BEREA, Ohio — The morning after the Cleveland Browns completed a blockbuster trade with the Los Angeles Rams that sent star pass rusher Myles Garrett to Los Angeles, Browns general manager Andrew Berry said that the Browns didn’t feel pressured by Garrett to make a trade or go through the offseason believing that they had to move on from the two-time NFL Defensive Player of the Year.Now that the trade has been made, the clear view from Cleveland is that the Browns only made the trade because the Rams offered multiple draft picks and included 25-year-old defensive end Jared Verse, a Pro Bowler in each of his two seasons and a player now viewed as a cornerstone of the Browns’ ongoing rebuild.The Browns’ current timeline for true contention matched neither the timeline nor the desires of Garrett, who turned 30 last December, a week before he recorded his NFL-record 23rd sack of the 2025 season. So the Browns shifted their thinking on their best player and, with constant prodding from the Rams, eventually agreed to a deal last weekend that officially processes on June 2 for salary-cap reasons.“Myles Garrett is a foundational player, Hall of Fame-worthy, and a homegrown talent who’s been here for a decade,” Berry said Tuesday. “And our intent was to have him be a one-helmet player for his career. That was the truth.“But there are moments … where opportunities come up that quite honestly are unexpected and they force you to stop and reevaluate and look at it and (ask), ‘Is this something that could be really beneficial to the team?’ And that was the case in this instance.“The opportunity was too great.”The Rams are sending the Browns a 2027 first-round pick, a 2028 second-round pick and a 2029 third-round pick in addition to Verse, who’s under an affordable rookie contract for two more seasons. The Browns in early 2027 can exercise Verse’s fifth-year option and ensure he’s signed through 2028, but Cleveland’s plan probably will be to sign Verse to a long-term extension as soon as he’s eligible in early 2027.By waiting until after June 1 to finalize the trade, the Browns can push back around $26 million in dead money from Garrett’s contract to their 2027 salary cap. The Browns’ long-term salary-cap considerations and uncertain quarterback situation were part of Berry’s decision to pivot and trade Garrett, though this was a complicated situation not driven by money.The Browns have spent plenty — on Garrett and on their roster as a whole — over the past five years, but they’ve won just eight games over the past two seasons. In 2025, Garrett became the first player to win NFL Defensive Player of the Year for a team with a losing record since Jason Taylor of the Miami Dolphins in 2006.With another Cleveland quarterback competition ongoing and a 2026 roster that could end up having at least 25 first- and second-year players, Berry said adding another young player — and Verse, in particular — was a key reason the Browns ultimately decided to make the deal.Berry said the Browns’ non-negotiables for finding a Garrett deal included acquiring both short- and long-term benefits, specifically a “young, cost-controlled star at a premium position” in addition to significant draft-pick compensation, with an emphasis on “premium” picks over quantity.Berry said the Browns did not share details of their negotiations with the Rams with other teams to try to drive up the price or create a bigger market. The focus of a potential trade remained on the Browns’ parameters and Verse in particular.“I’d say No. 1, the combination of picks and players, we think it’s excellent,” Berry said. “We’re really pleased with it in the short and long term. I’d say that the second piece of that in terms of us, today is … we all probably have to have a little bit of humility because we just don’t know how the season’s going to unfold. And probably the third part is, realistically, any team that is making a move for a player of Myles’ caliber, they feel like they’re in their window or they are about to be in their window. There’s unlikely to be a deal out there where you’re getting (an) expected top-five pick out of it, which is why the volume of picks and particularly the inclusion of Jared was incredibly important.”Verse was the NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year in 2024. He had 7.5 sacks and three forced fumbles last season, then added another sack in the playoffs. He’s just the ninth player since 2000 to win the Defensive Rookie of the Year award and be named to the Pro Bowl in his first two seasons. In Cleveland, he’ll team with 2025 NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year Carson Schwesinger and 2025 first-round pick Mason Graham to form a new long-term core for a unit that, even without Garrett, still should carry high expectations into 2026.Berry said Wednesday there was no trade request from Garrett in early 2026. In February 2025, Garrett took a trade request public, creating a mess from an optics standpoint that was temporarily resolved with a rich new extension that included more than $122 million in new guaranteed money. But this March, the Browns and Garrett agreed to a contract modification that deferred a payment of around $10 million to September, which resulted in no short-term gain of cap space for the Browns but signaled to the NFL that Garrett might be available for the right combination of picks and players.Berry continued to deny that the contract modification was made with the idea of trading Garrett. But it was that modification that led the Rams to reopen a pursuit of Garrett that actually began with an inquiry as far back as 2022. The result is that the Browns did trade Garrett, despite Berry’s claims that the team never intended to do so and didn’t shape its offseason planning upon something that seemed, from the outside, inevitable.“If we were to trade Myles, (there was) a very narrow universe of deals that would satisfy it,” Berry said. “Everyone wants to have a Myles Garrett on their team, but not everyone can afford that acquisition cost in terms of players, picks and dollars.”