Marcus Peters and Aqib Talib are ready for fun times with the Rams

Gary Klein

http://www.latimes.com/sports/rams/la-sp-rams-free-agency-20180314-story.html

Muted applause and laughter came from the back of the room.
It was produced by perhaps the happiest person attending a news conference Wednesday introducing new Rams cornerbacks Marcus Peters and Aqib Talib.

Defensive coordinator Wade Phillips clapped his hands and smiled broadly before quietly exiting out a door after Peters and Talib proclaimed their excitement about joining a franchise that won the NFC West in 2017 and appeared to have loads of fun doing it under coach Sean McVay.
Peters and Talib were acquired in trades that became official Wednesday, the start of the NFL’s new league year.

The two players, who have seven Pro Bowl selections between them, sat side by side at a table at the Rams’ Thousand Oaks training facility, flanked by McVay and general manager Les Snead, who brokered their acquisitions from the Kansas City Chiefs and Denver Broncos, respectively.
McVay described them as “special” and “cerebral” players.
“We feel like we got two No. 1 corners,” McVay said after the news conference.
Peters and Talib are the latest marquee members of the Rams’ remade defense that features defensive tackle Aaron Donald, the NFL’s defensive player of the year, and safety Lamarcus Joyner, who received the franchise tag last week.
Talib, 32, and Peters, 25, said they would complement each other on the field.
“We both have a great knack for the game,” said Talib, who has 34 interceptions in 10 seasons, adding, “We do some stuff the same, we do some stuff different.

“So he’ll learn some stuff from me. I’ll learn some stuff from him.”
Said Peters, who has 19 interceptions in three seasons: “He’s got a lot more years on me. I can just learn from him, so it’s going to be huge.”
Peters said it was clear from watching the Rams in 2017 “just how much fun they was having together. It felt like a real team atmosphere.”
Talib echoed that sentiment.
The chance to reunite with Phillips, for whom he played and won a Super Bowl with in Denver, and the opportunity to play for McVay were among reasons Talib nixed a trade to the San Francisco 49ers but agreed to be dealt to the Rams.
“You watch half the teams in the league, they just go through the motions and kind of collect the check,” Talib said. “But there’s another half of them teams, the playoff teams, they got a coach who they respect.
“And whatever [McVay’s] preaching, he’s got guys believing that they can really go do it. … I’m definitely glad I’m part of that.”
So is Joyner.
The Rams tagged the four-year veteran at $11.2 million for one season and let receiver Sammy Watkins hit free agency. Watkins signed a three-year, $48-million contract with the Kansas City Chiefs.
Joyner said he was “fine” with being tagged, that it would not hurt his career and that his goal was still to get a long-term contract done with the Rams.
“We’re just going through the process,” he said during a teleconference. “We’re trying to do what’s best for myself, and my family and what’s best for the Rams.”
Adding Peters and Talib, he said, would help the defense that ranked fifth in the NFL in takeaways.
“They can bring a lot of great things to the back end and help us create a lot more turnovers,” Joyner said.
Cornerback Nickell Robey-Coleman, who signed a three-year contract Wednesday, also is looking forward to playing with Talib and Peters.
“Aqib, I can’t wait to soak up his knowledge of the game, of being a veteran,” Robey-Coleman said during a teleconference. “Marcus, I know he’s a young guy but I know we are both ball hawks.”
Both Talib and Peters come to the Rams with histories of incidents.
Peters, who was kicked off the team at the University of Washington, was suspended for a game last season after throwing a penalty flag.
He said he has learned from his mistakes and that his behavior in the past “comes with being a competitor.”
Talib was suspended twice during his four seasons with the Broncos for incidents with opposing players. He also was involved in an incident in which he was shot in the leg.
Snead and McVay said the Rams vetted Peters and Talib and heard nothing but good things from former teammates.
“You continually heard the respect their teammates have for them, the passion they have for football and how important football and winning is to these gentlemen,” Snead said.
The two cornerbacks are looking forward to getting started.
“It won’t be my first time changing teams, man,” Talib said. “I’m a social butterfly. I’ll fit in just fine.”
Said Peters: “I’m just trying to come find me a nice comfortable home again.”

Led the team in tackles in 4 of 5 seasons. Thank you @MROGLETREE52 for your leadership on and off the field.#ThankYouTree pic.twitter.com/qMTomv5fOK

— Los Angeles Rams (@RamsNFL) March 14, 2018

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🙏🏾 thank you guys!!! https://t.co/Fm7FfICjPY

— Alec ogletree (@MROGLETREE52) March 14, 2018

Alden Gonzalez@Alden_Gonzalez
Video: Aqib Talib, on wanting to be traded to the Rams: “I wanted to be comfortable, and no time in the NFL was I more comfortable than with Wade Phillips.”

McVay, on Peters and Talib: “They’re probably going to piss me off a lot this offseason, getting picks from us in practice and things like that.”

Snead says he has been in talks with Tavon Austin’s agent and indicated that a resolution could come by tomorrow. Sounds like they’re trying to see if they can find a trade partner before releasing him. Still would be surprised if he was brought back, but we’ll see.

Les Snead, from the podium earlier: “We’re definitely not content, and we’re going to keep working to improve upon that.”

The Rams are talking with reps for C John Sullivan and OLB Connor Barwin, trying to bring them both back, GM Les Snead said.

Rams GM Les Snead had “productive talks” with Aaron Donald’s representatives at the combine, he said. They agreed on a timeline to potentially get an extension done.

Marcus Peters, on striking a balance and controlling his emotion as he gets older. “Everything comes with growth. What were you doing at 25? There’s probably some stuff that your mom and pops and some other people probably wouldn’t agree with. But all you do is you take it with a grain of salt and you keep pushing. You always learn from your mistakes, you sit there and you take it on your own, you stand tall and you have fun with it. That’s life. It’s ups and downs, man. It’s a beautiful journey.”

Lamarcus Joyner was asked how he could benefit from a full year as an NFL safety. Here’s what he said: “When I sit back and I think about it, I think about the progress I made as a nickel back in the league, coming in from college just my first year — I couldn’t cover a cold, and I just got better, and I learned all the things to work on to be successful in this league.” He expects to do the same at safety.

Vincent Bonsignore@DailyNewsVinny
#Rams head coach Sean McVay: “There’s really no limit to what these guys can do” on Aqib Talib and Marcus Peters

#Rams HC Sean McVay: “It’s rare to acquire two players of this caliber”

#Rams G.M. Les Snead: “We had to give Wade Phillips the pieces for his 3-4 defense.”

#Rams safety Lamarcus Joyner: “I’m in a good place. There’s still time to get a long-term deal done…It’s a process.”

#Rams Nickell Robey-Coleman: “I can’t wait to work with (Peters and Talib)”

#Rams Nickell Robey-Coleman: T”he #Rams showed their loyalty to me from day one.”

Needless to say, Marcus Peters brings a whole other level of swagger and passion to #Rams. He told me he’s doing better finding that emotional fine line and not crossing it on the football field, but makes no apologies for the intensity he brings and his strong desire to win.

New #Rams CB Marcus Peters: “I want to win so much, so yeah sometimes I’m going to get pissed off. But there’s no issues off the field. On the field, I can downsize a little bit” (says it’s all about emotions and wanting to win”

#Rams CB Aqib Talib: “This will be an easy transition for me…..I’m a social butterfly. I’ll fit in just fine.”

New #Rams CB Aqib Talib: “At no time in the NFL have a been more comfortable than playing with Wade Phillips.”

Dark Matter and the Earliest Stars

IN THE NEWS: Dark Matter and the Earliest Stars

So here’s something intriguing: an observational signature from the very first stars in the universe, which formed about 180 million years after the Big Bang (a little over one percent of the current age of the universe). This is exciting all by itself, and well worthy of our attention; getting data about the earliest generation of stars is notoriously difficult, and any morsel of information we can scrounge up is very helpful in putting together a picture of how the universe evolved from a relatively smooth plasma to the lumpy riot of stars and galaxies we see today. (Pop-level writeups at The Guardian and Science News, plus a helpful Twitter thread from Emma Chapman.)

But the intrigue gets kicked up a notch by an additional feature of the new results: the data imply that the cosmic gas surrounding these early stars is quite a bit cooler than we expected. What’s more, there’s a provocative explanation for why this might be the case: the gas might be cooled by interacting with dark matter. That’s quite a bit more speculative, of course, but sensible enough (and grounded in data) that it’s worth taking the possibility seriously.

Let’s think about the stars first. We’re not seeing them directly; what we’re actually looking at is the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, from about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. That radiation passes through the cosmic gas spread throughout the universe, occasionally getting absorbed. But when stars first start shining, they can very gently excite the gas around them (the 21cm hyperfine transition, for you experts), which in turn can affect the wavelength of radiation that gets absorbed. This shows up as a tiny distortion in the spectrum of the CMB itself. It’s that distortion which has now been observed, and the exact wavelength at which the distortion appears lets us work out the time at which those earliest stars began to shine.

Two cool things about this. First, it’s a tour de force bit of observational cosmology by Judd Bowman and collaborators. Not that collecting the data is hard by modern standards (observing the CMB is something we’re good at), but that the researchers were able to account for all of the different ways such a distortion could be produced other than by the first stars. (Contamination by such “foregrounds” is a notoriouslytricky problem in CMB observations…) Second, the experiment itself is totally charming. EDGES (Experiment to Detect Global EoR [Epoch of Reionization] Signature) is a small-table-sized gizmo surrounded by a metal mesh, plopped down in a desert in Western Australia. Three cheers for small science!

But we all knew that the first stars had to be somewhen, it was just a matter of when. The surprise is that the spectral distortion is larger than expected (at 3.8 sigma), a sign that the cosmic gas surrounding the stars is colder than expected (and can therefore absorb more radiation). Why would that be the case? It’s not easy to come up with explanations — there are plenty of ways to heat up gas, but it’s not easy to cool it down.

One bold hypothesis is put forward by Rennan Barkana in a companion paper. One way to cool down gas is to have it interact with something even colder. So maybe — cold dark matter? Barkana runs the numbers, given what we know about the density of dark matter, and finds that we could get the requisite amount of cooling with a relatively light dark-matter particle — less than five times the mass of the proton, well less than expected in typical models of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. But not completely crazy. And not really constrained by current detection limits from underground experiments, which are generally sensitive to higher masses.

The tricky part is figuring out how the dark matter could interact with the ordinary matter to cool it down. Barkana doesn’t propose any specific model, but looks at interactions that depend sharply on the relative velocity of the particles, as . You might get that, for example, if there was an extremely light (perhaps massless) boson mediating the interaction between dark and ordinary matter. There are already tight limits on such things, but not enough to completely squelch the idea.

This is all extraordinarily speculative, but worth keeping an eye on. It will be full employment for particle-physics model-builders, who will be tasked with coming up with full theories that predict the right relic abundance of dark matter, have the right velocity-dependent force between dark and ordinary matter, and are compatible with all other known experimental constraints. It’s worth doing, as currently all of our information about dark matter comes from its gravitational interactions, not its interactions directly with ordinary matter. Any tiny hint of that is worth taking very seriously.

But of course it might all go away. More work will be necessary to verify the observations, and to work out the possible theoretical implications. Such is life at the cutting edge of science!

snowman wrote:

If we do wind up netting two 3rd or 4th round picks for Watkins and Johnson, those might be used to get some decent interior offensive linemen.

Or to trade up and get back a 2nd rounder after trading theirs for Peters.

Alden Gonzalez@Alden_Gonzalez

Pro Football Focus rankings in 2017 for members of the Rams’ secondary …

Talib: 15th of 121
Peters: 17th of 121
Robey-Coleman: 19th of 121
Joyner: 3rd of 87
Johnson: 15th of 87

Jared Goff’s toughest assignments may come on weekdays.

max wrote:

I had a discussion with VinnyB [about Ogletree] and he told me that this was about Wade. Wade gave a frank assessment of personnel and obviously it wasn’t good for AO. Wade was banging the table for the CBs.

No surprise here, but it seems Wade wasn’t in on the decision to extend AO during the season. But he was instrumental in AO leaving.

Vinny said there was a lesson learned by the Rams on this.

VInny also said the Rams were not going to tag Watkins regardless of what some people thought.

They didn’t see him as worth that kind of money. (me: guess they were done with the TruJ type deals and had other things to spend money on).

They were planning on letting him test the market and hoped to sign him for something reasonable.

Not sure where Vinny gets his info from but that was a surprise to me.

zn wrote:

Last year WRs in his tier (like Adams and Jeffrey) got 13-14 M. Contracts go up. This year the expected range for WRs in that tier would be 15-16 M. That sounds like more or less what we should have expected.

More on that.

We don’t know yet what happened.

If he was not worth trading for in the first place, then that’s Snead and McVay. (You have to include McVay because Snead is not just going to impose a player on the head coach–they had to agree on that or it wouldn’t happen). Meaning, if they did not think he was worth the more or less expected range of 15-16 M, then they should not have done the trade.

However, if he was worth the trade, and was worth keeping, then probably they should have tied him up—and unless they were in the 16 M range, they were lowballing. That’s more on Demoff and Pastoors.

Or maybe it was some kind of combination of those things in which case it’s on all of them.

Or maybe SW just didn’t want to play for the Rams for whatever reason, in which case it’s on none of them.

BUT no matter what you think of Watkins, there’s this consideration too. As Ag points out, they could get a 3rd round compensatory pick for this next year. When Snead made the trade he said that the potential comp pick was one reason they did the trade.