The Rams have somehow arrived at the point where the kicking crisis is no longer a subplot. It is the story. Blake Grupe lasted one game, suffered a torn ACL while making a tackle during a kick return, and now Sean McVay is openly saying the team expects to have a replacement in place within the next day or two. That is not stability. That is a roster patched together on the fly.
On Monday, McVay was plain about it: the Rams were "in the process" of adding a new kicker, with John McKay, Bubba Ventrone and Les Snead working through options. By Tuesday, the search had already narrowed to a familiar sort of short-term solution, with Brandon McManus and Matt Prater reportedly being worked out. For a team that was already without a kicker for the second straight week, this is not exactly the kind of continuity anyone wants heading into a season.
A brutal swing from solution to problem
Grupe had just replaced Harrison Mevis, which only makes the whole thing feel more ridiculous. One kicker goes in, one game happens, and the next thing you know the Rams are back in the market again because their latest answer is suddenly unavailable. This is how thin margins get exposed in football: one collision on a kick return, one torn ACL, and an entire special-teams plan has to be rebuilt before the week is even over.
McVay’s own description of the injury made the frustration obvious. Grupe, he said, made an instinctual play trying to knock the returner out of bounds, but the result was disastrous. McVay even admitted the reaction in the moment was basically disbelief: he felt terrible for the player, and the whole episode left the Rams staring at another emergency fix. It is hard to blame the coach for sympathy. It is harder to ignore the fact that the team is once again living in kicking limbo.
Brandon McManus and Matt Prater make sense — and that is the point
Working out Brandon McManus and Matt Prater is a perfectly sensible response, which is usually what teams say when they have run out of time to be picky. Both are experienced options, both are known quantities, and both signal that the Rams are not trying to get cute here. They need someone who can walk in quickly and do the job. When you have already burned through one replacement and are now chasing another within days, the only real priority is competence.
That is the uncomfortable truth for the Rams. This is no longer about finding an ideal long-term answer or making some elegant roster argument. It is about stopping the bleeding. McVay said the team should have something in the next day or two, and that deadline now matters because the Rams cannot afford another week of kicking chaos. They have already lived through the second straight week without a kicker. They do not need a third.
So yes, Brandon McManus is now part of the conversation. More importantly, he is part of a far more telling conversation about how quickly the Rams have been forced back into survival mode. In a league where special teams can swing games, this is the kind of mess that quietly becomes very loud very fast.
