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The 2014 NFL Draft: Sealed With a Kiss
From Johnny Manziel's long wait on Thursday to Michael Sam's dramatic moment on Saturday, this year's NFL draft will go down in history. Plus, an NFC GM continues his trade prowess and a Ram infiltrates the Falcons' draft room
By Peter King
Read the entire article at the link.
Rams mentions:
Where do you start after a weekend like this? Choose one:
1. The Michael Sam saga, which couldn’t have been more dramatic if the Coen brothers had scripted it.
My pick: Sam. An emotional, cool, explosive moment, with Sam getting the call from Rams GM Les Snead telling him he’d been drafted with the 249th pick. “Man, was he emotional,” Snead said Sunday morning. “I could feel it over the phone.” Snead handed the phone to coach Jeff Fisher, with Sam tearing up and slowly, slowly, slow folding over and weeping, his male partner there to comfort him.
On national TV. It’s a scene we haven’t seen in American TV history (and certainly not in American sports history), thankfully running unedited and uninterrupted by ESPN. And then Sam kissed the man. The world is changing, and the Rams and Sam and the NFL and ESPN made a seminal moment of it Saturday. If you think that moment of Sam bending over and audibly weeping isn’t going to be replayed scores of times for sporting and societal reasons, you’re wrong. Way wrong.
“I could feel the pivot in history at that moment, with that phone call,’’ Snead said.
Late Saturday night, after the Rams finished signing their undrafted free agents, Fisher and COO Kevin Demoff sat in the coach’s office and read through the messages and Tweets of support. They read these words from President Obama: “From the playing field to the corporate boardroom, LGBT Americans prove everyday that you should be judged by what you do and not who you are.” And this Tweet from Ellen Degeneres: “So proud of the @STLouisRams for showing there’s nothing to be afraid of.” And this from singer John Legend: “Congratulation to Michael Sam. It’s a victory for love.” And this from former Saint and current ALS beacon Steve Gleason: “Great moment in US sports history.”
Fisher and Demoff were moved by the reaction. “It was a reminder of the power of the NFL,” Demoff said, “and how we could use the power for something good.”
“I wish I could have digested it and take it all in,” said Snead. “I’ve never been part of a decision that brought people to tears. But I couldn’t really embrace the moment, because we were so close to the end of the draft, and we had to mute the TV so we could get going on our undrafted free-agent class.”
Sam will have a huge task ahead of him. Want the good news? Of the 53 men on St. Louis’ opening-day roster last year, 18 entered the league undrafted, and another three were seventh-round picks. And new defensive coordinator Gregg Williams loves the desperate underdog; a seventh-rounder on any roster is an underdog. The bad news: Incumbent ends Robert Quinn and Chris Long are franchise cornerstones, and sub William Hayes is a productive rusher. Those three are set in stone. There will be either one or two more defensive ends kept, and Sam was the only one drafted. It won’t help Sam that he probably won’t be a good special-teams player because his mediocre flexibility and quick-twitch movement. He’ll have to star in camp and the preseason as what Snead labels the “DPR”—designated pass-rusher.
But he’ll have a chance. And the Rams are perhaps the best spot for him. It’s two hours from where he went to school, and the media is largely friendly, and wherever he went Wolf Blitzer or Anderson Cooper would have been part of the early days of training camp. The Rams know it, and Jeff Fisher can handle it. I will be surprised if Sam’s fate with the Rams is determined on anything other than whether he can be productive rushing the passer.
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War room visitor of the week.
The son of St. Louis GM Les Snead, Logan Snead, is a buddy of Max Blank (son of Falcons owner Arthur) in seventh grade in Atlanta. So Logan got invited to spend draft night in the Falcons’ draft room with Max on Thursday, and he wore tan slacks and a sharp blue shirt—Ram colors—for the evening.
Interesting: The son of the Rams’ GM inside another team’s draft room. Snead, of course, used to work for Falcons GM Thomas Dimitroff, and the two men are good friends.
“Hey Logan,” Dimitroff said to the boy at one point, “you kidding me with the gold and blue clothes?”
“I’m quietly repping the Rams,” Logan said.
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“With the 249th pick in the 2014 NFL draft, the St. Louis Rams select Michael Sam, defensive end, Missouri.”
—NFL vice president of game operations Mike Kensil, announcing a historic pick late in the draft on Saturday evening. Very good for Kensil, who is the ultimate loyal NFL soldier. Now, whenever history looks back on this moment, it will be Kensil’s voice and words that welcome the first openly gay player into the NFL.
“If it was A.J. McCarron and Katherine Webb kissing, no one would say anything. But we’ve been documenting the NFL draft for 35 years, and we’ve never seen anything like this. We’ve never seen a man and a man. My instincts were to just let it roll.”
—Veteran ESPN NFL producer Seth Markman, whose job it was to determine what pictures from the draft America got to see over the weekend, and who let the video of Michael Sam and his partner kissing run at length.
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a. Hey Mike Silver! Good choice, being in St. Louis! Why wasn’t I that smart?