5 reasons LA Rams 2020 NFL Draft strategy = Quantity over quality

Reason 4: NFL economics

The NFL collective bargaining agreement finally addressed the chaos involved with NFL rookie salaries and their collective NFL Draft position.  In the past, NFL rookies who had yet to play the game for the NFL walked into the league with better contracts than multi-year veterans.

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Now the NFL predetermines what the rookie contract will be before the season. Right now, the folks over at OverTheCap.com have a nice NFL Draft resource which estimates the 2020 NFL rookie wage scale.

Round one rookies can earn from $2.1 million up to $7.5 million. Round three rookies will earn between $750-850K.

For the LA Rams, the teams salary cap constraints has the team aiming at more of the round three contracts. The economics certainly plays a role in how a team approaches an NFL Draft. How can it not?

If the team is aiming at signing an NFL free agent to a $12 million / year contract, but only has $11 million after calculating their NFL rookie salary needs, which general manager would not trade back and free up that million?  Perhaps that even plays a part in creating a bias to the statistics.

After all, NFL teams will naturally give their round one pick far more chances to earn an NFL starting role over a round seven pick, purely from the standpoint of how much that round one player earns.  Sitting a round one player on the bench immediate places the general manager’s career on the hot seat.