Jared Goff earned some respect from his coaches and teammates on Sunday, not by throwing for 424 yards and leading the Rams to a 34-7 win, but by what he did when the ball wasn’t in his hands.
On a busted screen pass to Robert Woods, Goff laid a block for his wide receiver after Woods had to reverse field and go completely across the formation. Goff got in Patrick Peterson’s way, who essentially stiff-armed the quarterback, but it freed Woods up to gain big yardage.
The play went for 48 yards and Sean McVay loved it.
“Hell yeah. Go make that block, man,” McVay said on Monday. “I think what’s as fun as anything is the excitement that you hear from the teammates. When you get a chance to show the things that we did well or that we can do better collectively, and you hear how fired up guys get. I think you pick and choose if that’s a different player out there, I think he told you guys yesterday. Peterson got him good around the neck right there, but he ended up getting that block and Robert went inside. I think those are things that sometimes is just reactionary.”
McVay never expected the play to go for 48 yards, but there are a lot of instances where a play doesn’t go as planned and it winds up working out.
“This is still a game that is full of a bunch of different things that you don’t know how to exactly a play is going to play out,” he said. “If you told me that that screen was going to cut across the grain for a 48-yard gain, I would have told you there’s no way. That’s why when you’ve got 22 moving parts on each snap, sometimes things play out and I think that was a natural reaction for him. I think his guys love that and so did we.”
Goff already had the respect of his teammates, but it never hurts to make a play like that one to fire everyone up. Cooper Kupp would rather his quarterback not block downfield, though.
“I heard about that. I heard ‘PP’ gave him a little shot on that one. I typically discourage Jared from blocking as much as he can,” Kupp said after the game.
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