Looking at the Los Angeles Rams’ roster, it’s not hard to see where most of their expensive assets lie. The majority of their high-cost players are on offense, led by Matthew Stafford and Cooper Kupp.
In fact, the six highest cap hits on the team are all offensive players: Stafford, Kupp, Rob Havenstein, Jonah Jackson, Kevin Dotson and Joe Noteboom. After Noteboom’s cap hit of $11.6 million, there’s a steep drop off to Darious Williams, who owns the seventh-largest cap hit at $4.7 million.
When you compare the team’s spending on offense to defense, the difference is jarring. According to Over The Cap, the Rams are spending $176.4 million on offense, which is the highest of any team – $22.4 million than the next-closest club.
On defense, the Rams are only spending $44.1 million this year, by far the lowest amount in the league. The next-closest team is the Chiefs, who are spending $75.1 million – a whopping $31 million more than the Rams.
The Steelers lead the league in defensive spending with $145.8 million allocated on that side of the ball, three times more than the Rams. Incredibly, Stafford’s cap hit of $46.2 million is larger than the cap hits of every defensive player on the Rams combined.
Going as far back as 2013, there’s never been a gap between 31st and 32nd teams in defensive spending as wide as the one this year between the Rams and Chiefs. The closest example was in 2019 when the Giants spent $8.9 million less than the 31st-ranked team in defensive spending.
Furthermore, the last time a team spent as little as the Rams are on defense was in 2018 when the Colts had just $39.5 million allocated on that side of the ball. Of course, the salary cap was only $177.2 million that year compared to $255.4 million.
The Rams are clearly a very offense-heavy team with a lot of players who are on rookie contracts on defense, which is the reason for the lopsided spending difference. Plus, now that Aaron Donald isn’t on the team anymore, he lessens the cost on that side of the ball significantly; he still has a $23.83 million dead cap charge, which isn’t included in the above numbers.
The Rams have young talent on defense with players such as Kobie Turner, Byron Young, Jared Verse, Quentin Lake and Cobie Durant, all of whom are on rookie contracts, but they’re also not paying veterans very much, either. Chris Shula has his work cut out for him in Year 1 as a defensive coordinator.