wv wrote:

Btw, I predicted Kupp would be injured at some point this year. But he proved to be quite strong and durable. Instead, Higby, Woods, and OBJ went down. w v

Me too. Back in September I thought there’s no way Kupp gets through the entire season   without missing at least a game or two. His willingness to run after the catch is something you don’t see from every receiver.

Also, zn mentioned Mundt earlier in this thread. The Rams really missed his blocking in the run game.  I loved that McVay’s commitment to the run never wavered. I never would have predicted such a scenario back in November.

TSRF wrote:

No matter what happens today, nobody will care about it in 2000 years or so…

Thanks, that’s better.

zn wrote:

Los Angeles Rams UK@LARams_UK

A round up of the overnight awards:

NFL Honors – Andrew Whitworth won the Walter Payton Man of the Year award Cooper Kupp won Offensive Player of the Year Hall of Fame

Dick Vermeil enshrined Torry Holt snubbed

It is interesting to read fan reactions to the HOF announcement on social media. It seems the most outrage regarding players being snubbed was reserved for Zach Thomas. Not that that means anything, it could just be that Dolphins fans are the most passionate and are on social media more than any other fan base.

Anyway, clearly many Rams fans are bothered by Holt not making it. I am strangely ambivalent. Yet  I felt strongly about Bruce making it. I really wanted Ike to get in and was disappointed each year that he didn’t make it. I am not sure why I don’t feel the same way about Holt.

Please say hi to Jack for me. Also, please ask him for his home address as I have a few items that I would like him to sign.

These break down threads are always my favourite to browse through after a Rams win. So thanks for putting them together, zn.

I don’t know if I just wasn’t paying attention during the regular season, but A’Shawn Robinson has stuck out to me in a good way these playoffs. Good to see Baldy acknowledge him.

My favourite part was when the Rams won.

Maybe now you will all believe when I say that Kupp is a great receiver and a valuable contributor to the Rams offense. Wow.

One of the knocks on Akers coming out of Florida State was fumbles. Until today, it hadn’t been an issue. Hopefully he got that out of his system now. Michel will be fresh next week, he didn’t have much work today.

Hopefully Rapp is back next week, I struggle knowing that Weddle is on the field.

What a legendary, unforgettable game. I’m just glad the Rams came out on the right side. However, to be honest I’d rather them have lost to the Buccaneers in this round than the Niners in the NFC Final. Does that make me a bad fan?

Anyway, I’ve got the feeling back in my left arm now. Carry on.

Zooey wrote:

I was in disbelief at McVay’s actions at the end of the 1st half. I was surprised he didn’t go for it on 4th down, but then thought he was just going to run out the clock, and regroup at halftime. Then he started calling the TOs, and I was incredulous. Why get aggressive AFTER punting? But it looks brilliant in retrospect. It put the pressure on Baltimore, and they made a mistake that the Rams capitalized on. I don’t remember ever seeing anything like it before.

My exact reaction as well. With their cannon-legged kicker, I thought for sure the Ravens would at least get a field goal out of it.

I think Michel was in for all but one or two snaps yesterday. He definitely could use some relief. I guess he wasn’t used as much earlier in the season, so hopefully he doesn’t run out of gas come playoff time.

I was watching a Vikings wrap-up show from a Minneapolis station last night. The two dudes on that show were both critical and grateful that McVay did not run the ball more often.

Zooey wrote:

canadaram wrote:

xoxo

I don’t know if you guys celebrate Christmas up there, since Jesus was an American and all…

We are aware of him (Him) because we watch so much American television up here.

One more thing, I like Skowronek. Perhaps he can put up some Josh Reynolds type numbers over the next few seasons as well as being a reliable downfield blocker in the run game.

I would like to request that one of the moderators edit my post in the “Setting up the AZ Game” thread so that it says something about how I see the Rams stepping up in a big way on Monday night. That was my intended message, it’s just that sometimes translating Canadian English to American English gets messy.

Anyway, when I saw that the Rams would be playing with a high school secondary tonight I thought that Aaron Donald will need multiple sacks to even keep this game interesting. I love Ernest Jones. If I were a jersey wearing kind of guy, I think I’d buy his jersey. Kupp is having a generational season.

Hope that the Covid guys are back for the Seahawks. Seattle has been playing well. Not a game to take for granted.

Happy for Goff. It will be interesting to see what this upcoming offseason brings for him.

As for the Rams, I am officially a bad fan who can’t live in the moment. I feel nothing but indifference about this win. I got more excited about wins during their losing seasons. I can’t help but focus on the dread I feel about the upcoming MNF game vs. Arizona. There was nothing in this win over Jacksonville that made me think that the Rams have turned a corner… BUT I will say that my favourite part about the game was Michel’s running and McVay’s willingness to run the ball. Twenty plus carries from one back is the kind of football that I enjoy watching. Kupp is a good all round receiver, as he made some nice blocks in the running game today. On defense, I liked that Ernest Jones continues to play solid football. They seem to trust him in coverage. I don’t think he’s ever going be a superstar, but he looks like he could be one of the better ILBs that the Rams have had since Laurinaitis.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you down there. I remember that back in my elementary school and high school days my cousin was always allowed to stay home from school to watch football in American Thanksgiving. My parents would never allow me to do this. Since those days, I have always planned to stay home and watch football on this day. I’ve yet to do it though. I could have skipped classes when in university I guess, but I never did for some reason. I keep saying that next year I’m going to use a sick day and stay home, but I never follow through. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this day as much as I always imagine that I would. I hope all your relatives are vaccinated and you get to spend some quality time with them while enjoying some football or whatever else you like to do.

https://www.thestar.com/sports/football/opinion/2021/11/05/green-bay-quarterback-aaron-rodgers-is-right-about-being-in-the-covid-crosshairs-forty-five-minutes-of-misinformation-will-put-you-there.html?rf

Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers is right about being in the COVID crosshairs. Forty-five minutes of misinformation will put you there
By Bruce ArthurColumnist
Fri., Nov. 5, 2021timer5 min. read

I live in a world where Mike McCarthy kept his job as my boss for 13 years. I don’t trust authority.

If Aaron Rodgers had just said that, maybe the rest would have been an easier ride. But then again, he may be the greatest quarterback in the biggest pro sports league of a country where at least 775,000 people have died during the pandemic, and Friday he spent 45 minutes pumping out the kind of misinformation that can get people killed. You know what that means? Rodgers could be president, one day.

All grim, tight-faced jokes aside, the Green Bay Packers great has had himself a week. Rodgers contracted COVID, it turned out he wasn’t vaccinated, and Friday he went on former punter and current shouty bro Pat McAfee’s Sirius XM show and delivered almost every anti-vaccine talking point you can imagine.

“I realize I’m in the crosshairs of the woke mob right now, so before my final nail gets put in my cancel culture casket, I’d like to set the record straight on so many of the blatant lies out there,” Rodgers said.

In poker, they’d call that entire sentence a tell.

Honestly, Rodgers portrayed himself as a probing, rigorous, independent mind and then hit the bingo card of almost every anti-vax forum you can find on Facebook, 8chan or Fox News. Doing his own research? Check. Bodily autonomy? Check. Ivermectin? Check. Hydroxychloroquine? Check. Homeopathy, natural immunity, vaccine-related sterility, why don’t doctors talk about being healthy, and inhaling too much CO2 while wearing a mask? Check.

Coercion, collusion, the woke mob, cancel culture, Joe Rogan, and citing Martin Luther King? That’s a discount double check all the way, brother.

“If the vaccine is so great, then how come people are still getting COVID and spreading?” Rodgers asked, which is one of those questions that are truly impossible to answer unless you have access to Google and a lick of common sense.

The vaccines do not promise 100 per cent efficacy, but offer a high degree of protection against both acquiring the virus and severe medical outcomes; there is evidence of waning immunity versus transmission depending on the interval between two shots, which is where the idea of third-shot boosters come in. While we’re here, natural immunity is not superior to vaccine-based immunity. There is also zero evidence vaccines cause sterility, but the anti-vaccine community had to believe in something else after their predictions of mass vaccine-related death hasn’t manifested in, uh reality. COVID may contribute to infertility, though.)

It was a journey into the fever swamps. Rodgers claimed an NFL doctor told him the vaccinated could neither catch nor spread the virus, which sounds like a lie even if you accept that an NFL-employed doctor is like a mob-employed lawyer; Lindsay Jones of The Athletic reported a league source denied Rodgers had ever spoken to an NFL doctor or an infectious diseases expert employed by both the league and the union. Rodgers said he didn’t lie when he used to the word “immunized” in a question about being vaccinated, because … uh, because it was some sort of witch hunt.

I mean, maybe he is one of the vanishingly few who are allergic to an ingredient in the mRNA vaccines, but when you also throw out anti-vax bingo it seems less likely. Rodgers declined to explain the homeopathic process he used to substitute for vaccination, which is probably for the best because that’s not a thing. When asked what the NFL said when he presented his case for natural immunity over vaccination, Rodgers — who says he took both Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, neither of which is recommended for COVID — said, “I think they thought I was a quack.”

Well, I mean, yes. Rodgers criticized the science behind the NFL’s collectively bargained COVID safety protocols in one breath — the team and league letting him talk to reporters maskless is indeed a choice — and said he called podcast bro Joe Rogan for medical advice in another. Rodgers claimed every single left-leaning person was anti-vaccine while Donald Trump was president, before flipping their opinion when Joe Biden got in. Yeah?

If you live in a reality-based universe, you’d consider this an extraordinary fall from grace. Fellow quarterback great Tom Brady has previously hawked concussion juice and the idea that drinking enough water will prevent sunburns, but he is fully vaccinated, so he is the reasonable one here. It’s an incredible twist.

Mostly, though, this was deeply sad. Rodgers has long been considered a thoughtful, intelligent and simply brilliant athlete. He’s funny, and smart. And while Rodgers’ 22-year-old actress fiancée espouses ingesting clay as part of her health regimen, it was still shocking to hear someone of Rodgers’s pedigree ramble down this path.

But it shouldn’t have been. If Rodgers seems to live in the classic cherry-picked world of YouTube research and half-baked ideas, consider that he is far from alone. Just 58.5 per cent of Wisconsin is fully vaccinated, and the state is closing in on 10,000 deaths; that’s more or less Ontario’s mortality in a jurisdiction with 40 per cent of the population, and Wisconsin is only 40th among U.S. states in death rate. You can chart states that voted for Donald Trump and states that voted for Joe Biden, and the correlation between voting for Trump and higher death rates — and, of course, less vaccination — is an almost perfect connection. And it shouldn’t shock anyone if Trump wins the next election.

And faced with a reality-based risk assessment that shows vaccines are the best and safest way to protect yourselves and others from a virus that has upended the entire planet, Aaron Rodgers, in quarterbacking terms, couldn’t read the defence. He was utterly sure of himself, while babbling that it’s propaganda that it’s primarily a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Which, largely, it is.

The problem with an infodemic is anybody can fall prey to it; anyone, no matter their advantages, can fall down a hole. Aaron Rodgers has everything, more or less. He’s one of the greats. And it’s a shame, but he’s lost. And he will get somebody killed.