On Thursday news broke that the Los Angeles Rams were trading Brandin Cooks, along with a future fourth rounder, to the Houston Texans in exchange for a second-round pick.
Cooks has struggled since a breakout first season with the Rams, after the team acquired him from the Patriots and gave him an $81 million contract. After a shaky second year, they’re moving on from him.
That’s partly why this trade is bad. You’d expect an elite wideout to fetch more than a second-round pick, but sadly for the Rams, that’s not the worst part of this deal.
The worst part of this deal is that the Rams are somehow losing money by trading away Cooks and his contract. The Rams paid Cooks a $4 million contract bonus earlier this year, something they would have avoided had they traded him before the bonus kicked in.
They waited, however. So that money is his. And, for now at least, his cap hit for the team is even worse than if they just kept him on the roster.
Rams Wire’s Cameron DaSilva has the breakdown here:
Had they traded Cooks before his bonus was owed, they would’ve taken on $17.8 million in dead money. Since they waited, that dead cap charge jumped to $21.8 million – $5 million more than it would have cost them to just keep Cooks on the roster.
Basically, the Rams (right now) are paying $5 million extra in cap space to have Cooks play for the Texans.
The Rams can get some relief, however. If the deal doesn’t officially process until June 1st, which you’d have to imagine the Rams would insist on, they could split the dead cap between the next two seasons, per NFL salary rules.
The process date of the Brandin Cooks trade will be very important. Cooks holds $21.8M of dead cap w/ the #Rams. If this is processed after June 1st, that will split into $8.8M in 2020, $13M in 2021. If not, LA will lose $5M of cap space this year.
— Spotrac (@spotrac) April 9, 2020
Even if they are splitting that over the next two years, that’s still $21.8 million of cap space, dead, for a wide receiver who’s going to play for the Texans. A second round pick doesn’t make that better. Los Angeles must have really wanted to move on from Cooks.
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