The Sports Report: Rams fall to the 49ers

Howdy, I’m your host, Houston Mitchell. Let’s get right to the news.

From Dylan Hernández: The second-quarter play call was about as telling as any statistic, a quarterback keeper on second and three.

Matthew Stafford moves about as swiftly as Bay Area rush-hour traffic and that was the best option?

Never mind the drive was kept alive by an encroachment penalty on the next down. The Rams were desperate.

Four games into the season and Sean McVay looks as if he still hasn’t recovered from his boozy Super Bowl parade. The offensive revolutionary is suddenly a .500 coach, his once-feared attack now painfully predictable.

That predictability was the undoing of the Rams on Monday night at Levi’s Stadium in a 24-9 defeat to the San Francisco 49ers, who finished them off when Talanoa Hufanga leaped in front of a pass intended for Cooper Kupp and returned it 52 yards for a touchdown.

As if there were any chance of Stafford throwing the ball to anyone else with the game on the line.

The Rams have Kupp, and not much else on offense.

The Rams reached the red zone three times and had only three field goals to show for it, making this only the fourth time a McVay-coached team failed to score a touchdown.

“There were some bad play calls,” McVay said. “I put us in some bad spots.”

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Rams left reeling as regular-season slide against 49ers continues in loss

Talanoa Hufanga provides nightmare fuel for Rams with game-changing pick-six

SOCCER

From Kevin Baxter: Players at the top levels of women’s professional soccer in the U.S. were subjected to pervasive, systemic and widespread sexual abuse and harassment, and the NWSL and U.S. Soccer did little to stop it, a yearlong report conducted by former acting Atty. Gen. Sally Q. Yates and the law firm King & Spalding has concluded.

Yates’ report, released Monday by U.S. Soccer, found some of the top coaches in the sport were subjects of multiple charges of sexual misconduct yet repeatedly escaped punishment. These same coaches, Yates said, employed vicious coaching tactics, including “relentless, degrading tirades; manipulation that was about power, not improving performance; and retaliation against those who attempted to come forward.”

The federation commissioned the study last fall after multiple players told the Athletic they had experienced abuse, including sexual harassment, inappropriate conduct and homophobic comments. The Washington Post reported similar charges and the resulting fallout forced the resignation or removal of Commissioner Lisa Baird, general counsel Lisa Levine and, eventually, five of the league’s 10 coaches.

DODGERS

From Bill Shaikin: We have heard enough about how Aaron Judge is the only rightful candidate for the American League most valuable player award. He’s not.

We also have heard enough about how Sandy Alcantara is the only rightful candidate for National League Cy Young award.

He’s not. What the Julio?

The Cy Young could be fairly won by Max Fried of the Atlanta Braves, Zac Gallen of the Arizona Diamondbacks, or Carlos Rodon of the San Francisco Giants. But with Alcantara, the Miami Marlins’ ace, and Julio Urías as the likely top two, the NL Cy Young voting race offers an intriguing case study — not only in how we evaluate pitchers, but in how teams deploy them.

ANGELS

From Sarah Valenzuela: he Angels have not had a playoff team since 2014. Now that Arte Moreno said he’s exploring a sale of the team, what happens to the current team and what is the future of Shohei Ohtani with the Angels?

There won’t be answers for a while, but the scenario isn’t new for Southland baseball fans.

The potential sale of the Angels comes about 10 years after the Dodgers went through an ownership change. Ned Colletti was the team’s general manager when Frank McCourt agreed to sell the team in November 2011.

“We had a payroll, we had a budget and we did what we did,” Colletti said. “Our payroll did decrease. We just had to work with what we had. We weren’t prohibited from making transactions, but we had a budget to live under.”

LAKERS

From Dan Woike: No butterflies. No pregame photos on the court. No extra moments of reflection on the drive to the arena.

Just work.

“It’s game day,” Darvin Ham said before his first game as coach of the Lakers, projecting the calm, confidence and control that helped him land the job this offseason.

If Ham wasn’t in the mood for sentimentality, new Sacramento Kings coach Mike Brown cooked up some, offering a few stanzas when asked whether there was any poetry in the season starting with a matchup between the two men.

After all, it was Brown, when he was the Lakers’ coach, who hired Ham to work with the team as an assistant in 2011.

The preseason is a good time for laughs. Last year’s preseason for the Lakers, though, turned out to be more problem than poetry, the team looking bad in going 0-6.

This season started the same way, a 105-75 loss to Sacramento.

CLIPPERS

From Andrew Greif: In official statistics, Monday’s exhibition here in Seattle between the Clippers and Portland will never count.

But try telling the Clippers, who watched the return of all-world forward Kawhi Leonard and former All-Star point guard John Wall after each endured lengthy absences, that their 102-97 victory didn’t count for something.

And tell that to the more than 18,000 who watched the return of NBA basketball in the shadow of the Space Needle for only the second time in the 14 years since the SuperSonics relocated to Oklahoma City.

Clippers owner Steve Ballmer, who built his Microsoft fortune and his die-hard basketball fandom here, grabbed a microphone before tipoff at the center of Climate Pledge Arena’s court and declared, at the top of his decibel range, that “this is a basketball city, dammit!”

KINGS

From Helene Elliott: It says a lot about Anze Kopitar — and the Kings — that he has led them in scoring 14 of the last 15 seasons.

“Did he lead it last year too?” longtime teammate Drew Doughty asked. “I thought Phil won it.”

Nope. No. 2 center Phillip Danault made a strong impression in his Kings debut but ranked third with 51 points, behind Kopitar (67) and Adrian Kempe (54).

It was imperative for Kopitar to lead the Kings in scoring as they built up to their 2012 and 2014 Stanley Cup championships, as they reached their peak, and then to keep them credible through their painful decline. A No. 1 center must carry his team, and Kopitar has done that at an elite level at both ends of the ice. Only Jeff Carter, in 2016-17, has interrupted the Slovenian center’s dominance since a 20-year-old Kopitar succeeded Michael Cammalleri as the team’s scoring leader in 2007-08.

But as the Kings rise again, they’d be better off if Kopitar doesn’t lead them in scoring this season. At minimum they need him to be seriously challenged for supremacy because that will mean they’ve gathered enough skill and scoring depth to contend for the Cup again.

OLYMPICS

From Helene Elliott: The assembled guests were eager to hear Peter Ueberroth’s words of wisdom, hoping he’d extend a pleasant hour of reminiscing about the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics to tell stories about the vision he’d conceived and executed to make the Games so profitable, inclusive and entertaining that they’ve remained an unattainable standard for every Summer Olympics that has followed.

Standing in tribute as Ueberroth stood at a stage set up near the Coliseum’s Court of Honor — where a plaque with his likeness was one twitch of cloth away from being unveiled to the world — his friends, family, and admirers prepared to take their seats to savor his speech. Don’t sit, the former chairman of the L.A. Olympic Organizing Committee cautioned them.

Read the rest here.

THIS DATE IN SPORTS

1895 — Horace Rawlins wins the first U.S. Open. Rawlins beats Willie Dunn with 36-hole total of 173 at the Newport Golf Club in Newport, R.I.

1927 — John Longden rides the first official winner of his career, named Hugo K. Asher, in Salt Lake City.

1940 — Fritzie Zivic scores a 15-round decision over Henry Armstrong to win the world welterweight title in New York. Armstrong had 20 successful title defenses.

1964 — Mary Wills captures the LPGA championship with a two-stroke victory over Mickey Wright.

1964 — Kansas City’s Bobby Hunt ties an AFL record with four interceptions as the Chiefs post a 28-7 victory over the Houston Oilers.

1969 — Mississippi’s Archie Manning becomes the first player in college football history to throw for 300 yards and rush for 100 yards in the same game as the Rebels fall short in a 33-32 loss at Alabama. Manning passes for 436 yards and two touchdowns while adding 104 yards rushing yards and three touchdowns.

1980 — Alabama’s 45-0 win over Kentucky at Legion Field gives coach Paul “Bear” Bryant his 300th career coaching victory.

1987 — The NFL continues the regular-season schedule with replacement players while the players’ association strikes. Average attendance is 16,947, down from 57,205 the first week and 59,824 the second week.

1991 — The San Jose Sharks surrender 52 shots and lose 4-3 to the Vancouver Canucks in their first NHL regular-season game.

1998 — Atlanta scores three touchdowns in a 48-second span of the third quarter — the quickest trio of TDs since the NFL-AFL merger in 1970 — and routs Carolina 51-23.

2003 — B.J. Symons of Texas Tech tosses a Big 12-record eight touchdown passes and tops 500 yards passing for the third straight game when the Red Raiders beat Texas A&M 59-28.

2010 — The Europeans reclaim the Ryder Cup winning 14½-13½. The Americans rally from a three-point deficit to tie the score, but Graeme McDowell beats Hunter Mahan in the final singles match.

2012 — The NHL cancels the first two weeks of the regular season, the second time games had been lost because of a lockout in seven years. Unable to work out how to split $3 billion in hockey-related revenues with the players’ association, the NHL wipes out 82 games from Oct. 11-24.

2014 — Jared Goff throws for 527 yards and five touchdowns as California holds on to beat Washington State 60-59. WSU quarterback Connor Halliday breaks the NCAA passing record with 734 yards and six touchdowns for Washington State and sets the NCAA passing yardage record for all levels, breaking the mark of 716 set by David Klingler of Houston in 1990.

2015 — Drew Brees hits C.J. Spiller with a short pass that the running back turns into an 80-yard touchdown — the 400th of the Saints quarterback’s career — on the second play of overtime, and New Orleans won for the first time this season, 26-20 over the Dallas Cowboys.

2015 — Adam Vinatieri makes a 27-yard field goal in overtime to lift Indianapolis to a 16-13 victory over Jacksonville. Vinatieri converts all three field-goal attempts and one PAT to become the first player in NFL history to score at least 1,000 points with two different teams.

2017 — Sylvia Fowles scores 17 points and breaks her own WNBA Finals record by grabbing 20 rebounds to lead the Minnesota Lynx to their fourth championship in seven years with an 85-76 victory over the Sparks in Game 5.

2018 — Tom Brady becomes the 3rd NFL quarterback to record 500 career touchdown passes.

Compiled by the Associated Press

And finally

Tom Brady completes his 500th touchdown pass. Watch and listen here.