Les Snead felt bad for making Ty Simpson lie about Rams meetings before draft

There were breadcrumbs here and there linking the Los Angeles Rams to Ty Simpson leading up to the draft, but there were no firm reports about them bringing him in for a top-30 visit or showing public interest at his pro day or the combine.

That was intentional. They didn’t want to give their interest away, so they asked Simpson to keep things on the down low.

Needless to say, Simpson understood the assignment. He didn’t reveal anything before the draft, or even after it. During his first media session, he told reporters he had never met Sean McVay and hadn’t spoken to Les Snead until that night after he was picked.

Spoiler alert: he lied.

On Monday, he told ESPN Radio that he had a “secret meeting” with McVay and spent hours with the Rams coach. He finally revealed that bit of information because the Rams let him know he could tell the media about their meetings now that he had been drafted.

Snead appeared on the “Pat McAfee Show” Tuesday to explain that the Rams tell prospects to keep their meetings private as part of the gamesmanship of the draft.

“Here’s where it went awry,” he said. “We do like to emphasize, ‘Hey, look. Try to keep these private meetings between us. For that gamesmanship. We like for other teams not to know we’re interested.’ So we do emphasize that a little stronger. Try to keep it between us. So, if you go to another team and they ask – a lot of times, teams will ask, ‘Where have you visited?’ I know this: A lot of teams will keep up with who’s visited, where have players been on top-30s, who was at the pro day. You’re trying to figure out who may take a player and who may not. So we emphasize, keep it quite. Felt really bad for Ty. He stayed on script. Poor guy stayed on script.”

It wasn’t just McVay who met with Simpson secretly. Snead was in that meeting, too. He just didn’t understand all of the high-level football talk between the coach and QB.