An official deal took another month, but it’s a well-deserved pay day for Stafford, who has played the best football of his 17-year career over the past five seasons with the Rams.
After 12 seasons struggling to turn the Detroit Lions into a consistent playoff threat, Stafford won Super Bowl LVI during his opening season with Los Angeles. He’s made two of his three Pro Bowls as a Ram, and already has experienced one more postseason than the three he saw in Motown. His age-37 season was his best yet. Stafford led the league with 4,707 passing yards, 46 touchdown passes and a 7.7 touchdown percentage, all career highs, on the way to taking home his first MVP.
He came just shy of reaching another Super Bowl to cap off his finest campaign as a pro, falling to the Seattle Seahawks in the NFC Championship Game despite a 374-yard, three-touchdown performance against the league’s top scoring defense.
L.A. coming so close and Stafford still evidently having more peak performance to give only a few years shy of two decades in the NFL made it an easy decision to run it back. The Rams are committed to staying prepared for life after Stafford, having delivered one of the stunners of the 2026 draft’s first round by selecting QB Ty Simpson 13th overall, but they are clearly still in win-now mode with their wily vet under center.
They have a fierce, young defense on the rise and an offense loaded with talent — especially Kyren Williams, Puka Nacua and Davante Adams — around Stafford. They’re even back to their old ways of flipping first-round picks for proven talent, sending the 2026 No. 29 overall pick to the Kansas City Chiefs for cornerback Trent McDuffie in March in a package that included two 2026 Day 3 selections and a ’27 third-rounder. Most importantly, after years of question marks revolving around the fates of Stafford and head coach Sean McVay, both appear as bought in as ever to a future that involves capturing another Lombardi Trophy.
The Rams have found incredible success relying on annual check-ins with Stafford toward the latter stages of his career, and after another extension will again go as far as their MVP quarterback can take them.
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