One of the Giants’ defensive backs will be sidelined for at least the next four weeks.
New York placed cornerback Paulson Adebo on injured reserve on Friday, the team announced.
Adebo played 10 defensive snaps and eight special teams snaps in Sunday’s victory over the Cowboys.
He did not practice on Thursday, listed with a knee injury.
As a corresponding move, the Giants signed Nikko Reed to the 53-man roster off of the Chargers’ practice squad. Reed appeared in five games for Los Angeles last season as an undrafted rookie, mainly playing special teams.
The Giants will play the Rams on Monday night to wrap up Week 2.
Rams Clips
The Rams have made a couple of roster moves on Friday.
Los Angeles announced the club has signed Tanner Ingle to the 53-man roster off of the club’s practice squad.
Ingle played eight special teams snaps in Los Angeles’ season-opening loss to San Francisco.
The Rams could use some depth at safety with Kam Kinchens dealing with a hamstring injury and Kam Curl dealing with an ankle issue.
As a corresponding move, the club has signed defensive tackle Jaxson Moi to the practice squad.
The Rams had an open roster spot after placing edge rusher Myles Garrett on injured reserve on Thursday.
Rams coach Sean McVay says defensive end Myles Garrett’s knee surgery was successful, but it’s too soon to tell when Garrett will be back on the field.
“It went good, he’s feeling good, you already see he had crutches yesterday and then he was walking without crutches today. He’s like Wolverine, healing fast,” McVay said.
That doesn’t necessarily mean Garrett will be back on the field on October 18 for the Rams’ Week 6 game against the Cardinals, which is the earliest he’s eligible to return from injured reserve.
“I’m reluctant to put a timeline on it,” McVay said. “We know that he’s going to miss those four weeks at a minimum. We’re not going to rush him back. We want to make sure he’s feeling good, he’s able to get on the practice field, do all the things that are necessary for him to perform at a level that he’s been accustomed to. I’ll keep you guys posted as we have updates, as we go.”
Garrett did next to nothing in the Rams’ Week 1 loss to the 49ers and can’t play for the next four weeks, so the Rams will be about one-third of the way through the season before they get any meaningful contributions for him. That wasn’t the plan when they traded for him, but the Rams’ top priority is having him ready late in the season and in the playoffs, and McVay sounds confident that will happen.
One week ago, the Rams made their debut in Australia. It didn’t go well; the 49ers drubbed the Rams, 27-7.
For that reason, coach Sean McVay hopes the assignment doesn’t come their way again.
“It’s almost like you try to do the Men in Black thing where you say, ‘Hey, I don’t remember what happened. That was so long ago,’” McVay told reporters on Thursday. “We’re not playing in Australia ever again, I hope. Not because it wasn’t a great atmosphere, that’ll get taken out of context.”
The atmosphere was great. The burden on the teams was not. The strategy of showing up the day before the game ended up being a miscalculation.
Either way, the Rams have 16 games to play. Starting with a visit from the Giants on Monday night.
“Bottom line is, I like the way that I feel of our preparation, eyes moving forward, chest out, chin up, eyes forward, and let’s go be about it,” McVay said. “Let’s go prepare the right way. Let’s have great focus and concentration. Let’s have a great energy and an edge in which we prepare and compete with and then let’s go be ready to go against a really damn good football team. What they looked like in Week 1, we got a great challenge ahead. That’s what every week is. We’re excited to compete. All we can do is really have a great day of preparation today.”
It remains to be seen whether the two long flights with a football game as the Vegemite in the sandwich will affect the Rams in Week 2, or beyond. Either way, an up-and-coming Giants team is coming to town — and thousands of Giants fans in the L.A. area are surely scrambling to buy tickets for the prime-time game at SoFi Stadium.
The Giants expect Rams defensive lineman Aaron Donald to play on Monday night. Rams coach Sean McVay is “hopeful.”
McVay said before practice that Donald would fully participate on Thursday, and indeed, Donald is not on the team’s injury report. (Donald’s roster exemption was lifted Friday.)
Donald did not travel to Australia with the team, staying at home to continue working his way back from a two-year absence from football. He participated in individual drills for the first time on Aug. 30 and joined team drills on Sept. 6.
McVay said the Rams are not looking for specific benchmarks to determine whether Donald plays for the first time since 2023.
“It’s more along the line of how does he feel?” McVay said, via Sarah Barshop of ESPN.
Donald is “obviously champing at the bit” to play, but the Rams’ travel schedule to Australia has prevented limited practice opportunities for Donald.
“But what we are hopeful is, is that we’ll have some good work today and tomorrow and then hopefully he’s feeling good enough and if he says he’s ready to go, then we’ll be excited to see him,” McVay said.
Rams defensive end Myles Garrett is “feeling good” after knee surgery on Monday, but the reigning Defensive Player of the Year has no timeline for his return. Garrett was on crutches on Wednesday and walking without them Thursday.
Because Garrett is on injured reserve, he will miss at least the next four games.
“We’re not going to rush him back,” McVay said. “We want to make sure that he’s feeling good, he’s able to get out on the practice field, do all the things that are necessary for him to perform at a level that he’s been accustomed to.”
The Rams have made one of their expected roster moves official on Thursday.
Myles Garrett has been placed on injured reserve, Los Angeles announced.
It was reported on Sunday that Garrett would have knee surgery and be placed on IR after an ineffective performance to start the season in the loss to the 49ers.
Head coach Sean McVay said earlier this week that the team had believed that Garrett’s knee injury was something he could work through.
Now, Garrett is officially out for at least the next four weeks.
The Rams did not announce a corresponding move, leaving a roster spot open.
The Rams will host the Giants on Monday night.
Rams head coach Sean McVay said on Monday that the team has not decided whether defensive tackle Aaron Donald will play in Week 2, but the opposing head coach believes he knows the answer.
The Giants will be in Los Angeles for a Monday night game and head coach John Harbaugh said that the team believes Donald will be making his first appearance since coming out of retirement.
“We are expecting him to play,” Harbaugh said, via Ryan Dunleavy of the New York Post. “We are expecting him to be Aaron Donald. He’s a game-wrecker.”
49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan had the same expectation heading into last Thursday’s game, but Donald did not travel to Australia with the Rams for the opener. Shanahan did have to contend with Myles Garrett, who was ineffective while trying to play through a knee injury that landed him on injured reserve this week.
We’ll likely find out closer to kickoff if Harbaugh and the Giants are going to have to deal with either one.
The 49ers’ Week 1 win over the Rams resulted in a shift in betting odds, but perhaps not as big a shift as some would think.
The Rams remain the favorites to win the Super Bowl, as they were before the season. The Rams’ Super Bowl odds dropped to +650 from their preseason odds of +500, but they’re still the favorites to win it all.
The 49ers, however, are now the favorites to win the NFC West. The 49ers’ odds are +160 to win the division, followed by the Seahawks at +175 and Rams at +205. The Cardinals are extreme long shots at +4500.
The 49ers’ odds to win the Super Bowl are +1400, tied with the Chiefs for the fifth-best chance of winning the title.
Why would the Rams be first in Super Bowl odds but third in division odds? It’s ultimately about how good the oddsmakers think the Rams will be by the time the postseason rolls around. Right now, with Myles Garrett on injured reserve and Aaron Donald yet to play, it’s easy to see the Rams starting slow and falling behind in the division. But if they make the playoffs at all, the Rams should be a tough team to beat.
The Rams may have to go on the road in the playoffs, but no one should dismiss their chances of winning it all.
With the usual Thursday night opener moving to Wednesday night, the recent Friday night international game moved to Thursday. And the game between the 49ers and Rams from Australia did solid but not spectacular numbers.
Via Eric Fisher of Front Office Sports, the Netflix stream attracted 18.5 million domestic viewers and 3.2 million international viewers.
The U.S. number matched the YouTube audience from last year’s Chiefs-Chargers game in Brazil. The foreign audience was larger this year.
Given that Netflix is a paid service and the YouTube game streamed for free, that’s good news — even though the YouTube numbers were widely regarded as disappointing.
Last December, a pair of NFL games on Christmas generated 23.7 million U.S. viewers, on average.
On one hand, the Netflix number exceeded by more than three million viewers the 2025 Thursday night average viewership on Amazon. On the other hand, the excitement of Week 1 tends to generate bigger numbers.
It didn’t help that the game wasn’t very good. The 49ers slowly suffocated the Rams in a 27-7 game that was competitive in the first half but not in the second.
Netflix will stream four more games this season. The next one comes in November, on the night before Thanksgiving. Then, Netflix will have two Christmas games for the third straight year. The slate ends on the Saturday of Week 18.
The new age of college football has made one of its time-honored traditions even more glaring — the early-season tuneup games.
First-year Southern coach Marshall Faulk witnessed it on Saturday, when No. 22-ranked Houston shredded his Jaguars, 77-6.
“That wasn’t really a game, that was kind of a preseason crash-dummy test for Houston to work on all the good plays,” Faulk told reporters, via Brad Crawford of CBS Sports.
Southern was paid $450,000 to serve as the cannon fodder for the Cougars.
For decades, high-level programs have scheduled lower-level schools in the early weeks of the season. What used to be games between Division I-A and Division I-AA have become FBS vs. FCS slaughterhouses.
“Let’s just be real, OK?” Faulk said. “They’re better than us. We’re FCS, everybody knows what this is, let it be what it is.”
The transfer portal has made matters worse, because the best young players at FCS schools typically end up getting big bucks with FBS programs.
“I was literally standing on the sideline thinking to myself, back when let’s say Southern had juniors and seniors . . . this could be a competitive game playing a team like Houston,” Faulk said. “In today’s landscape, we don’t have the budget to compete against them. We just don’t.”
Saturday’s game included an eight-minute fourth quarter, after Houston built a 70-0 lead through the first 45 minutes.
“The reality is our kids were giving their best effort, but we’re not good enough to beat a team that doesn’t beat themselves,” Faulk said. “There’s not anything we could’ve done. I’ve been around a lot of football, man. We don’t have the bodies, we don’t have the funds, we don’t have the equipment . . . all the stuff needed to compete with a team like that. . . . Guts and glory and want and will is not enough to compete with a team like that.”
Again, it’s been that way for a long time. Recent trends have made it worse. The question becomes whether the powers-that-be will change the rules to prevent games like this from happening.
The problem is that, even if the players have no business going against elite programs, their schools won’t want to give up the revenue that comes from serving as a sacrificial lamb.
