I don’t think anyone, after Blake Corum’s Week 3 game against the Cardinals in which he logged eight carries for 28 yards, thought the time had come for him to officially start splitting carries with Kyren Williams. It was likely, anyways, that Kyren managers might have already been stashing Corum.
There was, for about a week, that whole tornado of hot air about Kyren Williams returning punts and Blake Corum returning kickoffs. Coming off such a volume-heavy season, draft day saw many folks skeptical about Williams but bullish on Corum’s potential immediate value. Rams GM Les Snead did, after all, say he drafted Corum to avoid “totally running down” Williams. Of Corum during OTAs, Sean McVay said:
Blake Corum has really stood out. Mature beyond his years. I love the way that he handles himself. I love even more how when there’s been a couple things that didn’t go the way we wanted, how he responded the next play. The mental toughness that you see from him.
Fast forward to post-Week 5, and I’m feeling a bit different about Corum’s rest-of-season value. And I’m not sure it’s because I believe this Rams offense is on the rise. One of Corum’s simplest paths to fantasy relevance this season is a Kyren Williams injury. Another is if the Rams realize sooner than later that 2024 is a lost season. The latter may be a loss or two away.
This is probably more a situational/circumstantial thinkpiece than it may be an analysis-heavy argument. But this is a 1-4 Rams team with a core of aging, expensive veterans on offense. We might be looking at some serious personnel overhaul as soon as the trade deadline.
Analysis
An unfortunate cro$$roads
Flat-out, the Rams are going to face some major and potentially-devastating contract decisions this offseason. Matthew Stafford’s contract for 2025 and 2026 includes massive cap hits ($50.5 million and $49.5 million, respectively), and—get this—zero dollars in guaranteed money. Moving on from Stafford after a lost season is almost a foregone conclusion for the Los Angeles Rams, 2021 Super Bowl be damned.
As you’d imagine: the Breakfast Brothers roll together, even still. Kupp, who’s still nursing an ankle injury he suffered in Week 2, has missed an absolutely-unsustainable 17 games since the start of the 2022 season. He’s missed an entire season out of the last three. The health concerns—hamstrings, ankles, all the crucial lower-body muscles and tendons—are very real.
It hurts to type, but Kupp’s contract is far too financially onerous when you look at the statistical production. It’s just not there. Kupp’s base salary for 2025 is $12.5 million, with an additional $7.5 million in bonuses. This would amount to something like $20 million against the Rams’ salary cap. Twenty million! Scary figure for a team that will likely be facing tight salary cap restrictions, if you ask me.
By this I mean: if this Rams team gets the slightest sniff after the Week 6 bye that 2024 is a lost, no-playoff-bid season, they might have nothing to lose by shopping Stafford, at the very least, and looking to the future.
Kyren & Corum
Seeing as Kyren Williams is in the third year of his fifth-round rookie contract, the Rams would be in line to offer him a massive extension following the 2025 season. They’d have to match the market price around the likes of Christian-McCaffrey-money, and, if the Rams retain McVay and Snead, I just doubt that happens.
I’m not suggesting I think Kyren gets moved with any degree of swiftness. I just think we all are adult enough to admit the current reality of the offensive skill weapon contract negotiation landscape: it’s basically a heatmap of holdouts. A Kyren Williams holdout isn’t whatsoever off the table of reasonable possibilities for the 2025 season. If the Rams try to get him to play ball, I fear the eventuality would get slapped with a Probable game designation, so to speak.
The Rams, then, might be inclined to get Corum a solid battery of regulation reps as the season goes along, even if it is behind Kyren Williams. If the Rams have any intent to move on from Williams—imagine what they might get if they traded him!—they’ll likely see it as a sound solution to keep him as healthy as possible.
Bottom Line
I know this is about as circumstantial, roundabout, and antithetical to my follow-the-data methodology on almost everything else I post. But Corum’s usage in what was, for at least a little bit, a slightly competitive game with the Packers got my wheels turning.
He’s such a worthy stash play if you can spare the bench slot. There could be massive standalone value here as soon as mid-November.
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