Rams' Jalen Ramsey: Leave Panicking to Social Media
The Los Angeles Rams (2-3) have no wins over the past two weeks, they have potentially no running back ... if things got worse, their pets' heads might be falling off.
Jalen Ramsey's not too worried about it.
The star defender's final comments before the Rams battle the Carolina Panthers on Sunday afternoon (1:05 p.m, PT, Fox) could potentially bring a calm aura over a Los Angeles franchise whose gameday misery (back-to-back multi-possession losses to San Francisco and Dallas) has extended beyond Sunday and Monday. Just this week, the team learned it would be without top rusher Cam Akers and Super Bowl hero Odell Beckham Jr. claimed his continued unemployment partly stemmed from a lowball offer from Southern California.
In the eye of the storm, Ramsey doesn't see the use of panicking when there are a dozen games left on the Los Angeles docket.
"If you have two bad weeks of your life at home out of 56 weeks, would you panic? Would you? Yeah, we got a long season to go. We've got 12 games to go," Ramsey said. "This might not be the only time that we lose two games in a row. Hopefully, it is, but it might not be ... I kind of don't get it like, the narrative of like, ‘Oh, we should be panicking or like, we're just that bad or something right now.’ I don't get it personally, because everybody knows it's a long season.
So I don't really get that. But I mean, we kind of just leave that to like the media, social media, whoever wants to run with that narrative, right?"
Ramsey's optimism extended to a personal level: he reveled in the glory of his first career sack, having taken down Cooper Rush during the 22-10 loss to the Cowboys, and expressed excitement in the potential of watching linebackers Ernest Jones and Bobby Wagner take on star Carolina rusher Christian McCaffrey.
The defender also hinted that he personally reached out to both Akers and Beckham as they work through their trials. When it came to Beckham, business was far from their minds ("We don't talk about football every time."), but he believes the Akers is equipped with the strength that will allow him to work through a situation that head coach Sean McVay described as "uncharted territory."
"I think he knows that he's a really good player. Everybody else knows that as well," Ramsey said. "When you got guys like that, who are super confident, there's not more confidence that I can give him, right? But I can challenge him to practice hard, like build a leadership value, pay attention to the details, and stuff like that.
"I just try to challenge him in those ways. But at the end of the day, like me and Cam are close, that's like a little brother to me, Florida State ties, same agent, all that good stuff. So I just hope that he's successful in whatever, like, just as a friend, as a brother, as a little brother.”
Geoff Magliocchetti is on Twitter @GeoffJMags
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