Every NFL team set its initial 53-man roster on Tuesday, each making a flurry of moves to get under the league limit. Yet, only one team doesn’t have a single kicker on the roster. That team is the Los Angeles Rams.
Several teams made trades for kickers, solving what’s one of the toughest positions to find consistency at. The Titans traded for Nick Folk, the Broncos acquired Wil Lutz and the Chargers struck a deal for Dustin Hopkins.
The Rams, meanwhile, cut rookie Tanner Brown and sat on their hands and watched as their opponents scooped up the best available kickers. Los Angeles will find someone to be its kicker, either via waivers or free agency. But Les Snead and Sean McVay didn’t necessarily handle this situation very well.
As badly as everyone would’ve loved for the Rams to re-sign Matt Gay, it’s hard to blame them for letting him walk. He signed the biggest free-agent deal ever for a kicker, earning $22.5 million from the Colts – including $10 million guaranteed. For a team in a rebuild, and one trying to clear cap space in 2024 and 2025, the Rams clearly didn’t want to commit that much money to a kicker.
However, that doesn’t mean they should’ve put all their eggs in the basket of an undrafted rookie. The Rams only carried Tanner Brown, a stud kicker in college, on their roster all offseason. They thought he’d be their replacement for Gay. Fair. But they shouldn’t have gone the entire summer without giving him at least some competition at kicker.
Just as they did in 2020, the Rams should’ve had a legitimate position battle for the job. They should’ve signed someone such as Robbie Gould or even Mason Crosby a while ago, adding someone to push Brown and put a little heat on him.
And in the event that Brown struggled the way he did in the preseason, at least they’d have a fallback option – a player they’ve gotten a look at throughout the offseason. Now they’re left to sign someone who’s left over from another team – or a free agent that no one cared to sign all year.
I get the idea of wanting to give Brown as many reps and opportunities as possible. After all, he only attempted four field goals in the preseason as it is. But with a 90-man roster, keeping two kickers instead of one wouldn’t have been an issue.
We’ll see who the Rams go with before Week 1, but their kicker position could look similar to one you’d see on a fantasy team. It might be a revolving door before they settle on someone consistent, which is what happened in 2020 before Gay emerged in-season.
