AP

Why did Rams General Manager Les Snead decide to make so many aggressive moves this offseason? In part because he watched how the Eagles won the Super Bowl.

Snead doesn’t just mean that he knew his team needed to get better to unseat the Eagles atop the NFC. He also means he admired the way the Eagles took chances last season, and he thinks that’s the way to get to the top in the NFL.

“I got a simple rule: You can’t be scared in this league,” Snead told Peter King. “Look at Doug Pederson this year and, it wasn’t reckless but it took courage and guess what? They won a Super Bowl on some of those fourth-down plays. So you try to do that as a general manager, but I also think, and this is long-winded answer, some of the analytics that you have now to really look at what historically draft picks bring you in reality over time.”

Snead wasn’t afraid this offseason to trade for Brandin Cooks, trade for Marcus Peters, trade for Aqib Talib and sign Ndamukong Suh, among other moves. Whether those moves allow the Rams to do in the 2018 season what the Eagles did in the 2017 season remains to be seen, but Snead is willing to take risks to find out.