LA Rams hover near NFL bottom in PFF’s latest 3 year cap analysis

The LA Rams do not save their salary cap dollars for a rainy day.  That’s a given and has proven to be both a matter of extreme frustration as well as unbridled jubilation. It’s frustrating when the LA Rams are handcuffed to the annual NFL salary cap and are unable to add an available free agent who fans believe can put the team over the top.

But it also leads to jubilation. The LA Rams have been one of the most successful NFL franchises over the past five NFL seasons, and a large part of that success is that the team optimizes the roster. That is, the Rams do not sit on stacks of cash for a rainy day. Rather, the team is quite proactive in ramping up the compensation for a player who outperforms their deal, even if they are already signed to a contract.

The LA Rams simply do things a little differently, and that makes the team very difficult to rank, compare, or assess. While other teams remain in inches and feet, the Rams are the metric system.

Pro Football Focus is at it again, and this time, writer Brad Spielberger is taking a swing at ranking all 32 NFL teams in terms of the next three years of the NFL salary cap. To do so, Spielberger measures NFL teams in five distinct categories. They are:

• Category                                    LA Rams Rank

1. Active Draft Capital                   30th
2. 2022-24 Eff Cap Space            30th
3. Total Prorated Money               29th
4. Top 51 Veteran Valuation          7th
5. 2023 UFA Valuation                  16th

You can discover what each category means, and what it attempts to measure, by clicking the link above or this link. Curiously, the NFC West teams are ranked:

Arizona Cardinals – 16th overall
LA Rams – 27th overall
San Francisco 49ers – 20th overall
Seattle Seahawks – 17th overall

So which team is ranked top of the heap?  The Cincinnati Bengals are ranked top of the NFL teams, thanks to a ton of cheap young talent still playing on rookie contracts.  What is the true meaning of this ranking? Does it measure the savviness of the organization’s ability to stash cash for a rainy day? Or is this measuring the luck of the draw, the ability of the Bengals to win with the help of solid drafts and cheap labor?

If it is another attempt to measure the success of a team, it’s not effectively doing that. Some of the best-managed NFL teams exhaust their annual allotment of salary cap dollars, while some of the worst NFL teams maintain a significant amount of available salary cap dollars that never seem to add help to the roster.

After reading the article, I concluded that the LA Rams are winning, and they are paying their players. But, to be honest, I already knew that.