Eric Weddle’s story in the NFL appeared to wrap up two years ago when he retired from football following the 2019 season. But he decided to come out of retirement a month ago to join the Rams for their postseason run – which has carried him all the way to Super Bowl LVI.
He’s played progressively more snaps each week and never came off the field for a single defensive play against the 49ers in the NFC title game. He led the Rams with nine tackles in that win, too.
Yet, his role continues to grow by the week.
According to Dan Pompei of The Athletic, who wrote a terrific feature on Weddle’s path to the Super Bowl, the Rams are going to make Weddle their defensive signal caller in the Super Bowl. He’ll wear the green dot on his helmet and relay play calls from Raheem Morris to the rest of the defense.
Rapp is expected to return against the Bengals — but as a backup. Weddle will not only be starting but for the first time this year, he will wear the communication device that makes him the designated play caller.
“He brings elite football awareness and intelligence,” Evero says. “And he has the ability to communicate, communicate fast and communicate in a way everyone understands. That leads to building confidence.”
Ever since Jordan Fuller went down with a season-ending ankle injury, Troy Reeder has been the signal caller on defense. He’s done a fine job in that role, but it requires him to play almost every snap in order to get the calls to his teammates.
Reeder has played about 90% of the snaps this postseason, but the Rams might be planning to shrink his involvement on defense a bit by giving Weddle this new responsibility. That will allow the Rams to substitute their linebackers more, giving Ernest Jones and Travin Howard additional snaps over the struggling Reeder.
Weddle has been a leader on every team he’s been with and despite just re-joining the Rams a month ago, he’s already grasped the defense enough to get the play calls to the rest of the unit. That’s remarkable considering he was out of football for two full seasons.
