The Los Angeles Rams pushed all of their chips to the middle of the pot this offseason by trading Jared Goff and two first-round picks for Matthew Stafford in hopes of upgrading at the quarterback position to get over the hump and win a Super Bowl.
While Stafford is as tough as they come, his tenure with the team has not gotten off to the best start physically as he underwent surgery to repair the thumb on his throwing hand shortly after being acquired.
The expectation was that he would be ready for the start of training camp and he was, although he now may have suffered a bit of a setback. During practice on Monday, Stafford hit the thumb on a teammate’s helmet while throwing a pass.
It’s unclear if the incident resulted in a serious injury or not but Sean McVay is optimistic that was not the case, via Jourdan Rodrigue of The Athletic:
“Not sure, we’ll see on that,” said McVay, before expanding a bit. “(My gut reaction) was probably what you’d expect. (But) I think he’ll be OK. We’ll just see what happens. That’s part of the game. … But I think everything will be OK there.”
McVay believes that because of Stafford’s toughness, this is something he’ll be able to get through:
“He’s so tough as it is, you look at what he played through all of last year to kind of get the thumb cleaned up. He’s a tough guy. We’ll see what they say, and we’ll take it a day at a time.”
Getting through training camp and the preseason healthy is something that McVay has always prioritized since coming over to the Rams. In fact, he has been an innovator in the NFL as far as not playing starters in the preseason with many other teams following suit in recent years.
The head coach added that this incident is something that could have been avoided and they will learn from it moving forward:
“Those are things that do inevitably occur,” he said, “it’s one of those things where I’m saying to myself, ‘Man, I feel stupid that I didn’t implement some of the things to prevent that. I’ve seen some teams around the league that have those shells on their helmets where you can at least soften the blow when you come down on the top of it. What you say is hopefully you don’t have to learn the hard way, and you start implementing things like that to try to just minimize the risk for injury.”
This offseason has already been a rough one for the Rams in terms of injuries with starting running back Cam Akers already going down with a season-ending Achilles tear.
L.A. cannot afford to lose its quarterback if it wants to win the Super Bowl, so everybody is holding their collective breaths and hoping for the best when it comes to Stafford.
