Yes, the Rams have moved to Los Angeles. But they won’t really arrive there until their stadium opens in 2019. For the next three seasons, they’ll bounce around Southern California, from Oxnard for offseason workouts to UC Irvine for training camp to Thousand Oaks for in-season practices to the Coliseum for home games.
On Friday, the team held its first meeting, something they received special permission to do given the strict rules regarding offseason communications and interactions with players.
According to Gary Klein of the Los Angeles Times, coach Jeff Fisher said roughly 80 percent of the team’s roster attended the meeting.
“We’ve all been in the dark, kind of, to this point, but this meeting helped clear up a lot of stuff,” punter Johnny Hekker (pictured) said after the meeting.
Only one thing has been clear from the outset: The Rams will have an unusual existence for the next three years, before opening their new stadium in Inglewood. By then, the roster will surely look a lot different. But that didn’t stop the current members of the roster from getting excited when they saw a video of the new building.
“They were hooting and hollering,” executive V.P. of football operations Kevin Demoff said. “They were excited, which I think makes us excited.”
Excitement remains the operative word regarding the Rams, for now. That surely will change when the players have to pick a place to live and will be crawling through snarled traffic from place to place as the Rams slide around the area for the 36 months until they finally have a new home.
