Stetson Bennett spent his rookie season in the NFL away from the Rams, going home to Georgia for a few months before returning to Los Angeles this spring. It wasn’t the rookie year he or anyone else expected, but he’s focused on contributing in some form or fashion this year.
He’ll first need to make the 53-man roster. Training camp and the preseason are golden opportunities for him to prove himself as an NFL quarterback and he’s doing everything he can to remain on track leading up to a grueling summer and fall.
One way he’s trying to do that: by going back to a flip phone.
“I’m going back. I’m going back. I gotta get out the flip phone,” Bennett said on “UNRESERVED with TJ Callaway”. “I gotta stop. I gotta grow up a little bit on that. I gotta stop. It just doesn’t matter. To be a starting quarterback in the NFL, you gotta be able to – I mean, we are the entertainment, which is cool and it is an honor. Luckiest thing in the world, but I can’t, like, shy away from it. Just look at it in the face and even if I don’t play well, then yeah, I don’t play well and go to work the next day.”
It’s easy for anyone to get engulfed in social media and what others are saying nowadays with how capable smartphones are, so Bennett is trying to eliminate that from the equation.
Plus, he thinks flip phones look cool.
“The main reason why I got it is because I think it’s cool,” he added. “It’s not very productive for getting back to people. I will say this: Going to the NFL, a lot of those guys, not good at it either. I don’t know what it is, maybe we’re just super conceited and selfish.”
Bennett is currently the third quarterback on the depth chart behind Matthew Stafford and Jimmy Garoppolo, so he’s in worse shape now than he was this time last year when the Rams were expecting him to be the backup. But with Garoppolo suspended for the first two weeks of the year, it’s possible Bennett will be QB2 for two weeks.
Either way, he wants to make the 53-man roster, even if it is just as the third quarterback for the time being.