I wouldn't be surprised at all if the Los Angeles No Caps swoop in out of nowhere and sign him if he's cut. Stafford insurance.
I dislike the Rams, but their skillful roster construction within the rules of the salary cap is admirable. If I thought they were cheating, I'd be making noise about it. However, because it looks completely clean to me, I think the other 31 NFL teams should study and learn from the Rams' cap management.
When you call the Rams the "No-Caps," you imply they're cheating on the cap, or that they get some kind of special treatment from the league on the salary cap (note that I qualified that carefully; I'm talking about the cap specifically, not things like the league's evident inability to suspend Aaron Donald even when he assaults people in clearly against-the-rules ways on camera, or the way big, visible referee mistakes - calls and non-calls - have favored the Rams in critical moments in recent seasons).
So here's a challenge. Information on all the Rams' current contracts is publicly available. Overthecap.com tends to have more-correct information, but Spotrac.com has some nice features, like stating realistic "outs" for each contract (
e.g., what the media report as a five-year, $90M deal might actually give the team a way to get out after three years with relatively little dead money, and Spotrac tells you what the contract's annual average value would be if the team were to get out at that point). Please show me where there's anything that could even be
construed as fishy in the Rams' cap management.
What seems to upset people who believe the Rams are cheating on the cap (or getting special treatment from the league in salary-cap terms) is when the Rams sign somebody to a top-of-the-market contract. But that's the opposite of how them cheating on the cap would look! The publicly available information on all the currently active player contracts the Rams have shows that they're within the same cap as everyone else, so if they were cheating on the cap, it would be by getting players signed for well below their market value and then compensating them outside the salary-cap structure. I see no signs of that.
I can't prove that the Patriots found other ways to compensate Brady outside the salary-cap structure so he got his money even though he didn't get top-of-the-market contracts, but I can say that it was awfully fishy that the Patriots were the main client of Brady's TB12 company, the headquarters of which was located inside the Patriots complex, at the same time the Patriots were officially paying Brady well below his market value. That's an example of the kind of thing I'm asking you to provide about the Rams. I'm not even asking for proof that they're cheating on the cap. I'm just asking for anything that could even be
construed as suspicious. And don't feel bad if you can't provide even that. The folks around here who explicitly accuse the Rams of cheating on the cap can't provide that kind of thing either.
