Rams Sign Brandon McManus, Their Third Kicker in Three Weeks

It took the Los Angeles Rams three kickers to reach Week 7, and the third one was at home watching when the season started. The Rams signed Brandon McManus on Tuesday following a workout that also included Matt Prater, according to ESPN’s report of Ian Rapoport and Mike Garafolo’s reporting. NBC Sports and the Associated Press carried the signing the same afternoon. He is expected to kick on Sunday at Las Vegas.

How did the Rams burn through two kickers by mid-October?

One was cut for missing, and one was lost to an injury no kicker is meant to risk. Harrison Mevis opened the season in the job. In Week 5 against Buffalo, in a game that finished 37-34 in overtime, he missed a 50-yard field goal and had a 48-yard attempt blocked in the extra period, a night covered in McVay’s overtime kick call against the Bills. The Rams released him the next day, with five makes from nine attempts on his season.

The replacement lasted one quarter. Los Angeles signed Blake Grupe off the New York Jets’ practice squad, a kicker who had gone 11-for-11 for Indianapolis last season. On Sunday against Arizona, Grupe made a 44-yard field goal in his Rams debut, then tore the ACL in his knee lowering his shoulder to tackle returner Devin Duvernay on a kickoff. After he went off, punter Ethan Evans attempted an extra point, the first of his NFL career, in a game the Rams lost 18-16. Head coach Sean McVay confirmed the torn ACL on Monday, and the club placed Grupe on injured reserve. By Tuesday the Rams had a workout scheduled and no healthy kicker on the roster, in the same week they are also absorbing Davante Adams’s ruptured hamstring.

Why was a kicker with McManus’s record available in October?

Because his last game of last season is the one people remember. McManus joined Green Bay midway through 2024 and steadied the job at once, making 20 of 21 field goals. The Packers gave him a three-year, $15.3 million contract in March 2025. The follow-up season ran at 24 of 30, and then came the wild-card game at Chicago on January 10: misses from 55 and 44 yards and a missed extra point, in a 31-27 loss. Green Bay lost by four points and its kicker had left seven on the field. In the spring the Packers drafted Florida’s Trey Smack in the sixth round and released McManus on May 8. No team signed him through training camp or the first six weeks. His career numbers sit in a different register from that one night: 297 field goals from 362 attempts across 12 seasons, a Super Bowl 50 ring with Denver, where he made all 10 of his field goals in that postseason, and a place in the career earnings picture covered in the highest-paid NFL kickers of all time. The Associated Press background also notes that a lawsuit against McManus was settled before he signed with Green Bay, and that the NFL said its investigation did not find sufficient evidence that he had violated its personal conduct policy.

When does McManus make his Rams debut?

On Sunday, all being well, at Las Vegas. NBC Sports reports the Rams will be on the road to face the Raiders in Week 7, and the signing reports expect McManus to kick in that game. The Rams had not published a transaction announcement in the sources checked for this article, so his exact roster designation, active roster or practice squad, is the detail still to confirm before Sunday.

How many kickers have the Rams used since Matt Gay left?

McManus is the sixth. The Associated Press counts six Rams kickers in less than three and a half seasons since Matt Gay, the kicker on their Super Bowl-winning team in the 2021 season, left as a free agent in early 2023. Three of those six have now arrived in a single season, and two of them in the past two weeks alone, which is why a routine Tuesday workout became a story.

What do the Rams need from him?

Stability, in the plainest sense. Los Angeles is 2-4 in a season that opened with Super Bowl hopes, and two of its losses turned on kicking plays, with a third, on Sunday, turning partly on having no kicker at all for most of the afternoon. The bar for McManus is not the 95 percent season he had in 2024. It is to be available in Week 8, which neither of his predecessors managed for long. Roster moves of this size are the week’s background noise, as the Giants’ releases of Najee Harris and Jihad Ward showed this week, but few of them carry a whole position group’s season the way this one does. A midseason kicker signing usually says more about the team than the kicker: the workout had two men in it, both veterans, because the pool of kickers with real NFL mileage who can start on Sunday is that small in October.