Rams Land Clowney, Mosley, and Yankey in Draft Simulator
By Anthony Bafaro
December 20th 2013
Hello friends. Podcast addiction has kept me from the keyboard for quite some time, but I was recently inspired by Rams Addiction loyalist, Cesar Noel, so I decided to take to the typing. He introduced me to a new addiction on Tuesday night–a 2014 NFL draft simulator.
Sorry, I’m not giving you the link to the simulator until the end of the article. I can’t force you to read this epic narrative, but if the only reason you came here was to use me as a gateway to the mental masturbation machine, you’re at least going to have to scroll through it all first, because, well, I’m kind of a dick.
First off, a brief description of the simulator. You can pick any team and run its draft based on current draft position. You can make trades, but it’s somewhat limited. When you’re on the clock, you CANNOT propose trades; you can only accept or ignore offers made to you. No negotiating; take it or leave it. When other teams are on the clock, you can propose a trade to that specific team, no others. Again, no negotiating. They either accept or reject the trade, and if they reject it they immediately trade with another team or draft a player. So if you need the deal to go down, you better pony up enough picks to make sure it happens on the first try.
Last thing before we get started. As you all know, free agency comes first. For the sake of this exercise, the free agent moves I manifested in my head went as follows:
I cut Cortland Finnegan, designated post June 1st, which saved $6M.
I cut Harvey Dahl, which saved $4M.
I re-signed Rodger Saffold (to play guard, of course).
I went hard, and signed Jairus Byrd to play FS.
I’ll get into this more once we get closer to free agent time, but I think Jairus Byrd is the single most important free agent target for the Rams this offseason. With him, they have a stud, ball-hawking, free-roaming center-fielder–a piece that I believe takes this defense from enigmatic to elite, regardless of what else is added. Without him, they almost have to draft Clinton-Dix. Nothing against Ha-Ha, but being handcuffed to a player who could go top-ten, but might be 20th in terms of BPA, seriously limits your draft-day flexibility.
I really don’t want to spend 500 words defending whether or not these moves are financially feasible, so I’ll try to keep this concise.
The Rams have about $12M in dead money coming off the books, but most of that will be consumed by pay raises for several key players (Sam Bradford, Chris Long, Jake Long, and Jared Cook). The money I saved with the aforementioned cuts essentially represents the total cap space I have to work with–at least right now–but keep in mind Kevin Demoff is a contract boss.
Demoff isn’t big on big...
-12-20-2013, 08:45 AM
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