That question is back, unanswered, before Week 2. Braden Fiske posted five sacks in 2025 and is a legitimate interior force, but interior pressure and edge pressure are not interchangeable currencies. Offensive coordinators know the difference. They'll scheme accordingly.
The 2025 close-game numbers are what make this feel consequential rather than merely unfortunate. The Rams won only four of nine games decided by a possession — a 44 percent rate against a 71 percent overall baseline. That gap doesn't exist because of Matthew Stafford; he threw 52 touchdowns and nine interceptions across the season. It exists because the defense couldn't get stops when the game was on the line, in the fourth quarter, against a competent offense that had time to adjust. That's exactly when a dominant edge rusher earns his contract. That's exactly what they no longer have.
Stewart is the answer the depth chart offers, and to be fair to him, the question hasn't been asked yet in live action. He hasn't been tested in a situation where an offense knows he's the primary threat and game-plans for him specifically. That's not a knock on his ability — it's just the reality of stepping from a complementary role into the role. The Rams' defensive secondary, anchored by Kam Curl's physicality and the newly arrived Trent McDuffie, can absorb some of the pressure if Stewart generates even a fraction of the disruption Garrett would have. But "a fraction of Garrett" is a significant ask of any player in the league, let alone one making his first extended run as the featured rusher.
My read is that the next three weeks will tell us more about this defense's ceiling than the entire offseason did. If Stewart can force at least two or three genuinely contested fourth-down situations in close games, the secondary has the talent to finish them. If he can't — if opposing quarterbacks are getting clean pockets in the fourth quarter the way they did last January — the structural weakness that ended the Rams' 2025 season doesn't just persist. It compounds. The Rams were already a team that needed to outperform their close-game record. Now they have to do it without the one player they signed specifically to fix it.