LA Rams Salary cap: Setting stage for 2021

The LA Rams, like 30 other NFL teams, have begun the reviews of the 2020 NFL season and the planning for the 2021 NFL season.  It’s a new calendar year, and that means that it’s time once more to break out my adding machine and sacrifice my own peace of mind for the common good. Yes, that’s right. It’s time for me to take the painful plunge into the icy cold waters of the NFL Salary Cap.

Listen, I’d love to jump into the fun stuff like signing NFL Free Agents, drafting new rookie prospects in the 2021 NFL Draft, and even signing up undrafted free agents. But the NFL, like any financially run organization, depends upon the flow of money.  So each year it’s a wise idea to start from the basic fundamentals.

The Rams are trying to pack everything they believe that they will need into a box. Each team gets the same size box. Each season, NFL teams get a new box. In most years the box is bigger. But due to the coronavirus pandemic, the 2021 NFL Salary Cap box is much smaller than originally thought.

At one point, estimates for the 2021 NFL Salary jumped to well over $200 million at one point. But as soon as the assessment of NFL revenues for the 2020 season dropped significantly, the NFL and NFLPA created an artificial floor of $175 million to ensure that the 2021 season would not begin by releasing players in record numbers.

Now, there is hope that a new 2021 salary cap will be higher than the original floor.

We had covered some salary cap fundamentals in 2020, and it’s probably a good time to review those basic principles.