Wow. You knew it was coming. Sometime or another. But you still can't escape the shock of the move itself. Marc Bulger has been a centerpiece, a crumbling, last standing column from the glory days of the St. Louis Rams. The fact that he displaced Kurt Warner sort of cursed his career. And for Bulger to have a public personality as dry as the stone in that ancient column in the wake of everywhere USA's hometown Horatio Alger doomed him from the start.
The obituary writes itself.
I can't really help but feel like this is best for Marc Bulger. He got his shot with a winning team, earned the big free agent contract and became the last man standing in a ruined team...and damn near ruined franchise.
I suspect he'll get a backup job real quick, though I wonder if there's an inevitable reunion with Mike Martz in the stars. His Colonel Tom Parker. Who knows. All we know is that it won't be in St. Louis.
And now a more practical matter. Is this the inevitable signal that the Rams will start a new era, a second republic with Sam Bradford?
It does seem all but inevitable that the Rams will draft Bradford.
But that seems like an odd spot for them heading into contract negotiations. Sure, Bradford is much less likely to say I want to play somewhere else with the Washington deal done now, but he could still demand a giant leap forward for a rookie QB drafted with the first overall pick.
Yeah. The Demoff and Devaney can try some brinksmanship with Ndamukong Suh waiting in the wings. This is the scenario you want to see if you think the Rams can win more than five games sometime before Steven Jackson begins the unforgiving downhill slide of the aging, overused running back.
Or they could trade for Jason Campbell. Or have their eyes on another Plan B. Who knows?! It's awfully hard to believe that the pick isn't Sam Bradford at this point, but you didn't think Donovan McNabb would be a Redskin anytime soon either.
The post script the news that Bulger was released today: it was his birthday, 33. Maybe the folks at Delphi thought it would be a gift, freeing him to find a cushy backup job somewhere. I choose to believe that it was just some random twist of fate that put a weird punctuation mark on the whole thing.