Matthew Stafford having difficulty with youthful Rams roster
Until final cuts are due on Aug. 29 at 4 p.m. ET, the Los Angeles Rams have one of the youngest rosters in the NFL.
And at age 35, not only is Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford the oldest player on the team, he’s one of just five players (WR Cooper Kupp, TE Tyler Higbee, OT Ross Havenstein, DT Aaron Donald) on the roster 30 or older — an age gap that his wife Kelly recently said on her podcast “The Morning After With Kelly Stafford,” has created a bit of a barrier between he and his teammates.
“It’s kind of crazy,” she stated. “So Matthew’s been in the league a long time. He’s like ‘The difference in the locker room has changed so significantly.’ They have a lot of rookies on their team, they’re very young. But he’s like ‘I feel like I can’t connect. In the old days you’d come out of practice, you’d shower, and people would be playing cards, interacting. But now they get out of practice, and meetings during training camp, and they go straight to their phones.”
As of Monday morning, Los Angeles has 36 rookies between 2023 draft picks and undrafted free agents, plus 32 others with three years or less of NFL experience. Four of the Rams five running backs, eight of their 12 receivers and four of their seven tight ends are 25 or younger.
Stafford even went as far as to have the Rams equipment manager create a book with all of the younger players names and faces so he could familiarize himself with his youthful teammates — a tool Stafford plans to use to help bond with some of the “Gen Z’ers” in the locker room, some of which even call him sir.
“He said it’s so different and so hard to get to know these guys,” Kelly added. “I think nowadays it’s really hard to develop that because all these young kids, they don’t care. Or it's not that they don't care, but they're so used to going straight to their phones. It’s different. It's kind of sad.”
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