The Best Team Money Can Buy: 2026

The 2026 Los Angeles Rams look like a superteam. The only other times we’ve seen the defending MVP and Defensive Player of the Year on the same squad were when they were the same person; bringing Myles Garrett in to play with Matthew Stafford is almost unprecedented. With Aaron Donald coming out of retirement, the Rams become the first team since the 1999 Kansas City Chiefs to have two players entering the year with at least 100 career sacks. Garrett and Puka Nacua were both unanimous choices for the All-Pro team last year, earning all 50 possible votes. They added Trent McDuffie and Jaylen Watson in free agency, patching their biggest hole entering the season. It is, on paper, a frightening collection of talent – the most talented team in the league this season and one of the best collections of personnel the league has ever seen.

But it’s not quite perfect, because Les Snead and company have the drawback of having to build their team in reality. The linebackers are vulnerable, the tight ends are unimpressive, the rushing attack lacks its own superstar. The Rams have drafted very well, made some savvy trades and attacked free agency with gusto, but they couldn’t go out and get every single player they possibly could have wanted. It turns out, the other 31 teams get to have good players, too. The Rams may well be the best team anyone has assembled for 2026, and one way to appreciate that is to try to do better than they have. It turns out, it’s quite tricky.

With a hard salary cap in place, roster construction in the NFL is a zero-sum game – every dollar you spend in one place is a dollar you can’t spend in another. You have to try to find value in some places you can splurge in others, and figure out just how you’re allocating your resources. In 2026, the salary cap is $301.2 million dollars. Let’s use that, and try to assemble the best team that money can buy in 2026.

Some ground rules, first. This isn’t just a list of the most valuable contracts in football. You don’t get credit for extra wins at the end of the year based on salary cap saved. The point of finding value in some positions is that it lets you splurge more elsewhere. There are players on this team who probably make “too much” money, whatever that means, but they’re also very, very good. We’re generating value so we can afford them! This is meant to be the best team assembled on the field, not the winner of the offseason Olympics. With that in mind, the requirements for this roster:

• It must not only fit under the 2026 salary cap, but theoretically be able to play in 2027 as well. Patrick Mahomes’ cap hit jumps from $34.7 million this year to $90.3 million in 2027! Obviously, the Chiefs will rework his deal and we can do that to. But we can’t rework everyone; we can’t take Mahomes and Justin Jefferson and Nick Bosa and Trent McDuffie and expect to be able to field a team next year. Nor can we load up on players whose contracts expire with massive void year hits next season. We’re not winning the Super Bowl and then running out the door to leave someone else to clean up our flaming wreckage.
• We can’t overload on rookie contracts. We can’t have five first-round picks in any given year – our theoretical scouts may be able to identify talent perfectly, but they can’t trick other teams into giving them their draft picks. We’re limited to a maximum of one player per round from the 2023-26 drafts, plus one first-rounder from 2022. We can’t take both Jaxon Smith-Njigba and Christian Gonzalez; we can’t take both Drake Maye and Brock Bowers.
• This is meant to be an actual team, not a collection of players. We need a long snapper. We need a gunner, a kick returner, a personal protector. We probably want a blocking tight end and a short-yardage back and a nose tackle. We don’t want three slot corners as our starters or a receiver corps consisting only of deep threats. Obviously, this is a fantasy and we’re just going to pretend that some of these superstars would be OK with being in a rotational role or playing on punt coverage and whatnot. But we have to at least pay lip service to the realities of building a roster.

Got it? Cool. Here’s my attempt at building the best team possible with these restrictions. I’d love to see your attempts, too; maybe at the end of the year, we’ll look back and see who did it the best. My money may still be on Les Snead.

Quarterbacks

The best asset a team can have is a star quarterback on a rookie deal, and so Drake Maye is the easiest choice for our starting quarterback – one of three players I started with and built up from there. Aaron Schatz voted for Maye for MVP last season, and while I can’t quite bring myself to go that high on him, he was third in DYAR and fourth in DVOA even after adjusting for the Patriots’ schedule. He also is only $10 million for 2026, less than half of what Aaron Rodgers would cost us and just over a fifth of what it would take to bring in Matt Stafford. Losing access to our 2024 first-round pick is a cost – no Brock Bowers, Joe Alt, Malik Nabers, Jared Verse or Quinyon Mitchell on this team. But it’s a cost well worth paying for the MVP runner up and one of the top 10 quarterbacks in the league.

Backing Maye up will be Mac Jones ($3.1 million). His heroics off the bench to keep the 49ers’ season afloat last year proves that you can live with him for a month or so without tanking your season. We’re also going to bring UDFA Haynes King ($0.9m) on as our third quarterback; you’ll remember him from his Hall of Fame Game heroics. A gadget package is often better on paper than in reality and our team is too good to really need to do too much nonsense to generate offense, but I could imagine a Taysom Hill-esque package for King if we really wanted to get creative.

Total Cap Hit: $14.0 million, or less than Daniel Jones