Rams report, 8/15

The Rams host the San Diego Chargers in preseason play tomorrow night. RamView will hopefully be out Sunday morning.

* Steven Jackson holdout, day 22. Sounds like, from Nick Wagoner's blog and other sources, that Scott Linehan is starting to get itchy about Jackson continuing to sit out. He has discussed talking the situation over with Jay Zygmunt.

It's impossible to know what Linehan may be saying to Jackson behind the scenes, but not knowing any better, I find myself wishing he would have stuck his nose into this at least a week ago, at least to publicly show he gives a darn about Jackson being in camp. Linehan's got a big stake in this too. He should have acted like it sooner. Maybe he has, but it hasn't been for public consumption. Still, if the team struggles again this season, it's going to be hard for him to make Jackson's holdout an excuse when he hasn't appeared to lobby for it to end until it got three-plus weeks and $330,000 old.

Howard Balzer theorizes that, in classic lawyer fashion, Zygmunt's now willing to break the impasse between the two sides because he refused to negotiate until Jackson reported for training camp, and training camp is over now. Of course, Zygmunt may now have no one to talk to; Jackson's rumored to be shopping for a new agent again, and according to John Clayton, is willing to sit out into the regular season.

$330,000, btw, appears to be the going rate for giant white truffles.

* Playing the starters. The key question for tomorrow night's game: will the starting offense FINALLY SCORE A FREAKING TD? I daresay Linehan is under pressure to leave the starting offense in the game until he gets that result. That sounds like it might be unusual for preseason, but I know it's already been done in a couple of games. The Bengals didn't pull starters in Green Bay until they scored, ultimately against the Packers' scrubs, and the Chargers left their starters in longer than I'd expected against Dallas because they hadn't scored yet, noting that LaDainian Tomlinson, as usual, did not take the field.

Can they score a TD? Will Linehan leave them on the field? Can they get off the field early? All critical questions heading into tomorrow night's game.