Ali Highsmith Done for the Season, Arizona Cardinals Sign Pago Togafau

Gotta love Oakland fans!

I’m not sure what the thought process on Harrington was but they do play different positions so they might not have even considered it. Sure he’d have played solely on special teams but they could have thought about it decided that they didn’t want to start his ‘clock’ (of being inelilgible for the P-squad).

There was a great SI article a couple of years ago about what practice squad players go through and all the rules around the squad. I’ll have to look that up tommorrow.

- I don’t think the squad travels. (almost positive)

Is was in October of last year and focused on the Lions’ practice squad. Oddly enough our old friend Buster Davis was a member of their P-squad last year. Here’s a couple of exerts:

Practice squad players are paid a minimum of $4,700 per week, but their salaries are not guaranteed beyond today. They’re eligible neither for long-term benefits nor for an NFL pension. If their team wins the Super Bowl, they’re entitled to championship rings — but not necessarily ones with real diamonds……………………..Up there is on the active roster. Rookies make a minimum of $16,700 a week, with benefits. If they play three or more games, they get insurance in the off-season and earn a year toward their pensions. And they get to play football on Sunday.

On Monday the practice squad players study tape of a game they did not play in. On Tuesday they study tape of an opponent they will not play against. On Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, in practice, they pretend to be people they’re not. And on Saturday, when the other players go to a hotel, the practice squad players go home, to one-bedroom apartments with month-to-month leases. They have the weekend off. But they would rather be working.

Practice squads were instituted by the NFL in 1989 as a way to give teams a pool of extra bodies to draw from in practice or in the event of injury. At the time the squads comprised five players per team, but in 2004 they were expanded to eight. The Lions carry a ninth player as one of 11 teams participating in the league’s international program, which is intended to cultivate new talent and grow the game outside the U.S.

The practice squad’s primary role is to work on the scout team, giving the starters an accurate representation of what they’ll see from the opposition on Sunday. Coaches call this representation the Look. Marinelli sometimes refers to the scout team as the Look Squads……….During practice last week Middleton and Buster Davis were supplying two of the most important looks. Middleton was pretending to be Joey Galloway, the Bucs’ No. 1 receiver. Davis was pretending to be Derrick Brooks, Tampa Bay’s Pro Bowl linebacker. Doing this every week can cause an identity crisis.

Just a bit on Buster:

Davis wants to be the next Derrick Brooks, not his scout-team doppelgänger. Like Brooks, he was a star linebacker at Florida State. He started 37 consecutive games, earned second-team All-America honors in 2006 and was drafted in the third round, 69th overall, by the Arizona Cardinals last April…….But during training camp the Cardinals saw a player who was uninspired and overweight. They wanted to send Davis to their practice squad, but he refused the assignment. Arizona released him before the season began, swallowing his $610,000 signing bonus.