Les Snead explains ‘calculus problem’ Rams face with lower salary cap in 2021
If the Los Angeles Rams thought last offseason was tough with Cory Littleton, Dante Fowler Jr., Greg Zuerlein and Michael Brockers hitting free agency, this year will be even more challenging for Les Snead and the front office. Not only do they have seven starters with expiring contracts, but the salary cap could drop as low as $175 million.
Considering the salary cap has increased by at least $10 million each year since 2012, a drop of $23.2 million from $198.2 million in 2020 will hit teams hard – the Rams included.
But this isn’t surprising news to Snead’s staff. They’ve been preparing for a $175 million salary cap since last year when that number was first announced as the floor. The Rams have planned accordingly, even getting deals done for Jalen Ramsey, Cooper Kupp and Robert Woods ahead of time.
“Even last year when we were going through, beginning with the draft process and some of our re-signings,” Snead told reporters this week. “You’re always looking ahead, what positions do you have under contract? Which ones are coming up? Trying to replenish so you have depth you can develop into roles as starters. Looking at that number, we always plugged in the number of $175 (million) since that was the floor, worked off of that number in some of the planning going that that could be the low number and anything above that is a bonus.”
What will complicate things is teams that aren’t set to be over the cap like the Rams will have more flexibility. The Jaguars, for instance, will have $69.6 million in cap space this offseason, compared to the Rams, who are set to be $27.6 million over the cap.
Los Angeles simply can’t compete with Jacksonville when it comes to offering, say, John Johnson a contract – and that’s when problems arise, as Snead acknowledged.
“The other part of the equation to that is, a lot of our players whose contracts are expiring, we could plug them in and fit them under the $175 number if that’s the cap, but if they test the market and they get a salary that’s higher than the number we plugged into that Excel spreadsheet, then it then becomes a calculus problem at that point,” he added. “If we meet this player’s market value, you may lose another player, so you’re always going to walk through those scenarios because they’ll happen in real-time when you do go to that 48-72-hour window of negotiation. So it’s a calculus problem, it’s a moving target, it’s an algorithm. It’s very similar to a game. You have a game plan. You know you’re probably going to have to change that game plan midstream and make adjustments.”
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Snead and McVay have had some preliminary discussions ahead of free agency, which begins in March. But in the middle of February, the team will begin diving in more on the market, the players set to become free agents and laying out their plans.
Given the way their roster is built, Snead knows the Rams won’t be able to keep many of their top free agents. The biggest names hitting the market are Johnson, Leonard Floyd, Troy Hill, Austin Blythe, Josh Reynolds and Gerald Everett, with Darious Williams becoming a restricted free agent.
It’s a similar story to last year, but the dropping salary cap presents a new challenge.
“The main thing is to try to get it right because there’s a lot of names there and there’s a salary cap and there’s a cap that’s going down, so it’s always a puzzle,” he said. “It’s really a calculus formula, it’s a tough algorithm to build. The simple thing is to say, any player that’s helped us – John Johnson made an interception to help us go to the Super Bowl. Dante Fowler probably caused the interception, but we weren’t able to bring him back last year, but Leonard Floyd comes in. So that’s just part of the NFL. We’d love to build a dream team, per se, but you can’t, so our goal this year is to sit down in February, really over a four-week span and really calculate that formula.”
