Forget a Super Bowl slump. The LA Rams have a Jared Goff problem

The Rams have a Jared Goff problem. At 5-4, in the toughest division in football, the upstart darlings from a year ago are in danger of missing the playoffs.

Sunday’s loss to the Steelers was the most disappointing yet, for Goff and the team. As in last year’s ugly Super Bowl loss, Goff turned into a puddle of panic. He was in a terrible state. His eyes flicked around the field. If he didn’t feel real pressure from an immediate free-rusher, he imagined it. Rarely has fear been so visible in a quarterback’s face. Defenders know; his teammates too.

Goff finished the game with his worst statistical outing of the season: 22-of-41 passing for 243 yards, with a season-low 53.7 completion percentage, no touchdowns, two interceptions, four sacks, and a passer rating barely cracking the 50s.

Lookup any advanced metric and you’ll find Goff in the bottom third of the league: DVOA, 24th; QBR, 28th. Pro Football Focus ranks him as the worst quarterback – by passer rating – under pressure this season.

Yes. This is really the guy the Rams signed to a four-year, $134m contract this offseason, with $120m in guarantees, the highest guaranteed total in the league history. Yikes.

What Goff’s leverage was, nobody knows. Last year’s Rams offense was special. They brought intricacy for the nerds and loud highlights for when you just wanted to see supernova athletes do cool stuff. Sean McVay brought organized disorder. They clobbered people on the ground and through the air. They ran behind the best run-blocking line in the league with the league’s top back. Nobody could keep up with an offense that paired such a run game with a sophisticated play-action plan and creative dropback passing system. Everything fit so artfully.

This year’s updated model is more stilted. Bill Belichick – along with the Lions and Bears – provided a blueprint on how to slow down the Rams creative ground game and confuse Goff. Ignore all the motions and shifts and fun and games. Hit your marks, stay disciplined, do your job, and good things will happen – like against any great offense.

What looked an unstoppable scheme 11 games ago is now stuck in the mud: Everybody is following the Belichick-Fangio-Patrica recipe in some form or fashion; the Rams offensive line has disintegrated; Todd Gurley isn’t the same running back anymore. LA are 21st in offensive efficiency through 10-weeks. They remain balanced – 18th in pass efficiency and 17th in rush efficiency – it’s just that they’re now balanced and bad.

There are no good answers, and that is because the simplest answer – dumping Goff – is a bad one, too. The Rams have 41 players under contract and $26m in projected cap space in 2020. They don’t have a first-round pick in the upcoming draft or in 2021 either. Re-tooling the offensive line under such restraints is damn near impossible.

And It’s not like the team has much flexibility to open up any space. In the NFL, the salary cap is usually a mirage. If teams need to find money to squeeze another player in or get some form of cap relief, they can. They juggle the contracts of their stars, extend players early to give relief now, crisscross contracts (you get an inflated number this year, then a cheap one next year; you get the opposite), and exert leverage to drop the cap numbers of veteran players. Look, we’ll probably cut you anyway, so sign this new deal now with a little more upfront but that gives us more chances to add players this offseason.

The Rams don’t have any tricks up their sleeves. There’s no big money maker they can axe to free the amount of space needed to overhaul this offense. The dead cap numbers for 2020 of some potential money-freeing targets should come with some kind of safety warning:

That’s right. Gurley and Cooks, two off-ball playmakers with troubling injury records, have a combined dead cap number (not salary) of $47.4m. And that’s still $3.6m less than Goff’s individual number. That’s dead money. There’s no relief if you cut a player or trade him away. That money is on your books whether you like it or not.

Offensive success in the McVay era has been made up of a mix of the coach’s schematic brilliance, the Rams overpowering offensive line, the run game, and a quarterback playing on-time and in rhythm, spreading the ball to open playmakers. Of the four, the last is the most replaceable.

Finding star quarterbacks who can play out of structure and drag a team to success is damn near impossible. But the NFL is flooded with competent QBs who can get the ball out on time to athletes in space. That stuff is easy. Goff excelled at those easy things, then sprinkled in some special throws and a couple of quality performances just to throw you off the Andy Dalton-like whiff. But Goff was always a product of those around him.

The Rams destroyed people with play action in 2019, the most efficient way to move the ball on offense (whether you have a good run game or not, by the way). The Rams ran play action on 36% (!) of their snaps – first in the league by a good distance. They finished first in play-action yards per play, averaging 9.4 yards per play. Play action wasn’t just important to their success, it was its foundation.

This year’s Rams offense has crumbled. They’re running play-action on just 25% of their plays, averaging 8.1 yards per play, falling to 17th.

The Rams were given a chance to move on from Goff after the Super Bowl loss. They could have tacked another year onto his rookie deal or let him play out his initial contract. They could have taken an organizational stand: it is these tenets that make us successful, not an above-average quarterback, and we’re going to preserve them.

The best way to ensure success in the NFL is to find a good quarterback on a rookie deal. It enables a team to flesh out the rest of the roster with a free $30m. The Rams were partly a product of that during their Super Bowl run a year ago. With Goff’s extension, they function as a normal franchise now.

They had a chance to be different. That’s what stings. They could have resisted. They could have trusted in McVay and the scheme and their ability to find talent. They could have let Goff walk and replaced him with another player on a rookie contract. And if that guy stunk they could have dipped into the draft pool again or picked up a so-so veteran on a year-to-year deal. They could have innovated off-the-field as well as on it.

But they didn’t. They chose the easy path.

They wedded themselves to Goff. The Rams are paying him like a superstar and he’s been kind of, sort of OK. If he hit the open market today, not tied to McVay, is anybody giving him in excess of $100m? Not a chance. You cannot build a team like that in 2019. The Rams have the third-best defense in the NFL and yet they’re third in their division.

There is no version of Goff that feels like it can anchor a franchise and develop into a top-five overall player. Moving on from a face-of-the-franchise-type star too early hurts, but not nearly as badly as waiting too long.