So you are trying to pivot along with the Los Angeles Rams to face the upcoming 2025 offseason, but long before you get your head wrapped around a new NFL season, you've already drowned in the tsunami of NFL rumors that have flooded the Rams football team. Whether it's news about trading away WR Cooper Kupp, to the perceived impasse between the team and contract (re)negotiations with veteran QB Matthew Stafford, fans are already news-weary before the real news arrives.
And that does not bode well for a team that was oh-so-close to an NFL Super Bowl victory.
But that is why winning, and winning consistently is so challenging in the NFL. There is a bit of skill involved, sure. But intermingled with the painstaking hours of data analytics comes the human element. NFL teams can mash and string out data to get to the moon and back, but it comes down to unquantifiable elements of desire, development, and durability.
In two words? Random chance.
I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole of chance and how everything from free agency to the NFL draft is ruled by the same probability factors that govern your grandmother's weekly BINGO game. What I plan to do in this article is offer some relief from the future scenarios. Something good has fallen into the Rams laps. Could this be the turn of events to bring the team back to the bargaining table to ink a new contract that works for both sides?
NFL team salary cap ceiling just went through the roof
When it comes to projecting future NFL salary cap space, NFL 'capologists' must not only struggle with forecasting the players and salary demands of players and drafted rookies, but they must throw a dart at the board in terms of what the new salary ceiling is set at. Because it's always easier to stay conservative on estimates, and then revise upwards, the early salary cap projections are not even worth looking up.
But with the NFL coming out today, as shared by ESPN's NFL Insider Dan Graziano, teams and capologits have a firmer understanding of where the 2025 NFL salary cap will come in. And that is a tremendous boost for the Rams who already have much of that increase softly spoken for in the form of the yet-to-be-drafted contract extensions and newly crafted terms that will lure Rams players back to the team in 2025.
Including QB Matthew Stafford:
Overthecap.com does a succinct but informative presentation of all 32 NFL teams and their currently projected salary cap for 2025. I like the presentation because it does more than just give rote dollar amounts. It also lists the number of NFL players under contract reflected in that cap projection. That's critical to understanding where teams lie as the offseason nears.
What do I mean?
Per the table, the Chicago Bears are projected to have over $60 million in salary cap space, but only 48 players are under contract and are reflected in that amount. Conversely, the LA Rams are projected to have $41 million in salary cap space. The Rams have 55 players under contract reflected in that amount.
Here's why that is so vital to have as a reference point:
As teams sign players to their initial 90-man roster, the NFL applies a Top-51 player rule to determine the team's offseason cap space usage. In the example above the Rams would offset any player added to the roster against someone already calculated in the team's salary.
Related Rams offseason news:
LA Rams Future Draft Picks for the 2025 NFL Draft and beyond
So if the Rams sign a player to a $5 million one-year contract, the Rams cap space does not shrink by that amount. Because the team roster currently exceeds 51 players, the team must also add back the least compensated player in the salary cap formula. If that player was due to make $2 million in 2025, the overall cap hit to the Rams would be $2 million, less the new player's $5 million, or an overall impact to the team's cap space by a reduction of $3 million.
In the same example, but for the Bears, there is not offset. The Bears, with 49 players, do not begin to offset salaries until the roster swells to 51 players.
So the Rams, with over $41 million projected salary cap space, project as the 14th most available cap space among 32 NFL teams. The base salary cap estimate for 2025 used to come up with that number is $279.5 million. If the NFL lands closer to the upper limit of the range, that number will increase.
