LA Rams Elbowgate: Why Rams aren’t worried. Why fans are.

The LA Rams are pioneers of the NFL. Oftentimes that is a good thing. Sometimes it can pose unique challenges.

Day by day. That’s how an NFL player takes his NFL career. It’s the ultimate conflict between performance and injury. It’s the athlete’s attempt to push his body to the very limits, but not cross over that precipice of crippling soft tissue with partial or complete tears, overuse, or even hyperextensions.

Athletic training is a regimented process of repetition. A concise set of actions that are performed over and over again. So trained, the athlete’s body gets to the point where the body is so accustomed to acting in that manner that it no longer requires the focus of the brain. It becomes automatic, a reflex action, a ‘can do it in my sleep,’ motion.

But it’s that same repetitious motion, over and over for hours, days, weeks, months, and years that wears out the human form. People were designed to move in many ways, not just in one repeated way. That’s why baseball pitchers have developed unique ailments that require new medical technologies and strategies to repair.

Now it appears that the same type of baseball-like elbow injury is beginning to show signs of ailment for LA Rams starting quarterback Matthew Stafford. Here is a recent press conference for Rams head coach Sean McVay and quarterback Matthew Stafford:

Notice how the conversation about the continued soreness in Matthew Stafford’s throwing elbow becomes a challenge to even reference? Is it a baseball elbow? A football elbow? Well, we know that it is a sore elbow.

The fact is that soreness exists for an NFL player and is part of the path for an NFL quarterback. The issue is that the soreness exists in the throwing elbow of the Rams QB Matthew Stafford, and that arm and player were just extended on a multi-year contract. A long-term relationship, committed to by both the team and the player.  But these are the LA Rams, and pain in joints to an offensive star has happened before.