𝕋𝕠𝕞 – 𝕃𝔸 ℝ𝕒𝕞𝕤@TL_LARams
Another reason @BigGame81 should be in the Hall of Fame already. Only two WRs in the entire history of the NFL had over 8,000 receiving yards in their first 6 seasons: Randy Moss and Torry Holt

TurfShowTimes@TurfShowTimes
Rams looking to post 4 straight winning seasons for first time since 1986

Jourdan Rodrigue@JourdanRodrigue
I think Wolford is a pretty decent backup, lots of teams around the league won’t have as ready an answer if anything happens to their QB1.

P-squads are expanded and teams can protect four guys each week. I think protected guys will be a backup QB, a backup kicker, OL depth and maybe a WR or TE depending on how the numbers shake out there. And as for the rest of the practice squad, it’s great that it expanded because I think many in the Rams’ UDFA class have a lot of talent. I really like Brandon Polk, and Rozeboom is an ideal develop-in-house candidate.

I’d bet Anchrum ends up on the active roster at some point during the year. But for many rookies (and particularly the closer you get to the line of scrimmage) it just takes some time to adjust. I think Anchrum, if he doesn’t make the initial, could well be one of the protected PSquad players at minimum.

MLB’s Worst Nightmare Is Here. They Should Have Seen It Coming
The league is grappling with a widespread COVID-19 outbreak on the Miami Marlins.

https://www.si.com/mlb/2020/07/27/miami-marlins-covid-outbreak-testing?suid=5cc1bb7e2ddf9c753fb8acd5&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=SI%20Extra%20072720&utm_term=SI%20Extra%20-%20USE%20THIS%20-%20List

And here we have it, the least surprising possible outcome of MLB’s decision to fly some 1,500 people around the country, from one coronavirus hotspot to another, buttressed by a hope and a prayer and instructions not to spit, in service of playing baseball: They have to stop playing baseball.

Four Marlins players had tested positive for COVID-19 by Sunday afternoon. As of Monday morning, that count was reportedly at least 11 players and two coaches. Miami’s scheduled Monday night home opener against the Orioles has been postponed.

But the Marlins played three games against the Phillies this weekend. Last week, they played two exhibition games in Atlanta against the Braves. It’s impossible to know how far the infected droplets sprayed. Both of the Braves’ primary catchers, Tyler Flowers and Travis d’Arnaud, missed the weekend series against the Mets after they exhibited COVID-19 symptoms. The Phillies players and coaches are waiting on test results; The Athletic reported that their entire visiting clubhouse staff has been quarantined. The Yankees-Phillies game on Monday has been postponed. The season is four days old.

This is a catastrophe. It’s also exactly what epidemiologists have been predicting for weeks.

Owners and players agreed this spring to eschew a “bubble” system—players didn’t want to leave their families and owners didn’t want to cede the revenue that comes from stadium sponsorships—and instead use the more dangerous plan of traveling from city to city. The parties also agreed to test players only every other day, returning results within 48 hours, which means a player could be carrying—and spreading—the virus for nearly four days before he knows about it.

(And MLB can’t even guarantee that insufficient frequency. Within the first few days of summer camp, at least four teams had to cancel workouts because they did not have test results back. The Angels had to delay practice because testers never showed up at all.)

Earlier this month, the league distributed an operations manual of more than 100 pages that laid out everything from the mechanics of placing a player on the injured list to the best way to use the bathroom on the team plane. But it does not address what level of COVID-19 spread would cancel a game or the season.

The Marlins players met before the game on Sunday to discuss their options. Miami manager Don Mattingly said that his team “never really considered not playing.”

Why did athletes, rather than infectious disease specialists, get to make that decision? Because there are no adults in the room. There never have been. Once the owners and the players stopped squabbling over the details and agreed to play, both sides had too much financial incentive to force through a season. Just look at the way the league and the union trumpet their COVID-19 test results every week, announcing the percentage of positive samples, rather than of people, tested. Those numbers are a sham. If someone tests negative three times and then positive the fourth, the first three aren’t a success story.

Commissioner Rob Manfred has not conducted an open interview with the press since February. His most recent media appearance came on Thursday, during the Yankees-Nationals season opener, when he smiled on ESPN while Alex Rodriguez, who is currently trying to buy the Mets, told him what a “tremendous job” he’s done.

All this looks even more reckless in a country that will soon eclipse 150,000 COVID-19 deaths. The Blue Jays will play their home games in Buffalo, because the Canadian government does not want people coming into the country from the United States. Meanwhile, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., both waived for professional sports teams local regulations that would have forced anyone who came into contact with anyone who tested positive to quarantine for 14 days. Over the weekend, while the Marlins were taking two out of three from the Phillies, Florida eclipsed New York as the state with the second-most COVID-19 cases.

League officials are reportedly planning emergency discussions for Monday afternoon. They could have scheduled them a month ago.

from 2020 Quarterback Tiers: 50 coaches and evaluators rank the NFL starters

Mike Sando

https://theathletic.com/1945894/2020/07/27/2020-quarterback-tiers-50-coaches-and-evaluators-rank-the-nfl-starters/

…

Fifty NFL coaches and evaluators rated 35 veteran quarterbacks this year while providing candid evaluations that appear in the analysis below. The process was simple. Coaches and evaluators placed each quarterback in one of five tiers, from best (Tier 1) to worst (Tier 5).

…

Tier 3

16th overall: Jared Goff

The first quarterback selected in the 2016 draft ranks third in this survey behind Wentz and Prescott among players selected in that class. He is also the only one to start a Super Bowl, but with the Rams’ roster losing key contributors, voters do not think Goff is going to make up the difference.

“It’s almost like a system guy and if it’s not right there for him, he can’t make shit out of nothing and that is what the really good ones do,” a secondary coach said.

A defensive coordinator whose team faced the Rams last season called Goff a systemized quarterback who gets shaky in the pocket against the rush. An exec said he thought Goff struggled to see the field. A defensive coach said he saw some Mitch Trubisky in Goff — as in, what exactly does either one do exceptionally well? And then there is the familiar criticism suggesting coach Sean McVay is doing the work for Goff by reading coverages and relaying adjustments through the headset before the snap.

“Goff is a two and he is better than any of these critics want to give him,” an offensive coach said. “Remember when New England was stealing the hand signals, telling Brady the coverage on every play and he was just killing it through his first five or six years? I don’t give a coach that much credit because the guy has the ball in his hands and has to make the plays. Watch the production. The Rams are not a high-percentage pass team. They throw it up the field. They ask a helluva lot of Goff with the types of throws they make. Goff makes a lot of really, really good throws.”

Nearly all voters agreed Goff needed the Rams to revive the running game that was their signature when Todd Gurley was in peak form.

“The team fell apart around him,” an exec said. “He struggled in blowouts. Who wouldn’t? I’m not ready to toss him aside yet. He definitely took a step back, though.”

Stephen Holder@HolderStephen
By the way… I, for one, definitely want the NFL season to overcome Covid. Because if the season is canceled, we would deprive all those fans who have threatened to boycott because of kneeling their opportunity to make good on their empty threats. Face with tears of joy

==

from https://theramswire.usatoday.com/2020/07/27/la-rams-jalen-ramsey-donte-deayon-secret-weapon/

Troy Hill, David Long Jr., Darious Williams and Donte Deayon are the other contributors at corner and Ramsey called one of them a secret weapon for Los Angeles. After talking on the phone for an hour with Deayon, he shared on Instagram that fans should know his name in 2020.

Here’s Ramsey’s post on his Instagram story late Sunday night.

I mean, what do you say about this? Just the worst way you could handle this, and here we are. https://t.co/RFGOYer32L pic.twitter.com/U7uILcOia1

— Chris Vannini (@ChrisVannini) July 27, 2020

Jeff Passan@JeffPassan
Eight more players and two coaches with the Miami Marlins have tested positive for COVID-19, as an outbreak has spread throughout their clubhouse and brought the total of cases in recent days to at least 14, sources familiar with the situation tell me

The Marlins’ home opener against the Baltimore Orioles tonight has been canceled, sources tell ESPN, as the team remains in Philadelphia and continues to undergo testing.

Judy Battista@judybattista
The Marlins situation is especially sobering because baseball is only one week into the season, and already is grappling with an outbreak.

Craig Mish@CraigMish
As we await the official lab test results this morning from the Marlins, there is real concern many more players have tested positive for COVID-19. This will be the day we find out if MLB can continue to play amidst one team being hit so hard with the virus.

Geoff Schwartz@geoffschwartz
How MLB handles the Marlins team testing positive will be a blueprint for the NFL. I assume they’ve already planned for this to happen once (or more) this season. I can’t imagine they’d shut the whole operation down when 28 other teams can play. (Assuming Philly is quarantine)

The Marlins will either have to forfeit games until they can field a healthy roster or call up players. I don’t think MLB shuts down the season for one team.

And what’s depressing and must be pointed out again … other countries have played sports and haven’t had major outbreaks on their teams.

Here are the “high-risk” activities that players are banned from doing. If teams can prove the player caught COVID via one of these activities, they can go after his money pic.twitter.com/WqvSwWYKfc

— Ben Volin (@BenVolin) July 26, 2020

This Injured Reserve is unlimited and allows the desired and necessary roster flexibility. https://t.co/CThiqlMdBF

— Ian Rapoport (@RapSheet) July 26, 2020

.@ScottJay94: NFC South training camp preview: Todd Gurley is a newcomer to watch for the Falconshttps://t.co/FPxeegj2Kl pic.twitter.com/OotxMyimeH

— Around The NFL (@AroundTheNFL) July 26, 2020

==

[from link above]

Newcomer/player returning from injury to watch: Todd Gurley, running back. It still doesn’t make sense to me that Gurley will be playing his age-26 season on a one-year, incentive-laden contract, but nagging injury concerns compounded by a down 2019 have brought us to this point. Two seasons removed from being named Offensive Player of the Year, Gurley registered career lows in carries (223) and rushing yards (857) while rushing for 57.1 YPG, his fewest since 2016. He also added 31 catches for 207 yards, his fewest since his rookie campaign. Gurley should be afforded the chance to prove that he can be a workhorse once again. If he’s unable to stay in the lineup, though, the perception of his abilities at this stage of his career will take another hit, and Atlanta will have to turn to Brian Hill and/or Ito Smith.

Inside one NFL team’s plans to transform its facility

https://theathletic.com/1950740/2020/07/25/inside-one-nfl-teams-plans-to-transform-its-facility/

For as much as the NFL has tried to create standard protocols for all 32 teams to follow as they return to work amid the coronavirus pandemic, the reality is that social distancing is going to be easier in some places than others when as many as 90 players report to training camp next week.

Some teams have massive new, state-of-the-art training facilities. Others are based inside their stadiums, which provides the benefit of space.

Other teams have had to get much more creative.

One such team is the Los Angeles Rams, who remain headquartered in a temporary practice facility on the campus of Cal Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks. (Some employees also work out of a business office in Agoura Hills.) The Rams work out of two modular buildings on a limited amount of acreage, and nearly every inch of it, from the locker rooms and weight room to patios and parking lots, has been transformed.

Rams director of football operations Sophie Harlan on Thursday afternoon guided The Athletic on a virtual tour of the facility to show the transformation and explain many of the changes players will see when they are cleared to walk through the gates.

Harlan also demonstrated some of the new technology the NFL and each of its teams will use, such as thermal scanners at the entrance to the building and inside the locker room that record and track individuals’ temperatures and proximity trackers that are to be worn by all employees at all times while on team business — from inside the weight room to the cafeteria and on the practice field — to aid in contact tracing should anyone test positive for COVID-19.

It’s been an all-consuming process for operations employees like Harlan, complicated by the fact that state and local regulations prevented most employees from being in the facility until six weeks ago, rapidly evolving public health recommendations and surges in positive COVID-19 cases across the country.

“It’s been hundreds, thousands — I can’t even begin to tell you how many contingency plans I’ve thought of. It’s been a lot of coming up with plans, scrapping them, reworking them,” Harlan said. “The amount of hours of late-night phone calls and early-morning emails, all of it, it’s constant. But at the end of the day, if it allows for us to go do this thing safely and keep not just our players and coaches and staff safe but our families as well, it’s more than worth it.”

At the Rams’ Thousand Oaks facility, players will notice several 40-foot trailers in their parking lot — home to the BioReference Laboratories testing site and 29 members of the NFL Films’ crew on-site to shoot “Hard Knocks” — and one massive tent that is 70 yards long and 44 yards wide.

That tent, with open sides and a peaked roof, will be the team’s new meeting space when head coach Sean McVay is ready to hold full-squad meetings or when his assistants want to gather offensive and defensive players or smaller position groups.

Harlan’s staff is having carpet installed over the asphalt and moving tables and chairs out of the facility’s indoor meeting rooms to create an open-air meeting space. The Rams’ plan is for team meetings to be held either outdoors or virtually. (The Rams did conserve enough parking space adjacent to the facility to account for all players; parking space for coaches and other staff members has been moved off-site, and they will take a short shuttle ride or walk.)

“That is a huge game changer for us because it creates a lot of square footage that is shaded but still outdoors, allowing for that airflow continuously but also allowing for our players to meet at some point together,” Harlan said.

But first, players will have to get inside, and before they arrive, they will be asked to take a screening quiz from their mobile devices before they leave their homes or hotels. If a player reports he is symptom-free, he’ll enter a different, smaller tent. He’ll step in front of a thermal facial scanner that will take his temperature and read it out loud. The scanner will record and store these body temperatures to create a baseline for each individual, to more precisely notice a dramatic increase.

If his temperature is normal, the player will then receive his SafeTag — a chip about the size of the face of an Apple Watch — which he’ll be required to wear at all times while inside the facility, on Rams property or engaged in any team activities. These SafeTags, produced by German technology company Kinexon, will provide visual and audio alerts when the wearer comes too close to anyone else.

(For employees in Tier 3 — those people who aren’t allowed to have any contact with players or coaches or other people in Tiers 1 and 2 — it will flash yellow at 12-feet proximity and red at 10 feet, and it will give an audible alert if the 6-foot bubble is breached.)

Harlan slips the tag into a black sleeve that she pulls onto her forearm. Players will be able to wear their SafeTags similarly, like a bracelet or watch or on a lanyard around their necks. SafeTags will also be inserted into jerseys so that the teams and league can easily discover who was close to whom, and for how long, during on-field action.

Dr. Allen Sills, the NFL’s medical director, said the hope is these proximity trackers will make the contact tracing process far more rapid and efficient. Not only will the league and teams quickly be able to determine whom a player might have been exposed to, but they’ll also be able to know the length of the exposure — a critical component to deciding who else might need to be quarantined and for how long.

“This is an area where our knowledge is continuing to evolve and change, but clearly the CDC and other public health agencies have provided guidance here that, right now, it appears that time and proximity are really important determinants of risk of transmission when someone is infected,” Sills said in a phone interview on Friday.

The league has initially ordered 10,000 of these SafeTags, and league officials said this will be one of the largest-scale uses of this technology. The NBA is using similar technology within its bubble environment in Orlando, Fla., but on a much smaller scale.

“I learned very quickly that we’re going to have to figure this out on our own and have our own unique use case,” said Michelle McKenna, the NFL’s chief information officer. “And our protocols that we’re working on with Dr. Sills and his team are so unique that even if someone else had done it, I’m not sure it would have been done at this scale, tying it to on-site testing, and all of that together.”

The NFLPA signed off on the use of these trackers. It is important to note that these SafeTags measure proximity only to other individuals who are also wearing them; they do not record specific geo-locator or any biometric data. The data will be collected and stored by a third-party provider, IQVIA, the same company that will collect the results of COVID-19 tests.

The league did consider whether players and other team employees could wear these sorts of devices outside of the facility, but it raised too many privacy and logistical concerns.

In addition to the contact tracing, Sills said teams and the league plan to use the SafeTags and the entire SafeZone system proactively, even in the absence of an outbreak, to tell if social distancing measures are working and if there are places in team buildings where players or other employees are gathering at unsafe rates and distances.

“It’s all about risk mitigation. But I think that that type of positive feedback information can be really useful for clubs as they look for ongoing ways to diminish risk,” Sills said.

The Rams’ practice facility is composed of two buildings, both modular spaces installed at Cal Lutheran when the Rams relocated from St. Louis in 2016. Eventually, the team will build a permanent training center, but for now, players, coaches and football operations employees split their time between those two buildings, which are separated by a large covered patio.

Players will spend most of their time in and around Building 2, which is home to the locker room, weight room, training room and cafeteria. Each of those spaces will look markedly different from what players remember.

The locker room was revamped after last season, with the installation of new, swankier lockers, more open space and fresh new colors. But many of those new lockers will sit empty, and more than 30 players will instead use auxiliary locker space in a large room that used to be the media room and team communications office. Now that space is filled with individual locker stalls, spaced 6 feet apart. There are no tables for congregating for games of cards or communal dining.

Both locker rooms have coolers, which can be opened with a pedal on the bottom of the door, filled with individual bottles of water and Gatorade. Bathroom stalls also have these foot-level openers, to reduce germ transmission on hands. The Rams have installed hand sanitizer dispensers near all high-touch surfaces, such as the doors leading to the locker room and training room.

Players will also notice the signage. It’s everywhere, in blue and gold letters and symbols. There are arrows on the floors to designate one-way hallways. Doors are designated as entrances or exits only. Every room contains a reminder to MESH — the Rams’ acronym for “Mask, Education, Social Distance and Hygiene.”

Face coverings are mandatory — not just here at the Rams facility but at all 31 training sites — and education is a critical part of creating a healthy ecosystem, said Reggie Scott, the Rams’ vice president of sports medicine and performance.

Scott runs the Rams’ athletic training office and is the team’s designated Infection Control Officer. He’s also the newly elected president of the Pro Football Athletic Trainers Society. In that role, he’s been part of nearly every NFL and NFLPA task force virtual meeting since March and the early stages of the pandemic.

“I can’t wait to go back to just taping ankles again,” Scott said Friday, laughing.

His job now entails making sure that everyone in the building is following the league’s COVID-19 prevention protocols, no matter how individuals might feel about the virus and their risk. Masks are mandatory; there will be no exemptions or debates about the politics of face coverings. If they want to play football, these protocols are not optional — and they should be followed once players and staff leave the building and go home.

“Education is going to be a big component of this. We’re doing it for ourselves and our families, but we’re also doing the right thing for other people. We’ve got to respect the person next to us,” Scott said. “That’s not just a Rams thing. That’s a United States thing; that’s a world thing. We’re going to educate our staff and players that this is bigger than ourselves.”

In Scott’s space, the training room, tables have been spread far apart, and the sheets on each training table will be replaced after each use. The laundry load will increase exponentially across the league, as all items are now single-use.

Scott and his staff will have to break that 6-foot barrier at times — they have to be hands-on with injured or rehabbing athletes. Team doctors and trainers have access to a supply of medical-grade personal protective equipment, such as N95 masks and gowns, if they need it.

The team’s weight room, which is connected to the training room, is one of a few spaces that has been largely unchanged because of protocols that prohibit large groups from working out at the same time. The weight room also has garage doors that open to an outdoor gym space that the team plans to use as much as possible.

Weight and conditioning times will be carefully scheduled, just like mealtime.

Players will order their food via a mobile app and will have a designated time to pick up their individually packaged meals. The round, banquet-style tables on the patio have been removed, replaced by long, rectangular tables, making social distancing easier, and players will be encouraged to eat at their locker stalls.

This will be as big of a change as anything for players who are used to bonding with one another during training camp. After months of virtual meetings in the offseason, players will reconvene only to be told they can’t spend much actual time together.

But Rams officials are trying to remind one another, and will remind the players when they arrive next week, that there’s a purpose here: to keep them and their families safe and find a way to make it through a full season.

Now that the Rams facility is set up for training camp, Harlan is shifting some of her focus to the complications of the regular season, things she never thought she’d have to consider when she was promoted to her job of running football operations in February.

She recently toured the team’s charter plane — a tape measure in hand, to figure out seating arrangements for when the Rams take their first road trip, in Week 2, to Philadelphia — and is also working to figure out hotel arrangements and what road-trip meeting spaces will look like in 2020.

And she’s ready for everything she’s planning to completely change. After all, it was only in the past few weeks that the team received clearance from Ventura County to hold training camp at its facility in Thousand Oaks. The organization is also working with officials in Los Angeles County, home to the team’s new $5 billion stadium.

“We are prepared to take this in stride and make the changes necessary to continue, whether that’s with new technology or new recommendations from the CDC. We’ll adapt and adjust,” Harlan said.

Video shows a white male attacking the leader of a justice protest Saturday in Weatherford, Texas, then walking away completely untouched by @txdps or @wpdtx. Posted by @judenewcomb via Flutternater pic.twitter.com/ih6fXfhOA0

— Bud Kennedy / #ReadLocal (@BudKennedy) July 26, 2020