For this weekend's #ARIvsLAR game, an interesting pass game nugget for those saying Palmer will go off in this one#BeRedSeeRed #LARams pic.twitter.com/8LD7jWwI3a

— NFL Matchup on ESPN (@NFLMatchup) October 19, 2017

Arizona Cardinals and Los Angeles Rams: Prediction and scouting report for game in London

http://www.azcentral.com/story/sports/nfl/cardinals/2017/10/19/arizona-cardinals-los-angeles-rams-prediction-scouting-report-london-game/781095001/

Cardinals on offense

Can serious problems on offense be solved in one week? Maybe we’ll find out on Sunday when the invigorated, confident Cardinals play the Rams at Twickenham Stadium. It’s still hard to believe the offense that scored 38 points against the Bucs last Sunday was the same one that struggled to reach 20 points in its first six games. That’s how much things changed with the addition of running back Adrian Peterson and the return of tackle D.J. Humphries and guard Alex Boone from injuries. Is it realistic to expect 134 yards and two touchdowns from Peterson again? No. He can’t keep up that pace, especially at 32. But Peterson obviously gives the Cardinals a run threat, which allows them to be more diverse on offense. More important, his addition made others around him play better. The offensive line blocked better. Tight ends Jermaine Gresham and Troy Niklas played their best games. Receivers were willing blockers. Carson Palmer had time to throw. The Rams’ defense has dropped off some from previous years, but it’s still learning the system of new coordinator Wade Phillips. The front seven is formidable. Tackle Aaron Donald, the best defensive lineman in football, will challenge the Cardinals’ interior. Robert Quinn will rush off the edge, testing Humphries. Alec Ogletree and Mark Barron are fast, physical inside linebackers. Watching Phillips and the Cardinals’ Bruce Arians match wits should be fun.

Edge: Cardinals.

Cardinals on defense

For years, the Rams were clueless on how to function on offense. Coach Sean McVay has changed that and it’s hard to recognize the unit this year. Quarterback Jared Goff, who looked overmatched as a rookie, has eight touchdown passes and three interceptions. The eight touchdowns are not a huge number, but the Rams will take that TDs-to-interceptions ratio. Todd Gurley spend the 2016 season looking for room to run, to no avail. That, too, has changed. He has 521 yards and four touchdowns. The Cardinals, as usual, will sell out to stop the run. They will try to put the Rams’ offense in Goff’s hands. Watch strong safety Tyvon Branch on Sunday. If the Cardinals’ defense is clicking, Branch will be making a bunch of tackles versus the run. The Rams upgraded their offensive line in the offseason. Left tackle Andrew Whitworth has stabilized a group that was among the NFL’s worst for several seasons. Outside linebacker Chandler Jones, who has seven sacks this season, will test him. The Cardinals’ defense has been streaky all season, playing well for two, three quarters only to put up little resistance during other parts of the game. That has to change or the Cardinals will fall out of contention in the NFC West quickly. The Cardinals appear to have run out of patience with starting cornerback Justin Bethel, who is expected to be replaced in the starting lineup Sunday by Tramon Williams. Bethel is an exceptional athlete, but too often fails to find the ball. Williams, 34, was signed after training camp started and has played a minimal amount this season.

Special teams

For years, the Rams have been strong in this area under assistant John Fassel. The Rams didn’t look as good in this area until last week. They scored two touchdowns on special teams against the Jaguars: a kickoff return by Pharoh Cooper and a return of a blocked punt. Those scores were the difference in a 27-17 victory. The Cardinals’ special teams played better last week after performing far below average in the first five weeks. Bethel should improve the coverage teams if he’s able to play more. Bethel might not start at cornerback, which will make him more available on special teams. They still aren’t getting much out of the return game, but at least Kerwynn Williams had better judgment last week about when not to return kicks out of the end zone.

Edge: Rams.

Bottom line

At 4-2, the Rams have been among the league’s more surprising teams this season. It’s no fluke. They have a direction on offense and should improve defensively as the season progresses. The trade for Adrian Peterson apparently was just what the Cardinals needed. I like how the Cardinals handled the trip to London: arriving early in the week rather than late, as the Rams did. I think it will pay off for them.

Prediction: Cardinals 24, Rams 21.

Cardinals, Rams travel far for big NFC West matchup

Bob Baum 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/redskins/cardinals-rams-travel-far-for-big-nfc-west-matchup/2017/10/19/2b9390c8-b521-11e7-9b93-b97043e57a22_story.html?utm_term=.10f40bde68ac

This is no throwaway NFL game in London.

The Arizona Cardinals and Los Angeles Rams normally play their home games 371 miles apart, but they are traveling thousands of miles across the Atlantic for their important NFC West matchup on Sunday.

“Obviously, it’s a very big game, a division game,” Cardinals coach Bruce Arians said. “It’s the first time that we’ve faced the Rams this year, and they’re playing extremely well. And, we got here safe and sound.”

The Cardinals (3-3) left Monday evening and arrived in London about noon Tuesday. They’ve been practicing there all week.

This is Arizona’s first trip to London. The Rams have been there twice, losing both times. But this is the first such trip for the new regime, first-year coach Sean McVay and his staff who have the Rams (4-2) off to a great start.

Los Angeles spent the beginning of the week at a beach-front resort in Jacksonville after beating the Jaguars last Sunday.

“It’s been kind of like a mini training camp a little bit,” quarterback Jared Goff said. “You get to hang out with all the guys again. To be around the coaches some more is always fun, and meeting rooms are right near our rooms. It’s kind of like training camp again. It’s nice and it’s definitely better than flying back to California and then having to fly all the way back out to London.”

The Rams give up a home game to make their Sunday appearance at Twickenham Stadium, London’s famous rugby ground.

Adrian Peterson, who rejuvenated Arizona last Sunday, a 38-33 victory over Tampa Bay, is making his second trip to London in less than a month. He was with the Saints when they beat Miami 20-0 on Oct. 1.

Peterson said that, unlike his first trip, he got some sleep on the flight.

“That was a big thing,” he said, “because it took me almost three days to adjust once I arrived here.”

Now he is raring to go after gaining 134 yards in 26 carries and scoring two touchdowns in his Arizona debut, satisfying proof that he’s not quite yet over the hill.

Here are some things to consider when the Cardinals face the Rams:

GIVE IT TO GURLEY: Rams running back Todd Gurley is getting plenty of opportunities to touch the ball this season, and he isn’t letting McVay down. He got 23 carries and one reception against Jacksonville after getting only a season-low 16 touches against Seattle the previous week.

Gurley has three games with at least 100 yards rushing and three games with at least five receptions. He is fourth in the NFL with 521 yards rushing, and his 4.2 yards per carry rank fourth in the NFL among backs with at least 100 carries.

The Cardinals haven’t allowed a 100-yard rusher in 19 games, the longest active streak in the league.

PASSING FANCY: Arizona’s Carson Palmer has had to throw a lot more than he wanted in the first five games with the team unable to move the ball on the ground. When Peterson is rolling, it means less passing, fewer hits on the 37-year-old quarterback, and more open receivers.

Palmer completed his first 14 passes, going 18 for 22 for 283 yards and three touchdowns with one interception against Tampa Bay. In his first five games, Palmer threw 49, 36, 48, 51 and 44 passes.

STILL WORKING: The partnership between Goff and new receiver Sammy Watkins still hasn’t taken off. Watkins, acquired from Buffalo for a second-round pick during the preseason, has two catches in the last three games, and Goff has only targeted him a shocking six times.

Watkins expressed surprise at his small role on social media recently, but McVay has said Watkins remains a key part of the plan. Watkins also draws the opposition’s top cornerback, presumably including Arizona’s Patrick Peterson in London, allowing Robert Woods and rookie Cooper Kupp to get free for big plays.

DANGEROUS DONALD: Aaron Donald held out until the day before the Rams’ season opener, but the All-Pro defensive lineman looks as good as ever. He had two spectacular games on the interior line in the Rams’ last two outings, pushing into opponents’ backfields to stop the run, and harassing quarterbacks with equal vigor.

NEW O-LINE: Arizona seems to finally have a combination on the offensive line that works.

Left tackle D.J. Humphries, out much of the season with a knee injury, was back last week, as was left guard Alex Boone, who had been sidelined with a triceps injury. On the right side, ineffective Adam Boehm has been replaced by recent signee Earl Watford.

Our top performers from within the trenches this season pic.twitter.com/sdTUXvjHDh

— Pro Football Focus (@PFF) October 19, 2017

LBRamsFan wrote:

I think Goff is progressing very nicely and this game is no more a measuring stick than any other. Next year should really prove to be a major ascension for Jarod, but he can definitely take over games right now if he needs to.

My observation is that Jarod is very proficient at throws where the receiver is crossing the field, like square ins (especially to Woods, and anyone who has thrown this pass knows how difficult it is to hit a crossing receiver perfectly in stride), and he is excellent at throwing the ball down the seam (he has made some great throws to Higbee down the seam), but has been inconsistent with throws to receivers moving away from him. He will get better at all of these throws, but that is how I see it.

But you cannot watch him run the offense with an up-tempo this year and not be amazed how far he has come from last year. Give him, McVay, and this same group of receivers another year together and I expect them to be head turning with the passing game next year.

For Rams, ‘everything is different’ under Sean McVay and his refreshing standards

Alex Marvez

http://www.sportingnews.com/nfl/news/los-angeles-rams-coach-sean-mcvay-nfc-west-playoff-picture-race/7n6ebr1lazz17ak8967b3hub?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

JACKSONVILLE — The last time the Rams opened a season 4-2 was 2006, when the club was in St. Louis and Scott Linehan began his first year as head coach. The Rams would then lose 23 of their next 30 games before Linehan was fired four games into the 2008 season.

I mention this as a cautionary tale for those who think Sean McVay already has proven himself as the long-sought answer for a franchise that hasn’t reached the playoffs since the 32-year-old wunderkind was a freshman wide receiver at Miami University in 2004.

The body of work simply is not yet available to prove McVay is the second coming of Dick Vermeil and can avoid flaming out like Linehan after initial success. Plus, so many things go into the head coaching position beyond Xs and Os. The NFL’s nature dictates there will be more challenges on and off the field, which McVay still must prove he can handle.

All that being said, count me in as a believer.

It wasn’t just the way Los Angeles bounced back from a Week 5 loss to Seattle with Sunday’s 27-17 road win over Jacksonville that continues to make McVay the early front-runner for NFL Coach of the Year honors. It’s the immediate impact McVay has made in defusing the malaise that had settled over the Rams during Jeff Fisher’s four-plus seasons at the helm prior to his firing in December.

“The whole culture changed as soon as McVay got in here,” Rams cornerback Trumaine Johnson told Sporting News from the visitor’s locker room at EverBank Field. “Go back to OTAs, training camp … Everything is different.”

Being atop the NFC West at this point of the season is something different for Johnson from his previous five seasons with the Rams. The same goes for linebacker Alec Ogletree, who has experienced the same playoff drought since he was drafted in 2013.

“We haven’t had the best of seasons in the past few years,” Ogletree told SN. “We definitely were coming in with an open attitude. We just wanted to get better in any way possible.”

What Los Angeles displayed against Jacksonville feeds into Ogletree’s conviction that “all three phases believe in one common goal.” While that sounds like a vintage football cliché, it was rarely the case with Fisher’s squads because the Rams were so poor offensively compared to their quality defensive and special teams units.

These Rams were superior across the board against a Jaguars team also trying to break its losing ways under a new coach in Doug Marrone. Special teams produced a Pharoh Cooper 103-yard touchdown return on the game’s opening kickoff, a blocked Jaguars punt for another touchdown and a two-for-two field goal performance by Greg Zuerlein, which stood out in comparison to erratic Jacksonville kicker Jason Myers missing two 54-yard attempts.

The defense rebounded after surrendering a 75-yard Leonard Fournette touchdown run on Jacksonville’s first offensive snap. Fournette was held to a 2.8-yard average on his other 20 carries, which placed more pressure on Jaguars quarterback Blake Bortles to carry the load.

That isn’t his strength. Bortles completed 23 of 35 passes with one touchdown but was sacked five times and threw a fourth-quarter interception with the Jags in field-goal range.

The Rams also rely heavily on their running game for offensive production, and Todd Gurley delivered with 116 yards on 23 carries. But they actually have a QB who is starting to live up to his high draft status.

Although he has made only 13 career NFL starts, Jared Goff already looks more advanced in his second season than Bortles does after 51 starts since 2014. Goff stayed composed in a modest 124-yard, one touchdown performance against a Jaguars defense that entered the game with a league-high 15 takeaways that led directly to 77 points.

Goff’s improvement under a quarterbacking guru like McVay hasn’t gone unnoticed by Rams defenders.

“We were the 32nd-ranked offense last year,” Johnson said. “Now, we’re in the top five. That’s a complete change right there.

The improvement doesn’t surprise Rams center John Sullivan. Neither does the team-building McVay has done since leaving his post as Washington’s offensive coordinator for the head coach role in Los Angeles.

“I expected what we are seeing now, which is a change in the culture, a change in the standard that was set and the expectations for this team,” said Sullivan, who was lured away by McVay from Washington to LA in free agency. “Today, this wasn’t our best offensive performance, but things have really turned around. We expect to be a winning organization on and off the field.

“He preaches about the character and culture of this team. It’s a constant reminder in our team meetings what a Ram is supposed to be, what our core values are, and what dictates our actions on a daily basis as players and professionals.”

Another Rams newcomer expressed similar insight to Sporting News.

“The essence of everything starts with my character and who I am on a daily basis,” said left tackle Andrew Whitworth, who had played the previous 11 seasons in Cincinnati before he arrived in LA during the 2017 offseason. “Consistency is the most important thing that matters.

“You can be a guy who has a splash play one Sunday and you think you’ve arrived. But the greatest measure of individual success is if week-in and week-out that you’re there for your team. That’s what builds a franchise — when your best player and worst player have that same mentality. Everybody is getting better, not just certain guys on the team.”

McVay’s team-first mantras were recently put to the test by wide receiver Sammy Watkins, who complained on social media about his lack of opportunities following the Seahawks game. McVay responded by personally watching video with Watkins to highlight areas in which both sides could do a better job in the passing game.

A source told Sporting News that McVay also reminded Watkins of why the team traded for him in August: They want him to become a long-term part of the roster. Watkins, a 2014 first-round pick by Buffalo, is set to become an unrestricted free agent in the offseason.

Although he only caught one pass on four targets against Jacksonville, Watkins didn’t kvetch about it to the media afterward.

“The only thing I can do is keep working hard on my craft and put everything on film,” Watkins said, per the Los Angeles Times. “I think I played hard, stayed in the game and managed it. We got the win, that’s the biggest thing.”

McVay admitted after the Jags game that “coaches and players alike” are still “learning about each other.”

“They’re working through the good and bad,” McVay said. “These players are mentally tough. I think that’s because they’re becoming that identity that you hear us talking about all the time.”

It’s one that would make McVay and the Rams built to last for the long haul.

“We have the pieces here to win if everybody just keeps believing and doing their job the right way at a high level,” Ogletree said.

The process has begun.

Neutron stars collide, solve major astronomical mysteries
Produces light and gravitational waves, confirms collisions produce fast gamma ray bursts, heavy elements.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/10/neutron-stars-collide-solve-major-astronomical-mysteries/

We’ve been extremely lucky. The LIGO and VIRGO detectors only operated simultaneously for a few weeks, but they were a remarkably busy few weeks. Today, those behind the joint collaboration announced that they’ve observed the merger of two neutron stars. And, because neutron stars don’t swallow everything they encounter, the gravitational waves were accompanied by photons, including an extended afterglow. So dozens of telescopes, and many in space, had representatives involved in the announcement.

The number of major astrophysical issues cleared up by this collision is impressive. The collision was simultaneously detected with the Fermi space telescope, confirming that neutron star mergers produce a phenomenon known as a short gamma-ray burst. The gravitational waves were detected nearly simultaneously with the gamma ray burst, confirming that they move at the speed of light. And heavy elements like gold were detected in the debris, indicating that these mergers are a source of elements that would otherwise be difficult to produce in a supernova.

Finally, the gravitational waves from this event were detected over a period of roughly 100 seconds, which should allow a detailed analysis of their production.

Meet the neutrons

Neutron stars are the product of supernovae where the star doing the exploding doesn’t have sufficient mass to form a black hole. The object that forms instead crushes one or two solar masses down to an object with a diameter of about 20km. At these densities, individual atoms are crushed out of existence, and the entire star becomes a single chunk of neutrons—and possibly other exotic particles (quark matter stars have been proposed but not yet confirmed to exist). In cases where two massive stars both go supernova, it’s possible to form binary systems where two neutron stars orbit each other.

We’ve known about binary neutron star systems for years, including some that were inspiralling toward a collision. Theoreticians have been busy proposing what they would look like and how they would behave once the merger took place, but the simultaneous detection of the event in gravitational and electromagnetic waves has been essential to confirm a number of the theoreticians’ ideas.

For that to happen, we needed to get lucky in two ways. Since neutron stars are substantially less massive than black holes, the events are weaker, and we’d only detect them if they were closer. In this case, the merger took place 130 million light years from Earth, something astronomers are calling a “relatively close distance.” (For context, that “relatively close distance” means the event took place shortly after the ancestors of marsupials and placental mammals went their separate ways.)

We also needed LIGO and VIRGO in operation simultaneously. As shown by a diagram in the gallery above, having a third detector has radically shrunk the area of sky that contains a gravitational wave source. Thus, we have a high degree of certainty that the gamma ray burst was produced by the same source as the gravitational waves.

The two neutron stars that merged here have a relatively low mass: they were estimated at about 1.1 to 1.6 times the mass of the Sun, compared to black holes that have been greater than 20 solar masses. This means that the neutron stars spent more time orbiting at a close distance before merging. This allowed the detection of gravitational waves for nearly 100 seconds; black hole mergers have produced detectable waves for only a fraction of a second. This should provide a nice test of our understanding of gravitational wave production.

Let there be light

LIGO-VIRGO’s analysis software is programmed to do a quick-and-dirty analysis of data for possible sources and send out an alert to telescopes to allow them to perform observations of the area of sky where an event may be taking place. In this case, however, the telescopes also got an alert from NASA’s Fermi Space Telescope, which specializes in catching high-energy events. Fermi has a gamma-ray burst monitor, and it picked up an event about two seconds after the gravitational wave signal arrived. This increased the precision with which we could map the source of the event, and telescopes of every sort sprung into action. More than 70 have provided observations that went into today’s announcement.

The rapid redirection of so much hardware caught people’s attention, and people quickly figured out that this was likely to mean the detection of a neutron star merger. So today’s announcement had been expected since shortly after the event took place in August.

Even before these telescopes got involved, however, the Fermi detection told us two things. One is that, as theoreticians had predicted, gravitational waves appear to travel at the speed of light. There’s still some imprecision in the measurements that could allow them to travel close, but not quite, to the speed of light, but the new measurements mean that it would have to be very, very close.

The second thing is that it nails down neutron star collisions as the source of some gamma-ray bursts. Gamma rays are the highest energy photons we can detect, and so we knew some powerful event must be producing them. Theoreticians had pointed the finger at neutron star mergers, but that had been a difficult thing to confirm, since it was often impossible to identify a counterpart to the bursts that was detectable at lower-energy wavelengths, plus we’d only be looking at debris produced by the event, not its source. The gravitational waves, by contrast, leave no doubt that the source was a neutron star merger.

Then there were the observations of the debris. This picked up the presence of gold and other heavy elements in the debris, which again, clears up an outstanding mystery. Some heavy elements are readily formed in the environment created by a supernova, meaning it’s easy to explain their abundance in the cosmos. But others can only form through pathways that involve the rapid ingestion of multiple neutrons—so fast that the atom doesn’t have time to rearrange to accommodate the previous neutrons it had absorbed. Supernovae aren’t thought to provide an environment that’s sufficiently neutron-rich for this to occur.

Neutron stars obviously would, but they keep their matter gravitationally crushed into its exotic state. What would be needed is for some event to liberate some of the matter that was otherwise trapped in these stars. Again, theoreticians had pointed to neutron star collisions as providing that opportunity, as the collisions would blast some debris out into space in a phenomenon that has picked up the term “kilonova.” But it hadn’t been confirmed until this point.

It’s an incredible wealth of information. As LIGO spokesman David Shoemaker put it in a statement, “From informing detailed models of the inner workings of neutron stars and the emissions they produce, to more fundamental physics such as general relativity, this event is just so rich. It is a gift that will keep on giving.” Plus it hints that further events of this sort will add to our understanding. Though they might not be as detailed, Laura Cadonati, another LIGO scientist, says that events of this proximity should only occur by chance once every 80,000 years. If we see more like this one, then the theoreticians will have yet another mystery to explain.

“It is tremendously exciting to experience a rare event that transforms our understanding of the workings of the Universe,” said France A. Córdova, director of the National Science Foundation. The organization she now runs took a multimillion dollar risk that the LIGO detector would bring us to this point. If the recent Nobel Prizes to the LIGO team didn’t already validate that risk, then this set of discoveries surely does.

There are two press conferences about to happen, and several papers will be released shortly. If any contain important information, we’ll have further coverage.

UPDATES:

Researchers are saying that the resulting object is either one of the heaviest neutron stars yet observed, or the lightest black hole. Data is ambiguous at this point, but they’re hoping further observations will sort this out.

The neutron stars have been orbiting each other for 11 billion years, as their stars went supernova early in the Universe’s history. The second explosion sent the neutron stars on an erratic orbit through their galaxy through this entire time.

A 16-inch telescope could have picked up the source, meaning that these events will be in the range of amateur astronomers. Plans are to open the LIGO trigger system notifications to the public, letting the amateurs in on the earliest observations.

PFF: NFL 2017 Week 6 – Team of the Week

https://www.profootballfocus.com/news/pro-nfl-2017-week-6-team-of-the-week?utm_content=buffer534de&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=nfl

—

LG – Rodger Saffold, Los Angeles Rams
PFF Grade: 83.1

Elite Stat: Rodger Saffold allowed just one sack across 26 pass-blocking snaps.

The Rams didn’t pass a whole lot this week against the Jaguars, and though Rodger Saffold did give up a sack, it was the only pressure he allowed across 26 pass-blocking snaps. He was able to assert himself in the run game against a Jaguars defense that has not been as dominant against the run as it has been in pass-rushing, and RB Todd Gurley gained 59 yards before contact overall.

==

Defensive interior – Aaron Donald, Los Angeles Rams
PFF Grade: 91.9

Elite Stat: Aaron Donald notched ten pressures against the Jaguars.

For the second week running Aaron Donald notched ten total pressures, and now has as many pressures over the past two weeks as Kawann Short has over the entire season. Donald tore the Jaguars offensive line to pieces on the inside, gaining multiple pressures against all three of the Jags’ interior linemen. Donald was relatively anonymous in the run game this week, but more than made up for it with his pass-rush, generating pressure on more than 25 percent of his rushes.

==

Eagles or Rams?

Which team is the now the NFC favorite after Week 6?

📺: @NFLTotalAccess pic.twitter.com/mluA5zdXn4

— NFL Network (@nflnetwork) October 17, 2017