The Rams thought they had solved one of their longest-running problems when they extended Nate Landman last year. For a stretch, it looked like a smart bet. Then the production slipped, and now Los Angeles is staring at the same linebacker questions it hoped it had left behind.
Landman opened the 2025 season with real impact. Through the first 11 weeks, he piled up 91 tackles and forced four fumbles, and Pro Football Focus had him ranked 20th among NFL linebackers. That run was strong enough to convince the Rams to hand him a three-year, $22.5 million extension before Week 12.
The deal wasn’t massive by league standards - his $7.5 million average salary in 2026 is tied for 30th among linebackers - but it mattered because of how the Rams have traditionally handled the position. They have not often paid linebackers since extending Alec Ogletree, so locking Landman in stood out.
The problem is that the extension now looks a lot less like a reward for a new standard and a lot more like a decision made at the peak of a hot streak.
Landman was excellent value on his one-year, $11 million deal. Since the extension, though, his play has trended back toward the level he showed over his career with the Atlanta Falcons.
From Week 12 through the end of last season, he fell to PFF’s 33rd-ranked linebacker, failed to force another fumble, and posted a 19.1 percent missed tackle rate. He still had three games with 10 or more tackles in that span, including two in the playoffs, but the splash plays dried up and the tackling became a concern.
The Rams were hopeful a full offseason in the system would help him rediscover that earlier form. Defensive coordinator Chris Shula said before the season, “I think Nate is starting to take the next step,” and added, “Having guys that have been in the defense [with] Landman going on his second year here, but he really feels like a huge veteran presence for us.”
That hasn’t been the story so far in 2026. Landman has dealt with injuries, but the numbers have taken another hit.
Through three games, he is PFF’s 48th-ranked linebacker out of 50, has not forced a fumble, and does not have a game with 10 or more tackles. He had just three tackles in Week 3 against the Broncos.
Last season, in the first 11 weeks, he had only one game with fewer than five tackles. He’s already had three such games this year.
His missed tackle rate is back up to 10.5 percent.
The biggest issue is not that Landman has stopped making splash plays. It’s that the tackling has slipped, and that’s harder to overlook.
He was a playmaker during the first 11 games last year, but that level was always going to be tough to sustain. The Rams needed something steadier.
There’s still time for him to settle in and improve, especially with the injuries he’s been managing. But the broader trend is hard to ignore: the strong stretch from the first half of 2025 looks more like the outlier, while the last 13 games look much closer to his normal production.
That puts the Rams in an awkward spot. They extended Landman to stabilize a position group that had been a problem for years, and yet the need there still feels obvious. The team traded Ernest Jones in part because it didn’t want to pay him, and Jones is making just $2 million per year more than Landman.
None of that means the Rams were wrong to extend Landman. At the time, he had earned it, and the team clearly viewed him as a possible defensive pillar. But it does raise the question of whether they committed based on a stretch of play that was always going to be difficult to keep going.
The Rams do not need Landman to be a top-20 linebacker. They do need him to be dependable and capable of producing the occasional big play.
That was the point of the extension. So far, though, the consistency hasn’t been there, and the linebacker issue remains unresolved.
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