compete

The Rams are no longer kicking the can down the road when it comes to their kicking problems.

On Wednesday, the Rams signed kicker Harrison Mevis to the practice squad to compete with second-year pro Joshua Karty. The move came a day after the team signed veteran long-snapper Jake McQuaide to compete with Alex Ward.

“It’s all geared toward trying to be able to just get some solutions and some kick consistency really with our field-goal operation,” coach Sean McVay said Wednesday. “I think it’s important to have good competition at some spots that we feel we can have improved play.”

The Rams are preparing for their game on Sunday against the San Francisco 49ers at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara.

The Rams are 6-2 — and their losses against the defending Super Bowl-champion Philadelphia Eagles and the 49ers both resulted from problems in the kicking game that resurfaced without dire consequences in last Sunday’s rout of the New Orleans Saints.

Against the Saints, Karty missed a 39-yard field goal attempt and an extra-point attempt. Karty has made 10 of 15 field-goal attempts and 23 of 26 extra-point attempts.

McVay said after the game that the Rams would evaluate “all parts of where we go with this operation.”

On Tuesday, they turned to McQuaide, 37, who played for the Rams from 2011-2020 and was part of a special teams unit that also included kicker Greg Zuerlein and punter/holder Johnny Hekker.

“If all things go well with Jake, we expect him to be our long-snapper,” McVay said.

On Wednesday, they brought in Mevis, who made 89 of 106 field-goal attempts at Missouri, including one from 61 yards. In the United Football League this past season, he made 20 of 21 field-goal attempts.

So Karty and Mevis will duel during expanded special teams drills this week.

“We’ll implement more than we normally would on a Wednesday and a Thursday and truly be able to kind of use it as a competition,” McVay said.

Oct. 28 (UPI) — Tech mogul Elon Musk launched his own online encyclopedia with his company xAI, calling it Grokipedia as a rival to the non-profit Wikipedia.

Grokipedia, named for xAI’s chatbot Grok, uses Wikipedia as its source and it’s modeled like Wikipedia. But it has sanitized versions of pages about Musk, reporting nothing critical of him. The page says it has 885,279 pages.

The venture launched on Monday, with the site initially crashing then coming back online later. It has been reported by Musk as an improved and less biased version of Wikipedia.

Republican lawmakers and White House AI czar David Sacks have called Wikipedia “hopelessly biased.”

On X, Sacks said, “An army of left-wing activists maintain the bios and fight reasonable corrections. Magnifying the problem, Wikipedia often appears first in Google search results, and now it’s a trusted source for AI model training. This is a huge problem.”

The Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, said in a statement last month, “Wikipedia informs; it does not persuade.”

“Unlike newer projects, Wikipedia’s strengths are clear: it has transparent policies, rigorous volunteer oversight, and a strong culture of continuous improvement. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, written to inform billions of readers without promoting a particular point of view,” Lauren Dickinson, a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, said in a statement.

“This human-created knowledge is what AI companies rely on to generate content; even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist,” she added.

On Monday, Musk posted on X that the launch was “Grokipedia version 0.1,” but that “Version 1.0 will be 10X better, but even at 0.1 it’s better than Wikipedia imo.”