Turf Show Times
The Rams lost four players to the waiver wire on Wednesday, but was one of them supposed to be getting a free pass back to L.A.? That’s the claim that some have made this week about center Willie Lampkin, who was “waived/injury” on Tuesday and then picked up by the Philadelphia Eagles on Wednesday, the team that was very last in the claim order because they just won the Super Bowl.
Did Eagles GM Howie Roseman break a code between general managers to not touch waived players who are injured because he just wanted Lampkin that badly and doesn’t care what Les Snead thinks? There is some logical evidence out there to suggest that that’s exactly what Roseman did, so losing Lampkin to the team 32nd in the waiver order caught some steam this week as a rumored violation of an unwritten rule.
Number one, the first person to note how unusual it was for Lampkin to be claimed was Field Yates, an employee of ESPN. Yates tweeted on Wednesday that “you don’t see waived/injured players claimed often”, pointing out that everyone probably expected that Lampkin would clear waivers and be able to revert back to L.A.‘s practice squad or injury list.
But Yates only connects the dots enough to suggest that the claim was “a testament to what Philly saw from him this preseason to claim him while he recovers from whatever injury he is dealing with”. Umm, I mean, okay. That could be true and it could also be a very meaningless statement for one simple reason:
Obviously the Eagles were not the only team in the NFL to recognize that Willie Lampkin was one of the stars of the preseason!
Lampkin was PFF’s highest-graded offensive lineman of the preseason:
He was praised by countless analysts and social media users as one of the great finds of undrafted free agency:
Yeah, Willie Lampkin was ironically always going to stand out because of his height (5’11) and that’s the main reason that he went undrafted. However, Lampkin was NOT a star of the preseason for physical reasons in the same way that say Desmond Watson was for being the heaviest player in the NFL. Lampkin was a star of the preseason because….HE WAS A STAR OF THE PRESEASON.
Now don’t get me wrong, the Rams were the team that had first rights of Willie Lampkin and they could have easily avoided this situation by simply not cutting him.
But for someone like Field Yates to tweet that “the EAGLES” must have seen something in him, that’s just a really narrow view of the situation and demonstrates what it’s like to have such a simple train of thought on a waiver claim because obviously Philadelphia was not the only team to realize that Lampkin was out-playing his status as an undrafted free agent and that he should have at least been snagged on day three.
So what does that matter?
