Please don’t worry if you had never heard of Carson Wentz and Jared Goff before a few weeks ago. Until last fall, the top two players in this NFL draft had no idea the other existed, which is remarkable, when you think about it.
Most top draft picks spend years circling around each other as acquaintances from high school all star games, college award shows and bowl weeks. Andrew Luck and Robert Griffin III, the quarterbacks who went one and two in the 2012 draft were recruited to play together at Stanford. They were silent rivals ever since. Peyton Manning undoubtedly knew a good deal about Ryan Leaf before their 1998 draft and Leaf had certainly heard of Manning who had been a star for years.
But on Tuesday morning, Goff stood in a park across from the Chicago Auditorium Theatre, where he will either be picked first or second on Thursday night, and tried to think of the first time he heard the name of Wentz, who played his college football at North Dakota State.
“I knew his program there was very successful…” Goff started, then paused.
He thought.
“Probably the first time I heard of him was during the season,” he finally said.
A few feet away, Wentz pondered the same question, before finally admitting that he didn’t watch any of Goff’s games at the University of California.
“I don’t get caught up in the other guys too much,” he said.
Perhaps nothing sums up the strangeness of this draft more than the two men who never could have expected to be the stars of the night. Goff was a solid quarterback at Cal with a good chance of playing in the NFL, but there was nothing in the Bears 8-5 season that said was about to be the next John Elway. Wentz started just 23 games at FCS North Dakota State, hardly the kind of resumé that puts a player at the top of a draft.
Now they will be linked forever the way those rare quarterback tandems at one and two are eternally connected. Wentz and Goff do not conjure images of Manning and Leaf, or Luck and Griffin – or even Jameis Winston and Marcus Mariota. They did not compete for Heisman Trophies or play for FBS national championships. Instead, they seem more like passers who peaked at exactly the right time, when the need for a new leader filled enough NFL draft meeting rooms and teams became desperate to find their next great thing.
Who would have thought last November that Wentz and Goff would be the giants of this draft and that the Los Angeles Rams and Philadelphia Eagles would trade up to get them? Their lives have been torn upside down since February’s draft combine propelled them to draft immortality. They’ve been dragged to meetings and workouts and interviews, flying back and forth across the country for enough reviews and assessments to last most players a career. Players like Manning, Luck and Winston were ready for this. Wentz and Goff must wonder who hijacked their lives.
Unlike the other quarterbacks who have held the same top-pick status and built rival camps, Wentz and Goff have actually endured the process together. Both chose the same agent, Ryan Tollner, and worked side-by-side in weightlifting sessions and passing camps. Wentz laughed on Tuesday when he said the first time he saw Goff play was the day they began throwing together.
Come Thursday evening one will be following the other up the carpeted stairs to a stage where NFL commissioner Roger Goodell will embrace them, and they will wear their Rams or Eagles caps into a blaze of flashbulbs. The clock is ticking down on the craziest pre-draft winter and spring in recent years, and the draft’s two biggest names shuffled through drills in a league-run kids clinic, showing little children in oversized T-shirts how to throw tiny rubber footballs. It might have been the most normal moment for either Wentz or Goff.
“Well, heck, it’s an exciting time,” Wentz said at one point as he started across the windswept field near the banks of Lake Michigan and into a breeze that kept temperatures hovering around 40F.
Back home in Bismarck, North Dakota, folks have arranged the biggest draft party anyone has ever seen there. Originally, someone planned to hook up a television in the gym at his old high school. But that was before the Rams traded to No1 and the Eagles to No2, and both suggested they were taking quarterbacks, making the hometown boy either the first or second pick in the draft. The other day, Wentz’s brother told him the gym won’t hold the number of people who want to come, so the party has been moved to the football stadium at Bismarck State – a tiny stadium they call the Community Bowl.
Sometime late on Thursday afternoon, Bismarck time, the city’s sudden celebrity will step into the television screen at the Community Bowl. The world will know where he is about to play his football and undoubtedly many will ask the same question everyone else is: just who are Carson Wentz and Jared Goff and how did this draft come to be about them?
