I’m already prepared for this to be an unpopular opinion. Why? Because people love quarterbacks. People defend quarterbacks. People want to give quarterbacks time. They want them to grow with their teams. They want them to succeed.

And in the case of overthecap.com, is set to have a salary cap cost of $17.6 million next season. That puts the Rams at ninth in the league in terms of quarterback spending. Per the site, if the Rams were to cut Bradford, they would actually save over 10 million dollars, something they hadn’t been able to do in the past with his contract.

Rotoworld.com and Senior Football Editor Evan Silva noted today that this figure is significantly higher than any other quarterback in the NFC West as well.

This puts the Rams in an interesting situation. You could always opt to try and give Bradford a pay cut, which may be a difficult thing to do given the current quarterback market. After all – not by mistake – we saw what Jay Cutler was able to get prior to even testing it.

If Bradford would be hesitant to take a cut, the Rams best option would, quite honestly, be to cut him loose and use their second overall pick (from the Redskins in the RGIII trade) to obtain a signal-caller from the draft.

While many will see that as a ludicrous idea, I’m sure that thought may change after the results of an analysis I did last week.

The study looked at the rookie quarterbacks in the NFL since 2000 that have seen significant time during their rookie season (meeting a 200 pass attempt requirement). I looked at those quarterback’s Passing NEP scores during that season, grouping the passers in four tiers, with Tier 1 being the grouping with the best rookie quarterback Passing NEP numbers.

By no surprise, the best quarterbacks – the franchise ones – were all listed in Tier 1. Joe Flacco, Nick Foles and Matthew Stafford were outside of the top tier, but you could easily make an argument for any of those quarterbacks as to why they’re not true franchise quarterbacks. And Flacco was able to win a Super Bowl with a stretch of elite play, something not easily found in a quarterback who performs under expectation during his rookie season.

Sam Bradford was in Tier 3. He was with Carson Palmer (caveat for Palmer, who didn't play a snap his rookie year), Christian Ponder, Josh Freeman, Kyle Boller and Joey Harrington. And by no surprise, Sam Bradford has yet to do anything significant on the field during his NFL career.

By doing nothing with Sam Bradford’s current contract, the Rams are digging themselves a deep hole.

Cut Sam Bradford?

The Rams organization can keep holding onto hope all they want. Jeff Fisher and General Manager Les Snead can continue to have this false perception that they “have their guy.”

The problem is, they don’t. Sam Bradford is not an NFL star, and the chances of him becoming one are incredibly slim given the start of his career. Of course it can happen, but forgoing the opportunity to get rid of some of his cap number while simultaneously selecting a quarterback in the draft would be idiotic.

It’s time for the Rams to move on. Sam Bradford is not the answer.