NFL Economics 101: How are Rams building a 2021 NFL Budget?

The LA Rams front office is gearing up. In a very short period of time, the NFL Free Agency market will open for business for the 2021 NFL season. When that happens, the NFL has its version of ‘Black Friday’. You see, on that day, 32 NFL teams unleash their checkbooks upon the NFL’s best and most promising players, making them instant millionaires.

This annual ritual brings the mighty teams to brief moments of humility, and the bottom feeders of the NFL to the sunlight of hope and optimism for a brief moment. Each new signing is touted with such descriptions as ‘incredible fit’ or ‘dominating performance’. Teams that have grown accustomed to the annual expectation of a Super Bowl future find the annual hype is rolled out once more, like a red carpet to the rich and famous of the NFL.

But you probably haven’t thought much about the process of building a great NFL-winning roster, have you? And yet, each year, we find ourselves subject to the magic of team spending. Of course, there is a story about it behind the scenes. But many of us are content to watch the magic unfold, never wishing to crawl behind the math of the magic.

What truly is behind the magic of making some players rich and others getting cut in the same year?  Is it true that the cause of a player ‘not a fit’ serves as the universal solvent used to justify all roster decisions?  There seems to be a science or at least some pattern of the mathematics behind the chaos of decision-making in the NFL. After all, how do teams know who to cut if they cannot be certain who they will use to replace the vacated roster spot?