Rams report, 8/22

* Injury report. Rookie free agent wide receiver Isiah Ferguson has been waived/injured after tearing his ACL during practice this week. That will move him from the active roster to the injured reserve and give Les Snead another opportunity to sign a player from AUBURN. (I'd say to give Greg Reid another look, but his Jacksonville Sharks play in the Arena League semifinals tomorrow.)

At this point in the NFL calendar, any player with less than four seasons of service has to be waived/injured to be placed on I.R., so E.J. Gaines, though also done for the season, will remain on the active roster until the first cutdown. I assume this rule is to prevent teams from stashing players. Gaines is obviously a much bigger risk to be picked up by another team if exposed to waivers than Ferguson, so he'll remain on the roster till September 1st when teams cut down to 75.

Fox Sports

Friday's did-not-practice list from Jim Thomas:
Daren Bates (knee), Michael Brockers, Gaines (foot), Todd Gurley (knee), Brandon McGee (foot), Rodger Saffold (shoulder), Korey Toomer (ankle), Cody Wichmann (calf), Doug Worthington (ankle/foot)

I know of no injury news for Brockers and expect he just got a veteran's day off.

Saffold has been tweeting that his shoulder injury is nothing serious and he expects to be back in the starting lineup opening day. Brandon Washington will start Sunday night in Tennessee and hopefully will be sharper than he was coming off the bench cold in Oakland.

Cody Wichmann was pretty involved in Tuesday's brawl with the Cowboys in Oxnard for a guy on the PUP list. Injured players should try to stay out of brawls. Didn't work out for Dez Bryant.

Gurley will be limited to individual drills all of training camp. Jeff Fisher has said not to expect to see him in preseason.

I assume we'll see Chris Long in action Sunday night. I believe it will also be Mark Barron's first game.

* Rams alumni catchup:
- Shane Suisham was hit while covering a kickoff during the Hall of Fame game and is out for the season with a torn ACL. Shouldn't starting kickers be obliged not to cover kickoffs during preseason? I hope Greg Zuerlein is just running straight to the sideline after kicking off.

- Buffalo closed the book on an awful signing by waiving guard Chris Williams. He failed a physical after appearing in only three games last season due to a back injury. I believe he has essentially been replaced by Richie Incognito. Back injuries are serious business, so best wishes to Williams in recovery. The Bills just paid way too much for him when they signed him away from the Rams in free agency a couple of years ago.

- And, the last Michael Sam update I expect to do for a while: Sam has retired from football. He appeared in one game in Montreal and did not record a tackle. In making his announcement on Twitter, Sam cited that the past 12 months have been very difficult for him, to the point he'd become concerned about his mental health.

What basically happened here was after the media long clamored for an out gay player in the NFL, once they finally got one, they drove him out. Sure, Sam is less athletic than the average NFL player, and he made some naive mistakes in handling his unique situation, but there were enough signs that he could have been a successful pro. I say he would have made it had he been able to put all the media b.s. behind.

Michael Sam didn't make it as a pro football player, not because he's gay, not because football or society is more hostile to gays than anybody else, but because the media was obsessed with him being gay. Will they learn that lesson and let the next Michael Sam just play football?

Inc. Magazine

* Eight is enough? There will be an extra referee on the field for Sunday night's game. The NFL is experimenting with an eighth official, lined up either deep in the offensive or defensive backfield, to watch for holding in the middle of the line.

And, wait a minute. Jeff Fisher, notably, is a member of the NFL's competition committee. Did he actually vote FOR this? Shouldn't Fisher be lobbying for reducing the number of referees, to six, or maybe one, given his team's complete inability to avoid penalties? Hell, this is a team that can't even complete a practice with another team without cheap-shotting its way into a bench-clearing brawl. Can Jeff Fisher actually be in favor of having MORE men on the field who can throw penalty flags at his team?

I'll set the over/under for Rams penalties Sunday at 11.5.

Sporting News

* I haven't mentioned much about Tuesday's brawl with the Cowboys in Oxnard till now, mainly because of a lack of time, but also because it was not surprise from a Jeff Fisher team whatsoever. It was so predictable I doubt it should even have made news. Go all the way back to 2000 when Fisher's Titans cheap-shotted their way through two days of scrimmages against the Greatest Show. The main goal of Fisher's coaching career appears to be replacing the Raiders as the NFL's outlaw team. Well, congratulations.

Playing in the NFL demands toughness and demands people who don't back down, but the continual lack of discipline of Fisher's teams deserves to be called the disgrace this is. The Rams are going to be one of the most-penalized teams in the NFL again in 2015. I'm not even going to pretend to hope otherwise. The question will be if they've finally gotten good enough in the rest of the game to get around it.

Also, congratulations to Imoan Claiborne for making the 53-man roster. I doubt it took much more than this.

* With Sunday night the stupidest timing possible for a preseason game, I can't say to expect RamView to be out very quickly for the Tennessee game. I'm thinking Tuesday night but will do all I can to work quicker.

-$-