New NFL regulation may hurt the LA Rams roster this season
By Bret Stuter
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Risk II: Rams must instantly assess over 1100 players simultaneously
Okay, now let's focus on the perilous change to the LA Rams front office in regards to NFL player scouts and personnel executives. In the past, the step down of NFL team rosters from 90 players to 75 players flooded the NFL Free Agency pool with 480 new faces and players. When teams cut their rosters down from 75 players to their final 53-man rosters, another 700+ players were unleashed into the NFL Free agency pool. Of that number, 512 players would be called back to sign on to an NFL team's practice squad.
The task is huge, but was far more manageable by requiring NFL teams to tip their hands by those preliminary roster cuts to 75 players. In short, players who were released early were pretty much fair game, and NFL teams had the opportunity to quickly assess those 480+ players over the span of several days before the free agency pool swelled with another 700+ players, most of whom were already earmarked to return to their original team as a member of their practice squad.
1100+ NFL players released simultaneously
With the new format, players who are released will all swell the free agency pool en masse, which will be at a minimum quite confusing for fans. With so many players suddenly released, the challenge for fans to anticipate which players will be re-signed to the practice squad and which players will be gone for the season will be significantly more difficult.
But the instantaneous pressure on personnel departments of every NFL team is suddenly quadrupled. So much so that I expect many teams to avoid interest in waived players altogether, and simply focus their efforts on re-signing key players to their practice squad.
Is it impossible? Number crunching gets easier each and every day with faster computer processors and larger data storage repositories. The logjam in any massive data analysis is the ability to distill massive amounts of information into KEIs or Key Elements of Information that enable the team's decision makes to make effective decisions. That will likely need to change now with the new NFL format.