The Los Angeles Rams placed kicker Greg Zuerlein, who leads the NFL in scoring this season with 158 points, on injured reserve Wednesday.
Zuerlein has been dealing with a lingering back injury all season. He aggravated it in the 42-7 win at Seattle on Sunday.
Zuerlein has made 38 of 40 field-goal attempts, including six of seven from 50 yards or longer, and 44 of 46 extra points. He was voted to the Pro Bowl for the first time Tuesday, one of three Rams special teams players to be voted in as a starter.
The Rams signed former Penn State kicker Sam Ficken after working out 10 kickers. Ficken spent time in training camps with the Jaguars and Chiefs and has never kicked in a regular-season game.
Elliott not so carefree
Ezekiel Elliott's Dallas teammates alluded to the happy-go-lucky locker room personality they missed — along with the football skills — during the star running back's six-game suspension, which ends this week.
Elliott wasn't interested in sharing that side of himself, or much of anything else in a 70-second session with reporters that last year's NFL rushing leader abruptly ended because he didn't want questions about his time away from the team.
"All right, I'm done," Elliott said after the fifth such question — why he didn't want to talk about what he did in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, where he spent almost all of the six-game suspension over domestic violence allegations.
Elliott fought Commissioner Roger Goodell's decision for two months in federal courts in three states. His legal team won injunctions and other rulings that kept him on the field for eight games before abandoning the case when an appeals court in New York denied an injunction. Soon after announcing that he was ending the appeal, Elliott went to Mexico. There were photos of him running on a beach, and apparently a planned documentary that has yet to be released. Elliott didn't want to talk about that either.
