Tuesday night’s debut episode of Hard Knocks took us inside Rams training camp the way the annual, uncensored HBO show promises to.
We knew the Rams had released wide receiver Deon Long on July 31, and now we know why.
The HBO cameras were on hand when Rams coach Jeff Fisher called Long into his office and reminded Long that there was a strict no visitors policy in the team’s camp dorms at UC-Irvine, and Fisher asked Long why he had brought a woman into his room.
Long tried to explain his way out of it, telling Fisher it was before curfew and he had no intentions of having the woman stay. Fisher listened to Long before telling him he’d broken a team rule that was non-negotiable.
“We’re going to cut you,” Fisher said, adding that he’d handled a similar situation in the same way before.
Early in the first of this year’s five Hard Knocks episodes, Fisher was shown standing in front of his players at a pre-camp meeting telling them that his only rules for camp were to be on time and to have no visitors in the dorms.
“What part did you not understand?” Fisher asked Long in their meeting. “Sorry, but this is our world, man. We have rules and we have to abide by them. I thought I made myself really clear.”
Later in the episode cameras caught Fisher telling his players, “I’m not f-----g going 7-9 or 8-8 or 9-7...we have too much talent here for that. We had some 7-9 b------t this morning and we can’t have that.
“Deon is gone. That is 7-9 b------t and we don’t need it.”
Long signed with the Eagles last Friday. Long broke into the NFL as an undrafted free agent in 2015 with the Titans and later spent time on the practice squad with the Dolphins and the Rams.