The Los Angeles Chargers and Rams season finale of Hard Knocks. There was cut down day and a recap of Derwin James injury.
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00:00Hey, Eric Williams here with Sports Illustrated. Of course, I'm joined by my partner in crime,
00:04Fernando Ramirez. I cover the Rams. Fernando covers the Chargers. We're going to talk about
00:09the final episode of Hard Knocks Los Angeles. A lot of interesting things happened during
00:14this last episode. Fernando, of course, is going to kick it off first. Here you go.
00:19Eric, sad day. Obviously, it's our last episode about this, but sad day for the Chargers as well
00:25for the episode because they had to be reminded about Derwin James and his injury. I mean,
00:29I was there and I remember you just see him go down and everybody thought, oh, he's clowning
00:34around or he's doing something. And then there's a silence. And yeah, he comes off and throws his
00:39gloves and he's angry because he knew that he might be out for the season again. And Melvin
00:46Ingram comes up and he's like, dude, do you have a cramp? Are you cramping? And you just see all
00:50the coaches just run at him and make sure that he's OK. And yeah, it was just one of those freak
00:54accidents that that happened. And Anthony Lynn even said in his office when asked and he's like
01:00non-contact. And that was the bad luck of it that everybody was so ready for Derwin James
01:04this year with that defense. We've only seen Derwin James and Joey Bosa for 12 games together
01:10in three in three seasons. So it's sad and it's terrible for Derwin James. But
01:16the coaches and everybody is hoping that he'll come back 100 percent. I mean, he's he had taken
01:22a leadership role this year, Eric. He had been with the guy that was breaking down the defense
01:26before they would go. He'd be a come on, guys, let's go. He would come over and he talked to
01:30Desmond and be like, Desmond, I think you should do this and this. He'd even go up to Chris Harris
01:33Jr. and be like, hey, Chris, I think you should do that. And it was just one of those things where
01:36you're like, wow. And then you saw his coverage skills were getting better. He was covering
01:40Keenan Allen, Hunter Henry, picking those guys off, doing so well. And it's just a shame. But
01:47but for some more positive news, I guess Tyrod Taylor was a he he he had been through the whole
01:53hard knocks thing before with the Cleveland Browns. You can tell he's not a fan of it.
01:57He doesn't like it. So he he was shown showing up at the facility here at 5 a.m., working out,
02:04getting ready, watching film and everything. And there was nobody around him. Why? Because
02:08the quarterback has to be the leader of your team. And Tyrod is the leader. He knows that he hasn't
02:12played football in a while. He hasn't been a starter in a while. So he knows he has to step
02:17up and he has to be the leader of this team. And he has done that when we're at practice. We can
02:21you can see that he is the leader. He tells guys, hey, come here and he'll talk to Keenan. He'll
02:25talk to Hunter. He'll talk to anybody. So that was a pretty good thing. The one thing that they
02:30didn't show, though, Eric, was GM Tom Telesco. What do you think? Do you think he was a fan of
02:34this or not? Well, I don't think I know that Tom wasn't exactly a fan of this. And the fact that
02:40he was on as much was what I thought was pretty interesting. And as you asked him,
02:44had no really comments to me when you asked him specifically about that. So that was interesting
02:50in terms of the Rams. I thought it was great to see their new one hundred and five million
02:54dollar man, Jalen Ramsey, working with rookie receiver Van Jefferson, who was kind of tipping
02:59his routes a little bit in practice. And that was one of the things that I saw, you know,
03:03in covering practice on daily basis was the other side of Jalen Ramsey, who is, you know,
03:08even though he's only twenty five years old, he is a veteran in his league in his fifth season,
03:11you know, working with some of those younger defensive backs or younger receivers and trying
03:15to help them get better. And that's going to be an important thing for this team in terms of where
03:19they want to be, which is in the postseason. Jalen knows he's going to need those younger
03:23players to to play impactful roles and he's helping them get better, you know, quicker.
03:28So that was important. Final cuts. You know, we got to see that in terms of the process between
03:33GM Lesnead, head coach Sean McVay and how they go about their business. A couple of the more
03:39notable guys that we got to kind of watch in terms of the main storylines was safety.
03:44Juju Smith, who's going to be staying with the team on the practice squad and Clay Johnston,
03:49the linebacker, the guy I like to say fudge a lot. Clay is going to be moving on. He didn't
03:56was cut, didn't return to the practice of the Rams. Instead, he's going to go to the Carolina
04:00Panthers where his dad serves as a strengths coach and where the head coach from Baylor,
04:05Matt Rule, is now the head coach with the Panthers. So it makes a lot of sense for Clay to be moving
04:09on there. One final thing I just want to say overall in terms of the series itself, I know
04:14the ratings weren't great. I know people were going in hard on hard knocks when you look at
04:18social media. But, hey, you know, kind of give the guys a break a little bit and understand the
04:22circumstance that they were dealt with, you know, with covid happening, the pandemic and then the
04:27social justice stuff. I thought they did a good job of kind of showing us how the players are
04:32dealing with those outside issues. And then finally, football. We get to see football finally
04:37beginning Thursday. Houston Texans, the defending champs, the Kansas City Chiefs opening things up.
04:44And of course, we'll get to see our our teams play on Sunday. That'll do it for us here. But
04:50you're you're not going to get rid of us. You're going to see Fernando and myself at some point
04:54this season. Thanks for following us and stay tuned.