Long Island's Dan Villari, a tight end for Rams, on what it's like to be a practice squad player in the NFL

There are some things about Monday night’s dream-come-true situation that are even better than Dan Villari spent most of his life imagining they could be. A rookie tight end for the Rams, not only will he be experiencing his first NFL regular-season game as a pro, but it will be on Monday Night Football and against his hometown team.

“I’m going to be jumping up and down, bro,” the former Plainedge star quarterback told Newsday of his excitement. “Especially because we are playing the Giants. All my buddies are Giants fans and I want to see them cussing me out in the group chat after the game.”

But absent a shocking change in Rams strategy before the 4 p.m. deadline to set their roster, there is one big part that won’t live up to his childhood aspirations. At least not yet.

Villari will be on the field at SoFi Stadium, he just won’t be playing. He won’t even have a uniform or a helmet. While he is on the team in a broad sense, Villari is not on the 53-man active roster. He is a member of the Rams’ practice squad, that murky, fluid, mostly anonymous group of extra bodies with various levels of experience that each team has at its disposal. Villari and his p-squad brethren live on the thin fringe between being in the league and not, waiting for their big moments to come . . . or not.

It is why, despite mostly joy and positivity when looking ahead to Monday’s experience, Villari expected to feel a little bit of disappointment as well.

At least when the Rams opened their season in Australia last week, they didn’t bring the practice squad with them. Villari watched them lose to the 49ers on TV with the rest of the country. This time he’ll be standing just feet away from the action he has worked so hard to be part of, so close he could reach out and touch it. He just won’t be allowed to participate in it.

“When you feel like you belong and it’s just a tough circumstance right now, yeah, obviously there is frustration,” he said. “But shoot, I’ve been through it before. I just have to keep being me every day. I know it’s coming.”

Other LIers experiencing it, too 

This is all new for Villari. It’s something two other players with Long Island roots have been dealing with for a while though.

“It’s interesting,” said tight end Messiah Swinson of Bay Shore, who played at Long Island Lutheran and is now on the Browns’ practice squad, his fifth different organization in a little over two seasons that includes three separate stints with the Packers. “Basically you are the next man up.”

Linebacker Sam Kamara, the only current Stony Brook University player in the league who has bounced between active rosters and practice squads for the last five seasons, has appeared in 26 games with two starts.

“You get that chance to shine, show them what you got, what you've been working all the time for,” he said of getting the promotion. “I've gotten the chance to play against Tom Brady, Ben Roethlisberger, Aaron Rodgers when he was with Green Bay.”

He is beginning this, his sixth season, on the Browns’ practice squad along with Swinson.

“I look at it as an extension of the roster and not just being a practice squad player,” he said of taking his role seriously. “I think that’s what has kept me around for so long.”

Teams are allowed to elevate two players from the practice squad to the game day roster each week. Being among those hopefuls can feel a little like the aliens in “Toy Story” hoping to be picked by the claw. Injuries and game plans typically determine who gets scooped up.

Trace Ford, a practice squad linebacker for the Giants in his second season with that designation, said there usually aren’t surprises among the players about which two players will get that game day elevation.

“During the week you can kind of tell as guys start getting more reps,” he said. “We’ll see guys getting more reps with the actual defense and not just the scout team, more reps on special teams. You can kind of get a feel for, oh, my time is coming.”

It hasn’t come yet for Ford. Last week, though, that call came for Jordan Clark of the Jets.

The second-year defensive back who spent most of last year on their practice squad, was signed to the active roster and played sparingly in November, then began this season back on the practice squad, was signed to the active roster again and played Sunday against the Packers.

“It’s a dream come true, a major blessing,” Clark said of getting that promotion. “But ultimately you have to snap out of it because it’s time to prepare. They’re trusting you to go fulfill a role for the team. It’s amazing, but now it’s time to go play football.”

Origins of the practice squad

The practice squad traces its roots back to the 1940s when Browns coach Paul Brown tried to circumvent the league’s roster limits and keep talent away from other clubs by having The Yellow Cab Company of Cleveland put extra players on its payroll with no-show jobs so they could practice and be available when he needed them (thus the birth of the term “taxi squad”). Over the years such ruses became more common and eventually, in the landmark 1983 Collective Bargaining Agreement that also created the first salary cap in professional sports, provisions were made for each club to keep five extra developmental players.

That number expanded slowly, first to eight, then 10, but there were always limits on who could be on it. Only players with less than two years of accrued NFL experience qualified. There was also just one way path to the full team: Being signed full-time to an active roster.

The pandemic season of 2020 changed that. Teams needed to have access to healthy bodies on short notice. Practice squads were expanded to 16 players with six of those spots able to be filled by veterans (and a 17th spot reserved for players in the International Pathway Program). Each week teams were allowed to flex up to two players for the game — each player can have it happen to him three times a season — and they would revert to the practice squad afterward. There were some teams who kept players on their practice squads but kept them quarantined from the rest of the roster in case of an outbreak. They were non-practicing practice-squadders.

Those rules stuck around post-COVID and are still in place now. It’s how the Giants can keep Braxton Berrios, their receiver and starting punt returner in his ninth NFL season, without having him on their 53-man roster. Sterling Shepard, 33, the former Giants receiver, just recently signed with the Jets’ practice squad as well.

“It’s a way to play chess outside the lines,” Berrios said. “It’s a way to expand your roster, especially with guys who don’t have to go through the waiver wire like me. That’s what you see happening all around the league.”

Teams can also sign players off other organizations’ practice squads. Players do have the option to not go, but that hardly ever happens. The Giants did that this week in acquiring cornerback Nikko Reed from the Chargers’ practice squad because of injuries in their secondary. Swinson had it happen to him in his rookie year of 2024 when he was signed by the Panthers from the Packers.

“I was in my position meeting in the morning getting ready for the Week 1 game and my agent kept calling me,” he said. “I stepped outside to take the call and he told me Carolina wanted to sign me. Within two hours I was on a plane from Green Bay to Charlotte.”

Part of the team

Fans may see practice-squadders as afterthoughts or just the human versions of tackling dummies for the starters to feast on during the week, and there was a time when they pretty much were those things. These days teams view them as valuable pieces in their pursuit of victory.

“Every guy is in kind of an individual place with that, certainly, but the message is, ‘You're on the team,’ ” Giants coach John Harbaugh said of what is a fairly universal approach. “When you're on our practice squad, in our eyes, you're on our team. We're counting on you to be your best every day and to become your best going forward because we're planning on putting you in the games and playing you when the time comes.”

Such playing time is its own reward for all the work they put in, but it’s not the only one. There is also a big bump in pay for anyone who sees a game day roster.

Players who are not vested veterans with two or more seasons of experience — like Swinson and the rookie Villari — earn a standard salary of $13,750 for each week they remain on the squad. Veteran players like Kamara, Berrios and Shepard make a bit more, between $18,350 and $22,850 per week. A game-day elevation means a game-day paycheck at the league-minimum rate of $49,166 for that week for rookies with veterans earning up to $72,222 depending on their service time.

Stick around on the practice squad for the whole 18-week regular season as a rookie without ever playing in a game and that works out to $247,500 a year. Certainly not the millions we associate with pro athletes; starting Rams tight end Colby Parkinson for example earns more than that per week ($305,555) in base salary alone. Plus there are expenses including agent fees, rent (in Los Angeles where Villari now has an apartment 10 minutes from the Rams’ facility) and various personal training expenses, not to mention taxes.

Said Villari of his income, which also includes the $45,000 signing bonus he received in the spring: “It’s not ideal, but it’s not that bad. I’m living just fine.”

But there is no long-term contract on the practice squad. It is week-to-week, sometimes day-to-day employment. Get hurt in a workout — even if it is not serious but won’t allow you to practice — and you’ll get a small injury settlement if you are lucky, but be out of a job. If the team finds someone they think is better than you, out you go with nothing but a handshake. And time on the practice squad does not count as accrued seasons toward NFL player tenure, free agency, or post-career benefits such as pensions and healthcare.

“It's kind of a volatile position that you're in,” Swinson said. “You could be cut one week, and could be on a roster, you could be up for a game, you could just be practicing. There’s a lot to it. But at the end of the day, you have an opportunity to play in the National Football League.”

Opportunity knocks

Villari, who played at Michigan and Syracuse in college, signed with the Rams as an undrafted rookie in the spring knowing he would have a tough time making the team’s roster.

“When I got here they told me the deal,” he said.

In the spring he would get hardly any snaps at OTA workouts. One, maybe two a day. Barely enough for him to even need to shower afterward. But in training camp when the players put their shoulder pads on Villari began to stand out.

“I started off with maybe two reps one day, three the next day,” he said. “Then I did well with those three reps and it became five reps, six. It got to like eight a day. So I was in a good spot. I was pretty much earning my keep and going in there and being physical and doing my job, running good routes. The reps started to build in practice.”

He showed up in the preseason games too. In the opener against Kansas City in August, he recovered a late onside kick and then threw a key block on a run that sealed the victory. In the next game against the Saints, he caught a short pass and turned it into a 24-yard gain.

When it came time for cutdowns at the end of that month, though, Villari did not make the 53-man roster but was told he was wanted back on the practice squad.

“It was all positive feedback, honestly,” Villari said. “They didn’t have a spot for me but they said I am absolutely an NFL tight end and they stressed how much they love me and they think I’m a great player. At the end of the day, it was a tough roster to try to get on. For this year, at least. I just need to stay in a building and I’ll make the 53 in no time.”

That’s what he works toward these days. This week he spent time in practices playing the role of Giants tight end Isaiah Likely. Last week he was George Kittle of the 49ers. The hope is that one day another practice squad player somewhere will have to be imitating him.

For now Villari, like the other practice squad players around the league, has the same general routine as the starters. He comes in early, attends meetings, takes notes, practices, goes through his drills, gets critiqued by coaches, lifts, rehabs and receives treatment on anything that doesn’t feel right, then goes home and studies some more.

As Clark, the Jets defensive back, said of being on the practice squad: “The week is business as usual. The weekend is the only real difference.”

Swinson is used to that bittersweet feeling Villari said he was experiencing going into Monday’s game. Despite that four-week spell on the Panthers’ active roster, Swinson has yet to play in a game.

“You could get frustrated, but I'm blessed to even be in this position, you know?” Swinson said. “There are people who would kill to be in my position. I played six years of college football with a lot of different guys who would love to be in this position right now. I’ve got friends who I grew up playing football with who I talk to every day who don't have the opportunity to play football. I do.”

So does Villari. Which is why he will be on the sideline Monday night jumping up and down, pulling for his teammates and his team, thinking about all those Giants fans back home, and wondering what it will be like if he ever gets the chance to step across that big white stripe.

He’s so new to it all he admitted he doesn’t even know what that process might entail. Will he get a phone call? Be asked to come to a meeting with Rams coach Sean McVay? Just find out when it’s posted on social media by the Rams or another team that wants him?

“I’m not sure,” he said. “But when it happens, I’ll let you know.”