Goff in his first offseason as a Ram

Sophomore Spurt or Slump?

Albert Breer

http://mmqb.si.com/mmqb/2017/04/13/jared-goff-los-angeles-rams-sean-mcvay-nfl-minicamp

The first offseason is crucial for quarterbacks coming off their rookie years. Here’s a look at where Jared Goff, Carson Wentz and Paxton Lynch stand. Plus notes on a draft QB’s freefall, Saints-Pats trade talk and more

The rules are the rules, so first-year Rams coach Sean McVay has spent a lot more time since January looking at his new quarterback on a television monitor than he has looking him in the eye. With the team’s offseason program starting this week, McVay readily concedes he and Jared Goff have a long way to go in making the team’s massive investment in the QB look smart.

But go ahead and ask McVay what’s made him most excited. He won’t skip a beat.

“New Orleans. New Orleans. Watch the New Orleans game,” he says, laughing. “He made a lot good throws, where he moved, he slid, he had a good feel for the pocket. When things condensed around him, he threw for a couple touchdowns. He ends up making a zero audible vs. a zero pressure, where he gets to max protection and hits Tavon Austin on a corner route in a 3-by-1 formation.

“If you buzz through that game, there’s a handful of plays that get you encouraged, where he’s moving, he’s making athletic throws, and he’s showing he can take a hit and get the ball out. He made a lot of throws in that game you get excited about. And he’s doing things mentally, where you can see he’s making protection audibles and getting the ball where it should be vs. those pressure looks.”

Over the next two weeks, we will obsess over where Mitchell Trubisky and Deshaun Watson and the rest of the draft quarterbacks will land. Most people won’t spend a second thinking about the guys we were obsessing over a year ago. But for those quarterbacks—Goff and fellow 2016 first-rounders Carson Wentz and Paxton Lynch—these weeks are critical, maybe moreso than they are for even Trubisky and Watson.

In this week’s Game Plan, we’re going heavy on the draft, with a look at the big-name quarterback who’s falling, the few knocks on Myles Garrett, how football teams look at college basketball players, why the Giants and Steelers and Chargers should be looking closely at young quarterbacks, and much more.

But we’ll start with the 2016 first-round quarterbacks, and what many coaches believe is the most critical offseason of any player’s career—the one between rookie year and Year 2, when growth should be at its most rapid. It started for Lynch in Denver on Monday, and Wentz and the Eagles get going next Monday.
Likewise, Goff and McVay are now three days in. And McVay does have those impressions from the tape. As he explained, “The two characteristics that we really value a lot from that position—are you a natural thrower of the football, and are you tough enough not to flinch in the face of the rush? He has both those things.”

Conversely, McVay won’t hesitate to admit he doesn’t know yet what ultimately he’ll need to know most about Goff. And to get there, he links the process ahead to a belief that’s deeply embedded in McVay’s football heritage.

“This goes back to what my grandpa (ex-Niners architect John McVay) instilled in me, from Bill (Walsh),” McVay said. “The quarterback position is the most difficult position. So everything that we do is geared towards making the most difficult position as easy as possible. And everything that you do is with the quarterback in mind first.

“And the thing that was great about having two guys like Kirk (Cousins) and Colt (McCoy in Washington), who took such great ownership of what we were trying to get done, they could explain why they liked a play. And if they didn’t like a certain play, whether it was Kirk or if Colt was playing, then we weren’t gonna call it. I thought it showed the value of having that relationship and rapport.”

And there you have the biggest goal set for Goff this spring.

To earn veto power that Cousins and McCoy attained over the next 11 weeks, as the coach sees it, two things have to be achieved. Goff needs to understand the offense well enough to articulate the “why.” And Goff, McVay, coordinator Matt LaFleur and QBs coach Greg Olson need to build the trust to have that kind of open discourse.

Is it different to try and give a 22-year-old that kind of latitude? A little. But Cousins’ results, and how a colorful offensive group in Washington responded to McVay’s style is proof positive that it’s been effective.

As for where they are now, the limited face time coach and quarterback have had has been largely uneventful. Goff was in two-hour meetings with the staff Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. They covered style of play, formations, motions and personnel groupings on Day 1, baseline drop-back concepts on Day 2, and protections Wednesday. It wasn’t intimate—all the skill players were there.

But McVay was able to get a little more in January when he spoke with Goff during his interview process.

“The thing I really liked in how he came off, even before he had any idea we’d be working together, clearly things didn’t go as well as we would’ve liked last year, but he made no excuses,” McVay said. “He took full accountability and I sensed a guy who was challenged to respond in the right kind of ways, as opposed to making excuses for not playing as well as we would’ve liked last year.”

Of course, Goff hasn’t been sitting on his hands the past three months. One big focus in his work away from the facility has been on finding consistency in the kind of stroke he had in that New Orleans game. And he’ll continue to work on his drops from center and becoming a better distributor and more aggressive downfield.

McVay and Goff will get to that when they hit the field in a few weeks. For now, the good news is McVay sees evidence that, while there’s a long way to go, the vault of draft capital the Rams yielded for the guy on that Saints tape eventually will prove to be well worth it.

“You see the natural thrower, you see the toughness, those are the things you get excited about,” McVay said. “And then, what you also appreciate is, if this guy stayed in college, he’d be a senior right now without even having redshirted. … So he has a lot of maturing and developing to come. When you see those kinds of skills, it gets you excited about the opportunity to work with him and try to help him develop and reach that highest potential. And I know Greg and Matt feel the same way.”

So that’s Goff. His draft classmates? Glad you asked …

The Broncos will give Paxton Lynch the chance to win the job, while the Eagles want to see more leadership from Carson Wentz.

• Paxton’s progress: Broncos coach Vance Joseph said this week that he’d like the competition between Trevor Siemian and Lynch to go deep into the summer. That’s the way it’ll go if both are assimilating to the new staff and playing well. But I believe the presence of new/old offensive coordinator Mike McCoy gives Lynch a leg up, and for a couple reasons.​

First, McCoy is master at retrofitting his scheme to match its signal-caller. In fact, it’s the mark of who he is as a coach. He made it work for Tim Tebow one year, Peyton Manning the next. So he should be able to mitigate that Lynch is raw, and that means talent will matter more. Second, as he did for both Rivers and Peyton Manning, McCoy plans to add elements of Gary Kubiak’s offense to ease the transition.

Joseph, for his part, has seen every inch of game and practice tape from Lynch’s rookie year, and I’m told he reached out to Kubiak to get a more complete picture on his new quarterbacks. Two things on Lynch’s game tape that impressed the staff: 1) How he seamlessly came into the Tampa game and competed; 2) How he took drops from center. Having been a shotgun QB in college, that showed he’s coachable.

That’s not to say he’s perfect. Lynch was less effective in his two starts than when he came into that Tampa game and flashed on the fly, a sign that he had more trouble with defenses game-planning for him. But there’s certainly plenty to work with here.

• What about Wentz? Goff played 393 snaps and threw 205 balls as a rookie. Lynch played 176 snaps and threw 83 passes. By comparison, Wentz played 1,127 snaps (second most among all NFL QBs in 2016) and threw 607 balls. The Eagles rookie started hot, had to deal with defensive coaches getting tape and building a book on him, leveled off, and then continued to grow.

Naturally, we know more about Wentz. For obvious reasons, there’s more optimism on Wentz nationally than the other two. But that doesn’t mean there’s not plenty of work to be done. The Eagles sent him off in January with two directives, as I understand them. One, he needed to rest a worn out throwing elbow. Two, he was to drill his lower body mechanics, in an effort to play and throw with more balance.

The Eagles’ staff will get its first look at Wentz on Monday, when vets return for Year 2 of the Doug Pederson era, and there’s something else Pederson hopes he gets. “I want to see him embracing being a leader on this football team,” Pederson told me, a few weeks back. “Now that he’s got a year under his belt, he can be the guy, a guy who can really motivate other players, challenge other players.”

Once we get to OTAs, the hope is that the offseason work on his mechanics and the rest will help Wentz’s downfield accuracy, one area where defenses made it hard on him last year. But there’s still plenty to be excited about here.

* * *
Each of these guys had help in the offseason, too. Wentz and Goff worked with renowned QB gurus Tom House and Adam Dedeaux; Lynch went back home to Florida to work with the coach who readied him for the draft, Charlie Taaffe. So each guy seems to be doing the right things.

But numbers tell us all of them won’t make it. In the five-year span between 2009 and ’13, 14 quarterbacks were drafted in the first round. Five got second contracts, and one of those was Mark Sanchez. Only Andrew Luck, Ryan Tannehill, Cam Newton and Matthew Stafford remain with their drafting teams. Bottom line: The odds aren’t in favor of all three of these guys becoming true franchise quarterbacks.

It will be fun to watch and see which of the three do.