Rams micro news, 4/17

 Just a few items that have popped up during the quiet before next week’s NFL draft storm:

* The NFL releases the 2013 regular season schedule Thursday night. Since the Rams got a national TV game in preseason, it'll be interesting to see how much exposure they'll get there in the regular season. Let's not count NFL Network's worthless Thursday night games, btw. The Rams-49ers games were so epic last season, I don't know how you can keep those off national TV if you're the NFL. And it's not like Rams-Titans or Rams-Falcons wouldn't be full of story lines.

The Rams will open the season on the road if the current pattern holds. Since 2006, they've been home, home, road, road, home, home, road.

* Clemens re-signs. The Rams re-signed quarterback Kellen Clemens to a one-year deal. His demotion still stands, though, if you want to call it that. Jeff Fisher made it pretty clear Clemens will enter camp as the #3 QB behind Austin Davis. In the only free agency capsule I got up last month, I predicted Clemens wouldn’t make it out of camp because the Rams would stick with 2 QBs, and I’m sticking to that, but Clemens is good insurance to have around if a QB is injured before the start of the season. And if Sam Bradford would happen to get hurt a few weeks in, I expect Clemens will be available to sign as an emergency QB. I’m unaware of any interest in him outside of the Rams, though injuries around the league will change that.

* Chris Williams signs. The Rams now have three players from the top half of the first round of the 2008 draft on the roster. The #14 pick that year by the Bears, Williams played at left and right guard down the stretch for the Rams last season while they withstood their near-annual rash of offensive line injuries. Williams’ own injury history isn’t great, and he’s really a finesse blocker, but he’s got experience at both guard and both tackle positions. He’s expected to compete to start at LG, but I can also see him replacing Wayne Hunter as the third tackle; optimistically, he could save the Rams a roster spot on the o-line. There’ll be a lot of shaking out to be done in camp, though.

Additional note: the #6 pick from the 2008 draft, Vernon Gholston, was also briefly a Ram in training camp last year.

Arbitrators heart Stan. Did Stan Kroenke pick the judges in the ongoing Dome arbitration case himself? They’ve have had $millions of love for him so far. First, the Rams win over the St. Louis CVC on the scale of the upgrade necessary to upkeep the Dome; now, the arbitrators have ruled the CVC owes Kroenke $2 million in legal fees. The Rams asked for $3.5 million, but the arbitrator told Kroenke he’ll have to pay a L.A. law firm helping out on the case himself.

And let me state here how it thrills me to no end that Kroenke has lawyers from Los Angeles who are in effect helping him fight to get out of his stadium lease here in St. Louis. There’s no lawyers in New York who could have helped the Rams on this case? Washington? Chicago? Just had to be L.A., huh, Stan?

From the article, posted on STLToday last week, it also sounds like St. Louis County is starting to get pissy about the costs the CVC is ringing up, including the deal recently signed with Goldman Sachs to advise how to keep the Rams in the St. Louis area. Yeah, because political in-fighting will make keeping the team so much easier.

* It might be a little noticeable by now that I have had nowhere near the time I had the past couple of years to keep the blog and the site very up-to-date this offseason. (Doesn't help, btw, that Blogger is one of the worst editing tools in the history of computing. Why can I not cut simple text from one document to another without having it filled with useless HTML statements that wreck its appearance in the blog?) But this isn’t the worst Rams blog on the Internet for nothing! Having botched the Combine this year (only saw the offensive player workouts) and free agency, the next item for RamView to botch would be the 2013 Accu-Draft, but I have a plan for that. If all goes as planned, I’ll assemble a 32-post mock first round on the blog this weekend and dress it up with various items I usually throw into the annual Accu-Draft.

That’s if all goes as planned, of course.

 -$-