Rams roster makes its 1st cut. Who's next? What clues does this offer fans for 2024?

Now that the LA Rams have reformed the crux of their coaching staff for the 2024 season, the team has accomplished just the first step of an arduous series of five steps that are prerequisites to a successful new NFL season. But the team will soon join many other NFL teams who have jumped to the next steps of their offseason task list.

The Rams had to accept significant salary cap hits in 2023, so significant that the team's dead cap number exceeded $77 million. The Rams, conversely, had faced a much smaller dead cap hit of only $770K. Well, had faced because any adjustments to the Rams roster now will impact both the team's freed up salary cap space in 2024, as well as the carrying charge of dead cap space.

On the matter of teams that may be making cuts to their roster to free up salary cap space, here is a list of players who may be released to create more space:

Players who are outright released from their NFL contracts are an important category to remain aware of. Unlike contracts that are allowed to expire at the end of the NFL season, players who are released do not impact any algorithms used by the NFL to calculate potential awarded compensatory picks in future drafts.

Financial health is an important step in reconfiguring the team's roster to align with the intended roles in store for the upcoming NFL season. Since the Rams, like all NFL teams, have a limited amount of salary cap space in 2024, the team must adjust the compensation to reflect the roles of various players. Starters must earn more money than backups, and backups must earn more than reserves or depth players. Because the team was limited in spending cash in 2023, the process of right-sizing player salaries could be rather prolonged this year.