Did Aaron Donald spell the end for Jared Verse’s Rams tenure? Cam Newton believes so

Cam Newton is a pretty straight shooter; he usually calls it like it is on the football front.

On his show this week, Newton brought up a meme that has been circulating since the Myles Garrett trade broke and used it to make a point that landed harder than most people expected.

“There’s a meme that’s going around, brothers and sisters,” Newton said. “That we knew that ole boy’s days were numbered, who got traded to the Cleveland Browns. Once Aaron Donald did a workout with him, and he was sitting down, and Aaron Donald was still out there pressing out them little push-ups.”

I haven’t found this meme yet, but what he is talking about is when Jared Verse challenged Rams legend Aaron Donald to a workout and learned a lesson after losing to who he called a “psychopath.”

“The optics don’t look good, Peggy.”

It would be hard to believe that the Rams would actually trade a defensive face of the franchise player over a workout video. But that would be a better rumor than to believe they traded him over his recent interview with Ruba Wilson.

Then Cam said something that actually saved the argument and reframed the whole conversation in my mind.

Per Newton, “There has never been a time that I knew that a follow-up team has had the Defensive Player of the Year and MVP on the same team the following year. That’s something special. And it puts the owners to say, hey, I can see it now — the Los Angeles Rams are the team that everybody’s gonna be playing with on Madden.”

That is a real acknowledgment. The Garrett trade, paired with Stafford‘s MVP season, creates a combination the league has not seen in the modern era. Newton got there, even if he took the scenic route.

But he may be right that the opportunity to seize this moment was greater than what Verse brought to the table. He is a phenomenal bullrush pass rusher, but he was also a subpar finesse rusher with not many moves in his arsenal to offset his gifted bullrushing talent.

When Newton was asked about the Verse side of the equation, he kept it blunt. On what sending Verse to Cleveland meant for the Browns:

“It made it more unrealistic for them to win.”

That is a hard take for Browns fans who were ultimately teased during this offseason with the hopes that Deshaun Watson could potentially be back at his 2019 form and that, combined with Garrett on a ferocious defense, they could have been on the better side of the win column.

But the toughest part of his comments was reserved for Cleveland.

“Now we have to see what Deshaun Watson does, because our best player that has been giving us relevance outside of Shedeur Sanders — they’re in a pickle in that quarterback room.”

That is the real story for the Browns. Verse is an exciting acquisition, but he is walking angrily into an organization that still does not know who its starting quarterback is and isn’t even trying to win anymore. The draft capital helps, and the direction is at least more interesting than it was a week ago, but everyone knows Cleveland will just waste them. Newton was just nice enough to put into plain language what every honest sports fan already knows.

Verse went from the best team in the NFL to the worst team in the NFL.