The NFL salary cap is designed to maintain a competitive balance in the league, limiting what teams can spend on player salaries throughout their roster. But there are some creative ways in which teams can manipulate and navigate the salary cap, and it appears that the Los Angeles Rams are doing just that this week.
As NFL insider Field Yates of ESPN reports, the Los Angeles Rams are restructuring the contract of veteran wide receiver Cooper Kupp in a way that allows the team to free up more than $10 million in cap space this offseason.
“The Rams have converted $13.92M of WR Cooper Kupp’s base salary into a signing bonus, creating $10.44M in 2023 cap space, per source,” Yates said in a tweet.
The timing of this move is interesting considering the Rams have just begun mandatory minicamp. At the same time, the Rams have one of the weakest depth charts in the league and likely need all the help they can get.
This move will obviously allow the Rams to sign more free agents if they desire, as they continue to try to bolster a relatively weak roster ahead of the 2023 season. And the NFL world had plenty to say about it on Twitter.
In making this move, it’s likely that the Rams already have someone in mind they’d like to target in free agency. At the same time, the Rams have likely given themselves some breathing room from a cap space standpoint, so they can afford to sign their draft picks to rookie contracts.
[Field Yates on Twitter]
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.