Trent McDuffie called Jaylen Watson before the Rams had finished turning their cornerback room over and told him, “Bro, you never know.” Five days later, Watson had a new deal with Los Angeles, and the two former Kansas City teammates were headed for the same locker room again.
McDuffie, who was traded to the Rams on March 4, 2025, said he followed that call with a second pitch: “We might get you. We might get you. Keep an open mind.” Watson signed on March 9, giving Los Angeles two players from the same 2022 draft class and two defenders who had spent all four years together in Kansas City before landing in Southern California.
The sequence matters because it turned a roster reset into something closer to a reunion. McDuffie was a first-round pick in the 2022 draft. Watson went in the seventh round. One was a premium selection, the other a late flier, and yet the Rams now appear ready to lean on both of them as central pieces of a secondary they wanted to revitalize.
That was not the original plan, according to Rams general manager Les Snead. He said the team did not initially intend to bring both players to Los Angeles, even though he kept spotting McDuffie while he was scouting Watson as an impending free agent. Snead also said he had heard whispers that the Chiefs could be interested in trading Watson, a possibility that helped push the idea from background noise into something real.
The Rams’ path also underscores how quickly a roster can change once the right names surface at the same time. Emmanuel Forbes Jr. remained on the Rams roster, and the team could still add another rookie in the draft, but McDuffie and Watson are already poised to be the Rams’ top two cornerbacks in 2026. That is a long way from the 2022 draft class, when they entered the league on opposite ends of the board and spent all four years together in Kansas City.
The odd part is how accidental the pairing first looked. Los Angeles started with one defender in view, then found itself circling back to the other. McDuffie noticed that possibility early enough to warn Watson not to close the door. For the Rams, the result was a cornerback room built not from a single master plan but from two moves that ended up fitting together better than anyone expected.
