In March 2013, the Baltimore Ravens rewarded Joe Flacco for a 2012 postseason in which he threw 11 touchdown passes and no interceptions with a six-year, $120.6 million contract that was, at the time, the richest in NFL history. Flacco, who had never thrown more than 25 touchdown passes in a regular season before his 2012 postseason hot streak that ended with the Ravens winning Super Bowl XLVII, never threw more than 27 touchdown passes in a season after signing his massive contract. In his final four years with the Ravens, he was one of the least effective quarterbacks in the NFL.
The Ravens selected Louisville quarterback Lamar Jackson in the first round of the 2018 draft as Flacco’s successor, a process that took half a season. But what if the Ravens had held off on Flacco’s deal with the potential understanding that his 2012 postseason was an outlier, and his 2013 seasons and beyond would be primarily worse than before? What if they had selected one of the quarterbacks in the 2012 draft — say, Robert Griffin III, Ryan Tannehill or Russell Wilson — and rolled Flacco’s rookie contract into another rookie contract? What if the Ravens had realized that they could only go so far with Flacco, and prepared for a future without him, adding three to four more years of inexpensive quarterback play as a roster-building advantage?
Teams tend to be tied to their franchise quarterbacks even when they’re not franchise quarterbacks. And the current financial structure of quarterback deals, laden with backdoor escapes as they are, leave little room for flexibility even in an era when the salary cap approaches (and will eventually exceed) $200 million. In March 2018, the Vikings gave Kirk Cousins a three-year, $84 million contract that’s fully guaranteed. They are inexorably tied to Cousins through the life of the deal — there’s a $60 million cap penalty to move on in 2019 and a $31 million penalty in 2020. The thought was that Cousins would be a better version of Case Keenum, the Vikings backup who thrived in offensive coordinator Pat Shurmur’s system in 2017. Didn’t happen. Water eventually finds its own level, and so do quarterbacks.
When the Rams signed quarterback Jared Goff to a four-year, $134 million contract that includes an NFL record $110 million in guarantees, it ties Goff and the Rams together, ostensibly, through the 2024 season. As always, there will be escape clauses that allow the Rams to cut bait in later years. But the extent to which the Rams have committed to Goff when the 2016 first overall pick had two years left on his rookie deal, and when you factor in the fifth-year option is interesting — because Goff hasn’t had a Flacco-esque burst of production to make the deal half-sensible in the short term. Yes, he put together a perfect passer rating against the Vikings in a 38-31 September win, but he benefited heavily from Minnesota’s inexplicable decision to run pass rusher Anthony Barr in intermediate and deep coverage. And yes, he “outdueled” Patrick Mahomes in a 54-51 Monday night win in November than nobody will ever forget, but there are also reasons the Chiefs fired defensive coordinator Bob Sutton as soon as they possibly could following the 2018 season.
Goff has also benefited heavily from coaching and personnel, and he hasn’t yet proved the ability to transcend those things. He’s a late processor who needs head coach Sean McVay’s system to succeed, and his downturn in production after receiver Cooper Kupp suffered a torn ACL last November was startling — his DVOA, Football Outsiders’ primary opponent-adjusted efficiency metric, plummeted from 37.3% to -2.2%. It’s not that Goff is a bad quarterback; nobody who throws for 4,688 yards and 32 touchdowns in the regular season is a bad quarterback. The question is: Is Goff indispensable to the Rams’ offensive operations?
“I felt very confident and excited about the opportunity to work with him from when I just met him the first time,” McVay said of his quarterback on Wednesday. “For a lot of the things that I was mentioning, when you’re mentally tough like that, when you have the natural inclination to look inward, before you look to blame anybody else, I think that sets you up for success. You show me anybody that’s been successful, it’s somebody that’s persevered, that’s overcome some adversity and been able to stay the course and not let some of those adverse times alter your confidence. I think he’s got a steady confidence, he’s got a refreshing security about himself. I wouldn’t say there was really that ‘aha moment.’ I think there is a bunch I could go to. I think it’s been a continued growth process as we’ve got to know each other over the last couple of years. He made an impact on me as soon as I met him, before we even played a snap together.”
Based on Goff’s December, when he completed 58.9 percent of his passes and threw six interceptions to six touchdown passes, and a postseason in which he completed 55.7 percent of his passes and threw for one touchdown to two interceptions, it’s tough to argue in his favor.
Which brings us once again to the idea that the Rams may have been better off playing Goff through his rookie contract, realizing he has a definite ceiling, and drafting his replacement sooner than later. McVay also talked Wednesday about how Goff could build off a performance in the NFC Championship Game in which he did make some definitive downfield throws, but there’s a lot of league average and below around that handful of plays. The Rams had to determine whether Goff’s upside performances were indicators or outliers. If they’re right, they’ll be justly rewarded. If they’re wrong — and at this point, the evidence is fairly overwhelming that they are — it’s going to be a problem.
Again, the argument is not that Jared Goff is a horrible quarterback. He isn’t, and there is capacity for improvement. The argument is whether the Rams would have been better off rolling one rookie quarterback contract into another. Eventually, some team is going to do this, and in McVay, the Rams have one of the few head coaches with the acumen to pull it off.
When looking at the reasons for Goff’s late-season malaise, his relative inefficiency on long-developing plays appears to be an enormous hidden factor. More than before, defenses were presenting Goff with different coverages, forcing him away from easy reads (a hallmark of his success under McVay in a general sense), and making him succeed against coverages that reveal themselves later in the down.
Goff said as much after a 30-23 loss to the Eagles in mid-December.
“Teams are doing different things to us. Teams are trying out different things, and we just need to find a way to respond.”
Goff also talked about how “I feel like I’ve grown and learned and made strides in a positive direction regardless of what has happened,” but the tape told an entirely different story. While Goff has shown growth as a player from his nightmare rookie season of 2016 to now, he had also relied heavily on McVay’s schematic constraints, and those schemes weren’t working as well for the Rams as they had earlier in the season.
Let’s start this study with a few plays from when things were working.
On this 19-yard touchdown pass to Kupp (No. 18), Goff has to hit him on a crosser, and he has to get the ball over cornerbacks Trae Waynes (No. 26) and Mike Hughes (No. 21). The right-to-left motion of running back Todd Gurley (No. 30) does freeze safety Andrew Sendejo (No. 34), but that doesn’t help Goff in this case. He still has to make a near-perfect throw to get this touchdown, and he does.
Kupp certainly wasn’t the only receiver benefiting from Goff’s tight-window accuracy against the Vikings. Here, on a vertical route up the numbers, you see Brandin Cooks using his speed to lift Waynes upfield, and Goff makes a throw with excellent timing and velocity to match Cooks’ downfield acceleration.
The 40-yard touchdown below to tight end Gerald Everett (No. 81) was the deciding score in the Rams’ Week 11 barnburner over the Chiefs. This touchdown is a byproduct of another McVay staple: Create mismatches through formation and receiver distribution, and count on the quarterback to recognize where those mismatches will be. The Rams bedeviled Anthony Barr with this over and over in Week 4, and this time, McVay’s huckleberry is Kansas City safety Daniel Sorensen, who simply can’t keep up with Everett down the boundary.
Even against the Lions in Week 13 (the week the trouble for Goff started), he was still taking advantage of favorable matchups — including the 8-yard touchdown pass below to Robert Woods. Before the snap, Woods’ motion reveals that the Lions are playing man coverage when cornerback Darius Slay moves with Woods to the three-receiver side. Then, you see the Lions tightening their defense as if they’re expecting a run, and Woods runs a drag route through the vacancy left by that perception. All Woods has to do is beat Slay, and all Goff has to do is wait for him to do it.
But on Goff’s first throw of the Lions game, you could see issues starting to pop up. When Cooks motions from left to right, Detroit shows zone coverage. As is often the case, the motion receiver is Goff’s first read, but linebacker Christian Jones hangs with Cooks as Goff doesn’t expect him to, and Goff isn’t able to reset his vision or get out of the pocket before the pressure comes in. The result: an incomplete pass and the start of a worrisome trend. While Goff had second-level reads open over the middle, he couldn’t take advantage.
Goff finished the Lions game with 17 completions in 33 attempts for 207 yards, a touchdown and an interception. Not exactly world-beating, but not a harbinger of disaster either. The harbinger of disaster came against the Bears in Week 14, when Chicago’s stingy defense turned Goff into a pumpkin, intercepting four of his passes (it could have easily been more), locking up his receivers in oppressive and multiple coverages, and rendering Gurley so irrelevant Goff had nowhere to go. This was a third-year quarterback against what is looking more and more like a historically good defense, but the mistakes were disconcerting.
Then-Bears defensive coordinator and current Broncos head coach Vic Fangio’s schemes tend to throw quarterbacks off because his pre-snap alignments look relatively simple, but they contain multitudes after the snap. Receivers have to run gauntlets featuring everything from tight, aggressive coverage to deep linebacker drops. And always, there is the pressure, brought most obviously by Khalil Mack and Akiem Hicks, but also from less heralded players such as Roy Robertson-Harris and Eddie Goldman.
This was the crucible Goff had to face, and beyond the inhospitable Midwestern winter weather (not ideal for a guy who went to Cal and has played in Los Angeles as a pro), it was Chicago’s defense that turned Goff from one of the more promising young quarterbacks in the game into the uncomfortable, jittery rookie he was in 2016. Goff finished his night with 20 completions in 44 attempts for 180 yards, no touchdowns and four interceptions — the worst game of his three-year professional career, and that includes the series of disasters he underwent under former head coach Jeff Fisher and offensive coordinator Rob Boras in his inaugural campaign.
Per ESPN Stats & Information Group, the 15-6 loss marked the second time in McVay’s career as either a head coach or an offensive coordinator — 79 games overall — that his team didn’t score a touchdown. There would be one more, of course.
“I feel sick about it,” McVay said after the game. “Our job from an offensive standpoint, specifically as my role as a play caller, is to help our team move the football and score points, and I felt like our defense played a good enough game, got enough takeaways to where they played winning football tonight.”
Perhaps McVay could have done things differently, but one of the signatures of his offense is that the Rams run more “11” personnel — one tight end and three receivers — than any other team. And out of seemingly predictable formations, they attack defenses with all kinds of route combinations. The tight splits allow Goff’s targets to widen their routes, and most defenses play on their heels to counter it, which makes things easier for Gurley.
But Fangio’s guys were having none of it. They stuck to their plan, forced the Rams to adapt to them, and put up perhaps the most dominant defensive performance of the 2018 season.
From the start, the Bears were going to bring pressure to Goff as often as possible. Per Pro Football Focus’ metrics, Goff was pressured on half of his 44 dropbacks, but the Bears blitzed on just nine of those. When you can get pressure with your four down linemen and drop your back seven into coverage, you are going to turn most any quarterback into a jumpy thrower who will tend to make mistakes when he’s not throwing the ball away.
The Rams’ first third down of the game came with 9:21 left in the first quarter. Edge rusher Khalil Mack was bound and determined to wreck this attempt all by himself, at the expense of right tackle Rob Havenstein, who has no way to keep up with Mack’s inside move — a fake that would make a receiver proud. Goff may have been trying to get the ball in the vicinity of tight end Gerald Everett, but he had to throw a bail pass out of bounds. The Rams had started on the Chicago 15-yard line due to Marcus Peters’ 48-yard interception return, but they had to settle for a field goal.
Goff wasn’t pressured on his first interception, but he was unable to get the ball anywhere near Woods. This may have been due to the weather, but the result was all about rookie linebacker Roquan Smith dropping into coverage well enough that even if Goff would have been able to put more velocity on the ball, this would have been a very tough completion.
And though Goff was debited for a career-high four picks, it could have been far worse. On two consecutive incompletions in the second-quarter drive that followed his first interception, Goff targeted Cooks twice as he was covered by cornerback Prince Amukamara, and in both cases, Amukamara dropped what would have been an easy pick. On the second near-interception, Smith nearly intercepted the ball Amukamara didn’t.
You will hear some argue that Goff was negatively affected by the cold weather, but he made things far more difficult on himself by frequently telegraphing his intentions. Against a defense this good, you’re going to be lost if you stare down your target, as Goff did with Reynolds here. Bears cornerback Kyle Fuller was able to easily jump the route because he knew exactly where the ball was going.
To demolish an offense this good in an era that favors nothing but offense makes what the Bears did an anomaly for the rest of the league, but more of the same (only better) for these new Monsters of the Midway. Goff had absolutely no answer for any of it.
The following week, Goff would try to turn things around against an Eagles defense that had been decidedly in the middle of the pack through most of the season. Philadelphia went into that game ranked 23rd overall in Football Outsiders’ opponent-adjusted defensive metrics — 23rd against the pass and 15th against the run. That Goff was not able to solve this defense — and that this defense had more new wrinkles that seemed to perplex him — amplifies concerns not only about Goff’s potential, but how NFL defenses are not reacting to McVay’s offense.
Instead of covering the Rams tightly and potentially biting on play-action and backfield motion, Philly continued the Detroit/Chicago trend of backing into coverage, taking away Goff’s primary reads and forcing him to think beyond where he’s used to thinking in the timing of the down. Goff completed 35 of 53 passes for 339 yards, but failed to throw a touchdown pass for the second straight game, added another interception, and wasn’t able to take anything the Eagles defense didn’t want to give him. Perhaps still affected by what the Bears did to him, Goff had a bunch of what looked like mental meltdowns that turned into throwaways — ones that would have been at least in the vicinity of his receivers earlier in the season.
At the end of the first half, Goff had three straight red-zone incompletions to receiver Josh Reynolds (No. 83) — the guy who was essentially Kupp’s replacement. None of the throws was close to the receiver, though each time, Reynolds was single-covered.
Notice on the first play, with 18 seconds left in the second quarter, that the Eagles are playing back in coverage. They aren’t giving Goff an early and easy defined read; they’re forcing him to decipher things later in the play. Cornerback Rasul Douglas has Reynolds covered pretty well here, but if Goff wanted to draw Reynolds out of coverage with a ball thrown underneath (a timed fade, perhaps), this could have been a touchdown. As it was, Goff looked like he was just hurling the ball out of bounds in frustration.
Before the next play, you can see defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz exhorting his defense to move back. Here, Goff is facing three deep defenders to either side and another in the middle. Basically, the Eagles are forcing him to think his way through an open receiver. Again, Goff’s response is to bail out of the play entirely.
The Eagles went with the same defensive concept on third-and-10. Again, Reynolds was single-covered. Again, Goff couldn’t seem to work his way out of what he was seeing. When you have a quarterback making this many repetitive mistakes that basically amount to giving up, you have a major problem on your hands. Either Goff is playing scared or McVay is telling him to throw the ball into the 300 section of the stadium whenever he doesn’t get a read he likes, but at this rate, he was going to have 20 throwaways a game.
With all that in mind, Goff’s final overthrow to Reynolds — a potential game-tying play if completed — seemed to be a fait accompli.
Goff’s stats in the Rams’ controversial 26-23 NFC championship game win over the Saints weren’t mind-boggling — he completed 25 passes in 40 attempts for 297 yards, one touchdown and one interception — but he did make two throws near the end of the first half that gave some hope to a reversal of his recent performance downturn.
There was this 17-yard pass to Brandin Cooks, who beat cornerback Eli Apple on a quick downfield curl route …
… and there was this impressive 36-yard pass to Cooks in which the Rams forced one-on-one coverage outside with a quick crosser near the line of scrimmage. For a minute or so, it appeared that the McVay-Goff combination was back on track and determining defensive outcomes.
Those hopes came crashing down in the Rams’ 13-3 Super Bowl LIII loss to the Patriots, in which Goff completed 19 of 38 passes for 229 yards, no touchdowns and a backbreaking interception late in the fourth quarter. He looked just as overwhelmed as Bob Griese or John Elway or Ben Roethlisberger or any number of young quarterbacks who get their heads turned around by the enormity of the event, as much as they may prepare for anything but that.
Goff’s surface stats weren’t the only story — it was also the throw he missed to a wide-open Brandin Cooks late in the third quarter that would have put the Rams up 7-3 and possibly changed the entire narrative. Quarterbacks have to be able to take advantage of coverages that are busted to that degree. They can’t wait and wait and throw late, or missed opportunities occur.
Per Pro Football Focus, Goff was pressured on 18 of his dropbacks by New England’s ravenous defense, completing just four of 14 passes for 47 yards and throwing up the fadeaway jumper to Patriots cornerback Stephon Gilmore. The pressured version of Goff in the Super Bowl had a passer rating of 11.3, which is three times worse than if he’d just chucked the ball out of bounds on every snap.
“What really stings for me, especially as a quarterback, is that our defense played so well — and I wasn’t able to deliver,” Goff told Michael Silver of NFL Network after the game. “It was me. It was our offense. And we — well, I — couldn’t do my part.
“It wasn’t a game we needed 30 points to win. We needed two touchdowns, and I couldn’t get it done. That’s on me. I’m the guy who has to drive this offense.”
Perhaps the most revealing story regarding Goff’s limitations in the Super Bowl was told by Albert Breer of The MMQB. Several Patriots defenders revealed that they went on the field for every play with two coverage looks — one for when McVay could speak to Goff through Goff’s helmet earpiece, and one for after the sound switched off with 15 seconds left on the play clock, as the NFL mandates.
So, the Patriots sent disguised coverage at Goff on every play, and Goff couldn’t decipher it. The time frame is a cool story, but the nuts and bolts tell us that at this point in his career, Goff is far more a product of what McVay can give him than anything emanating from himself. And you can be sure Goff is going to see more disguises in 2019 and beyond; NFL teams take every little bit of intel they can get to use it against their opponents. Now that Goff’s balkiness against more difficult concepts is clear, it could open up a whole new can of stuff, despite the limitations ostensibly forced upon enemy defenses by McVay’s post-snap schematic diversity.
When I watched Goff’s college tape, I saw a quarterback who was prone to certain repetitive issues that would be highly problematic if they surfaced during his NFL career. I noted that his internal clock sped up under pressure; that he was far too often a “see it and throw it” player who relied too much on pre-determined reads; that he had a target in mind from the snap and wasn’t flexible enough to adjust when receivers slipped, slowed down or were jammed at the line of scrimmage; and that he threw wild and high when his mechanics got off-kilter, and was prone to throwing interceptions when that happened.
That Goff has peeled his game back to the point where these issues are again paramount has to be highly disconcerting. And if it’s true that opposing defenses have figured out McVay’s machinations, it will be up to Goff to transcend that schematic battle with his own ability to improvise. That’s what is expected of franchise quarterbacks who get franchise quarterback money.
Based on the evidence, there’s not a great chance of that happening — at least in the short term. The hope seems to be that over the long term, Goff will develop into the quarterback the Rams need him to be. If not? The decision to commit to him as opposed to rolling the dice and going after another quarterback on a rookie deal, giving the Rams more years and more cap dollars to continue at a championship level, could be a great regret for McVay and the franchise.
As I said, some NFL team will eventually go Full Metal Moneyball and drag one rookie QB deal into another. The Rams were in an optimal position to do so.
