Rams GM sheds light on Stetson Bennett's future with the team
Former Georgia quarterback Stetson Bennett spent the 2023 football season on the non-football injury list and away from the Los Angeles Rams. On Monday, Rams general manager Les Snead told reporters at league meetings in Orlando that Bennett is working out with plans for team onboarding this offseason.
Taken in the fourth round, Bennett saw action in the Rams preseason games, throwing 62 passes for 36 completions, 347 yards and a touchdown. Bennett also rushed for a score. He had a particularly impressive preseason debut against the Chargers, throwing for 191 yards on 17-of-29 passing while showing off his athleticism, jumping up to the team’s second-team quarterback in the process.
Bennett’s future with the Rams was certainly a topic of discussion this past season. The former Heisman Trophy finalist was the subject of several questions directed towards head coach Sean McVay who said that the team would “connect with him at the appropriate time.”
“I think the first thing is you connect with him, which we’ll do that at the appropriate time and you figure out, where are you at and is this something that we feel like is best for him and for our football team to bring him back into this ecosystem?” McVay said at the NFL Combine. “Those will be conversations that we will have. And then, I think once we have a better idea of what we’ll do with that, then that will give clarity.
“But you do make sure that you know that right now, we’ve got Matthew Stafford. And really in our minds, we don’t have a backup quarterback that’s on this roster. But we’ll see what that looks like in terms of how that affects Stetson and the draft or free agency.”
Bennett started his college career at Georgia as a walk-on in 2017. He transferred to junior college and came back to the place it all started on scholarship. Not only that, Bennett ended up leading the Bulldogs to their first National Championship in 41 years before doing it again the very next year, becoming the first back-to-back champions in the College Football Playoff era and only the sixth since the latter half of the 20th century.
Bennett became the first Georgia quarterback to throw for over 4,000 yards in program history during the 2022 season, completing 310 of 454 passes for 4,127 yards and 27 touchdowns. He also added 10 more scores on the ground. Doing so earned Bennett a spot in New York as a Heisman Trophy finalist while he also won the Burlsworth Trophy as the top former walk-on and the Manning Award as the nation’s top quarterback, including postseason play in the decision process.
Among Bennett’s many strong performances on the season was an especially impressive one in the National Championship Game – played at the Rams’ home stadium in Inglewood, Calif. Bennett earned Offensive MVP honors for Georgia in a 65-7 win over TCU throwing for 304 yards and four touchdowns while added 39 more and two touchdowns on the ground. His combined six scores ties a National Championship Game record with 2020 No. 1 overall pick Joe Burrow, now of the Cincinnati Bengals.
