The Club Ruled Out Sam Okuayinonu Six Days Before Kickoff
Clubs do not usually rule a man out on a Friday for a Thursday game. San Francisco did, because the player is in California and the game is in Australia. Hours later the club was reported to be signing a replacement off another team's practice squad and putting him on a plane.
San Francisco ruled Sam Okuayinonu out of the opener on Friday. The club said he "has been ruled out for the International Series game due to a foot injury," in wording David Bonilla published at 49ers Webzone. Michael David Smith had the same announcement at Pro Football Talk that morning.
On Wednesday night the club had called him questionable and left him in California. Questionable was a designation that assumed a second flight. The second flight is not happening.
Six days is early#
Clubs rule players out on Wednesdays and Fridays of game weeks, off practice participation they have just watched. The first Week 1 injury report is not due yet. San Francisco did it anyway, and the reason is geography rather than medicine: the ordinary sequence needs a player at the facility, and Okuayinonu is 7,855 miles from his team, San Francisco to Melbourne.
He started twelve of the fifteen games he played last season, with thirty-nine combined tackles and three sacks, per the club's own player page. Twelve is most of a career. He has fifteen starts in all and every one of them is San Francisco's.
The club's injury-report archive lists him out for Week 13 and again for Week 15 last season. Those are the two games missing from the fifteen. Thursday will be the third.
The eight who are there#
Nine defensive linemen sit on the active roster, counted off the club's roster page on Friday afternoon: Nick Bosa, Alfred Collins, Gracen Halton, Romello Height, Osa Odighizuwa, Okuayinonu, James Thompson Jr., C.J. West and Keion White. Eight of them are in Melbourne.
Three of the eight did not practise on Wednesday, the last session in Santa Clara. Kyle Posey's account at Niners Nation has Halton and Height with ankles and Thompson with nothing specified. A fourth, Bosa, took team reps that day for the first time since August 3, and his first session with team periods in it since he tore the right anterior cruciate ligament in Week 3 last season.
That leaves Collins, Odighizuwa, West and White as the four men in Australia with nothing written next to their names.
Mykel Williams, the name a reader might reach for next, is on a physically-unable-to-perform list and is not among the nine at all.
What is on the shelf#
Friday afternoon the club stopped looking at its own shelf. Greg Auman of FOX Sports reported that San Francisco is signing edge rusher Khalid Kareem off Atlanta's practice squad, to the active roster, and that he is already on his way to Melbourne. Michael David Smith carried it at Pro Football Talk under the same terms and Niners Nation had it as well. Kareem is 28, a fifth-round Cincinnati pick, and he spent the last two seasons in Atlanta with Raheem Morris, who is now San Francisco's defensive coordinator. A man the coordinator has already coached is a shorter runway than a man he has not, which is most of the reason to sign anybody on a Friday for a Thursday.
This is a report and not yet the club's own paperwork. On Friday evening the club's transaction page still ended at September 1, and its roster page still listed nine defensive linemen, none of them Kareem.
The alternative, before that, was the shelf. The club's roster page carries two defensive linemen on the practice squad, Ogbo Okoronkwo and Sebastian Valdez. A team may elevate two practice squad players for a game without a roster move, and each of them three times in a season before he has to be signed outright.
One caution on the count, and it belongs to the club rather than to anyone reporting on it. Niners Nation's Friday account names Okoronkwo and Vincent Anthony Jr. as the practice squad options. The club's own transaction page still shows Anthony signed to that squad on September 1 and carries nothing at all since. The club's own roster page, read the same afternoon, files him under Cut. Two documents on one website disagree about whether a defensive lineman is on the practice squad, and neither the transaction page nor any reporting found on Friday records the move that would settle it.
Anthony is not the only one. The September 1 entry signed four men to the practice squad: Anthony, Brandon Codrington, Kevin Givens and Foster Sarell. On Friday evening the roster page filed Codrington under Active, Givens under DEV, Sarell under Traded to Another Division and Anthony under Cut. None of the four is on the practice squad table, and the transaction page records none of the four moves that took them off it.
The week#
The Rams do not leave for Australia until next week and arrive the day before the game. San Francisco is the designated home team, which is why its own schedule page reads Rams rather than at Rams.
Kickoff is 5:35 p.m. Pacific on Thursday, which is 10:35 on Friday morning at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
Okuayinonu will watch it on a Thursday evening, seventeen hours behind the men he plays with.
