5 LA Rams offseason moves worse than extending Floyd over JJIII

Good concept, bad delivery

Hey, I get it. The author of that article had taken on the role of writing about 32 NFL teams and just grabbed at straws for something to write about the LA Rams. Unfortunately, he swung and missed royally. To be more exact, the NFL Free Agent market for outside linebackers was hot, red hot. One of the first to be signed were two Rams free agents in Samsun Ebukam and Derek Rivers. Neither played exceptionally well, but they were available and at the right position.

The fact that he would go after the Leonard Floyd extension doesn’t stand up well to the market value of Floyd. When the LA Rams signed him to a one-year prove-it deal worth $10 million, the team had no idea how well or not well he might turn out. He played incredibly well and exceeded the value of his contract. So when the Rams extended him to a four-year deal worth a total of $64 million, that was the number cited by Randy Gurzi.

But he missed the delicate intricacies of that Leonard Floyd contract that make it one of the best I’d seen the Rams author in some time. For starters, the team constructed a four-year contract in such a way that the salary cap hit for 2021 was only $5.5 million, nearly half of the impact of his 2020 contract. It has the silhouette of an elephant, but the footprint of a mouse.

That contract kept Leonard Floyd in place at a position that was hotly competitive in the free-agent market and was not overly deep or talented in the 2021 NFL Draft. That’s where the fantasy football perception disconnects from the real-world application of building a truly competitive roster.