LA Rams: Pros and Cons of fielding the youngest team in the NFL

Con: Perennial struggles with the NFL salary cap

The LA Rams paid a lot of players a tone of guaranteed money leading up to or after the team’s lone Super Bowl appearance under head coach Sean McVay. Unfortunately, their decisions of compensation have shackled the team ever since. After all, the LA Rams swallowed a huge chunk of the guaranteed dollars invested in running back Todd Gurley, WR Brandin Cooks, and now quarterback Jared Goff.

It seems once the LA Rams entered the penalty box of the NFL salary cap, the walls began to cave in. In short, just as the team decided to swallow even more dead cap space by trading away quarterback Jared Goff, the salary cap ceiling shrank significantly due to the limited revenue earned by the NFL during the 2020 season. That has forced the team to restructure all of their major contracts, which has forced 2021 salary dollars into 2022 and future years. Next year, the team will likely need to employ a similar strategy to clear salary space by pushing dollars into the next year.

Without free cap space, the Rams are very limited as to who the team can re-sign, or even consider adding to the team. That forces the Rams to develop even more talent from within the roster, and promote young players in 2022 and beyond. It’s a circular referencing set of actions now.

Of course, one way to break the vicious cycle is to write contracts that the Rams intend to see through to the end. The Rams would have experienced no dead cap space if there was no early termination of the players who were bestowed such significant guaranteed sums of money. While that quick decision-making process has sustained the Rams’ success, it was created more and more inflexibility for the front office to continue to cut or trade players to add new game-changers in the future.