Rams rookie linebacker Ernest Jones wore the helmet with the green dot in Saturday night’s preseason opener, signifying that he had a speaker so he could hear defensive coordinator Raheem Morris’s play calls and relay them to his teammates. The problem: For the Rams’ first 21 defensive plays, technical difficulties were keeping Morris’s calls from getting through to Jones’s helmet.
But it proved to be no problem. In what Morris called “absolute poise” from a rookie, Jones made all the play calls on his own, and did it well enough that Morris said you’d never know he was a rookie winging it in his first live NFL action.
“He couldn’t hear me, and you didn’t even know it,” Morris said, via the Orange County Register. “That coming from a rookie was pretty impressive.”
The 21-year-old Jones, a third-round pick out of South Carolina, will be a candidate to wear the green dot when the games count for real. He has already shown he has a good grasp of what the Rams need from a defensive signal caller.