The Los Angeles Rams may not be making major moves in free agency, but they’ve been busy in the first week of the new league year. Just in the last week, the Rams have extended Joseph Noteboom, Brian Allen, Coleman Shelton and Matthew Stafford. They also cut Johnny Hekker, traded Robert Woods and agreed to a three-year deal with Allen Robinson.
All of those decisions were made with the salary cap in mind, and after being $20 million over the cap before free agency began, the Rams are now in great shape financially. According to Over The Cap, the Rams have $15.8 million in cap room after their first wave of transactions. That number doesn’t include Robinson’s contract, however, so his deal will certainly eat into their cap room.
But simply by cutting Hekker ($2.1 million), trading Woods ($7.1 million) and extending Stafford ($9.5 million), the Rams came away with a total savings of 18.7 million. That’s a significant chunk of change for a team that’s so loaded with stars and big contracts.
We don’t yet know Robinson’s cap hit in 2022 but it won’t be more than $15.5 million, which is his base salary. Depending on how the Rams structured his deal, his cap hit could be as low as $4-5 million, with larger cap numbers in future years.
The Rams did extremely well to limit the cap hits of their extended players this year. Stafford has a cap hit of $13.5 million, Noteboom’s is only $3.5 million and Allen’s is just $1.8 million. Shelton’s is only $1.5 million, too, so those four players have cap hits totaling $20.3 million this year, despite all of them signing extensions.
