A good debut for Stetson Bennett

By Dennis J. Freeman (News4usonline)

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The first preseason game is in the books for the Los Angeles Rams. There weren’t too many “wow” moments for Sean McVay and his team in their 34-17 loss to the Los Angeles Chargers. Rookie quarterback Stetson Bennett proved to be the exception.

AFTER watching Brett Rypien start the game, Bennett came on and played pretty well in his NFL debut. For the game, Bennett completed 17 of his 29 passes for 191 yards and a touchdown. Not too bad for a guy who is used to playing on the big stage.

Bennett led the Georgia Bulldogs to two straight national championship football championships, including de-

By Dennis J. Freeman

molishing TCU at SoFi Stadium earlier this year. McVay was modest in his approach to heaping praise on Bennett.

“I thought he did a nice job,” McVay said. “There were some tough situations. You could see the athleticism where he escaped. I thought the one scoring drive where [RB] Royce [Freeman] ended up punching it in, I thought he was able to get into a rhythm.

I thought [offensive coordinator] Mike [LaFleur] did a good job, some early down completions. He got [WR] [Austin] Trammell involved, got [WR] Tyler Johnson involved. I thought he did a good job of being able to exhaust some of his progressions.”

The high for Bennett was the 11-yard touchdown toss he throw to rookie wide receiver Puka Nacua. The low was getting away with nearly throwing two interceptions that were both dropped by Chargers defenders.

Bennett’s approach to the near picks was simply to move on quickly.

“I just don’t think about it. Thank you for not catching that and we’re onto the next one now,” Bennett said after the game.

Bennett wasn’t too impressed with his overall performance against the Chargers. .

“I thought it was alright, I thought there were some boneheaded plays that I made,” said Bennett. “I thought there were some good plays that I made. I thought we bounced back a few times from some lost yardage plays. I thought we did pretty good on third downs, didn’t turn the ball over, even though I tried to a few times, so got to clean that up a little bit, but I thought it was alright. It’s hard to say without watching the tape.”

While he made not have hit the satisfactory level in his level of play, Bennett, nonetheless enjoyed getting his feet wet in NFL play..

“It was cool, it was fun,”

Bennett expressed.”It was fun to finally get out there and honestly get hit, you know? I’m not going to win with many of those, but it’s good to, I don’t know, feel like a football player again and it’s fun to get out there and compete. It didn’t happen the way we wanted it… there’s a few things to…I wish we would’ve scored on that drive when it was, I think we were down 10 and we started inside our own 10 and we went three and out. I wish we would’ve got ten that one and then may be it’s a diffe rent game.”