Some teams don’t like to reveal their starting quarterback for strategic reasons. For the Rams, they’re not giving anything away about who their kicker will be on Monday night against the Bucs.
It could be either Austin MacGinnis or Matt Gay as the replacement for Kai Forbath, who landed on injured reserve last week.
Sean McVay has a good feeling about who it will be, but he’s not tipping his hand.
“Yeah. I’m going to wait,” McVay said. “I’m going to talk to those guys. We do have some pretty good clarity, but we’ll not share that with you guys right now.”
Gay was signed as a free agent last week and just joined the Rams on Saturday for practice. MacGinnis is on the practice squad, so he’ll need to be called up.
Saturday was their first practice together, but it wasn’t necessarily an open competition.
“No, I wouldn’t really look at it that way,” McVay said of whether Saturday was a competition. “We just got Matt in today and he got an opportunity to kick and showcase his stuff. Austin was kicking earlier this week. So, the good news is that with either one of these players, we feel really good about our situation, very confident. It’ll be a good thing for us on Monday.”
The Rams have missed at least one kick in eight of their nine games, struggling to find consistency at kicker. The team is hopeful that Gay or MacGinnis can solve those issues, but that’s far from certain.