LA Rams move quickly to get to 80 players limit

The LA Rams may be finished with their roster moves required to get to the 80 player limit. Even as the expectation set the belief that the team needed to part ways with another group of five players, they may have finished their pruning work after today’s transactions.

A week ago, the LA Rams did in fact waive five players. They were all bubble players who saw little action in the first preseason game. While they were shown the door after the first preseason game, much of the deliberation as to their fate occurred both at the team OTAs and training camp practice field. The transactions were recapped in this Tweet on August 16, 2021:

Not surprisingly, the next wave of five came in two parts. Due to the LA Rams’ need to assign both punters, Corey Bojorquez and Johnny Hekker, to the reserve/COVID-19 list, the team had already cleared the active roster of two players.

That meant that the team merely had to part ways with three more players. A day before necessary, the LA Rams announced the following player transactions per the team website:

"“Waived/Injured RB Raymond Calais. Waived/No Recall DB Paris Ford and Waived/No Recall QB Devlin Hodges“"

By rights, the LA Rams have turned a bit of misfortune and flat-out bad luck into a curious way to leverage a bit longer look at one-two player(s) who will ultimately be waived eventually.  By assigning both of their competing punters to the reserver/COVID-19 roster, the team cleared two roster spots on August 21. That enabled the Rams to waive just three players but remain in compliance with the 80 man limit well before the deadline.

The team made the cuts. The roster is down to 80. So let’s look over the who and the why these particular players were waived.