Winners and losers from the first week of Rams training camp

With the arrival of training camp, competition is the order of the day. Competition brings the ordering of the LA Rams roster, the establishment and refinement of the Rams Depth Chart, and how the limited number of reps can be dolled out to so many players. It's the law of the jungle, a meritocracy, the rule of law of the Necromancers (see The Chronicles of Riddick), a futuristic society whose governing rule is "You keep what you kill."

In the NFL, playing better than other players translates into securing a better role on the depth chart. But there are more ways to win in this 2024 LA Rams Training Camp. What about those players who have no direct competition? Of course they can. We all hold expectations of players, whether forged from their performance in 2023, or the information we were able to glean about them from the offseason. However we got there, we set the players into our own hierarchy.

Now, in training camp, they either meet, fall short of, or exceed those expectations.

But there are other ways to fall short at training camp as well. If this team finds excellent play out of all five running backs currently on the roster: Kyren Williams, Blake Corum, Boston Scott, Zach Evans, and Ronnie Rivers, but only has room for three running backs when the time arrives to trim the roster down to 53-players, two players worthy of a roster spot will not earn that spot. Those two slots will be bestowed to lesser quality players due to the need for their unique positional skills on the initial 53 man roster.

So there is more at stake in the early days of the Rams training camp that you may realize. This team is not only competing with 31 other NFL teams in the upcoming 2024 NFL season, but the players are competing daily to earn and maintain their roles and spots on the team.

Week 1 of the Rams training camp is in the books. So who is losing ground, and who is gaining ground, in the heated competition so far?