Jared Verse was born in Dayton, Ohio, and on June 1, the Browns brought him home as the return piece in one of the biggest defensive trades in NFL history. The two-time Defensive Player of the Year Myles Garrett was sent to the Los Angeles Rams in exchange for Verse, a 2027 first-round pick, a 2028 second-rounder, and a 2029 third.
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It should have played like a homecoming story. Instead, the 25-year-old defensive end went on Colin Cowherd’s “The Herd,” and when asked whether being traded for a player of Garrett’s caliber made it easier to take, he didn’t hesitate.
“Like a lot of people going, ‘Oh yeah, that’s got to be a good feeling,’” Verse said on the show. “Getting traded, it feels terrible. They don’t make you feel bad just because it was Myles Garrett or anything like that.”
Considering what Verse is walking away from, it was never going to be easy. Across two seasons with the Rams, he won the 2024 AP Defensive Rookie of the Year award, becoming only the second Rams player to do so behind Aaron Donald in 2014, and made back-to-back Pro Bowls.
That is perhaps why Browns GM Andrew Berry said the Garrett trade “wasn’t something we anticipated” until the Rams agreed to include Verse, calling him essential to the deal getting done. Garrett, meanwhile, leaves Cleveland as the franchise’s all-time sack leader, having set the NFL’s single-season sack record with 23 in 2025 across nine seasons since arriving as the No. 1 overall pick in 2017.
But as Verse had earlier explained, while the news stung at first, the feeling faded within a couple of hours once he got on the phone with two of his now-former Rams teammates, Byron Young and Braden Fiske, with the latter also his old FSU teammate.
At his first Cleveland press conference, he said: “I’m not here to fill anyone’s shoes. Myles, he’s a size 13, Nikes, whatever they are. I’m a size 13 1/2, size 14, Jordans. Everybody’s different. I’m not here to fill his shoes. I’m here to bring my own. I buy my own.”
He admitted that knowing the Browns wouldn’t have made the trade without him softened the blow: “That was probably the biggest fact that brought some sunshine into this whole situation for me. I saw that, I was like, ‘yeah, they want me.'”
That belief now puts Verse alongside 2025 Defensive Rookie of the Year Carson Schwesinger, making Cleveland the first team to roster consecutive Defensive Rookie of the Year winners on the same defense. Teammates have noticed the shift, too. Veteran linebacker Kyle Van Noy called him “a dawg” within weeks of his arrival.