Goff's development

This is from a longer article about several players. It includes vids of Goff and comments on those vids, but you need to be a subscriber to access the vids. So, uh…pretend. It’s still a good read IMO.

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Matt Waldman, Sept 4 2017

http://subscribers.footballguys.com/apps/article.php?article=waldmantop10wk1&utm_content=buffer272c1&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

CAN JARED GOFF MAKE THE CUT?
Most football analysts I know have written him off. They cite his stats that were among the worst in history for a rookie starter and project the slim likelihood that he’ll develop because of the history of rookies with poor stats in that range who never worked past their abysmal first seasons.

If you’re only about getting the correct answer (then it’s unlikely you’re reading this post), then staying away from Goff is the statistically correct course of action. A quarterback with a horrific rookie year for a team that fired the coach that helped draft him and is now working with a second coach who may not be tied to him long-term is not a safe option relative to other young quarterbacks.

However, if it’s equally important for you to get the correct reasons for the answer, then I have concerns about many of these attempts to correlate Goff’s season with past history. How many of these statistical studies included the context of offensive scheme switches as radical as the Air Raid to the West Coast Offense? Did these studies have any baseline data that examined the quality of each team’s receiving corps?

I doubt any.

As I’ve written about extensively, Goff learning the West Coast Offense would be like learning Chinese. Executing the WCO during his first year would be like getting dropped into Hong Kong, asking the first person he flagged down where to find the nearest bathroom while badly needing to use one, and getting this answer in Chinese spoken at a rapid rate:

Sure, you walk five and a half blocks, look for the blue and yellow neon sign on the left about three flights up that reads, “Tasty Duck,” and below it on the ground floor is a pink door. Ring the white button on the panel—not the red one, it doesn’t work—and when the electronic locks click open, enter through the hall, go three flights upstairs and then down the hall past eight doors. The ninth door is a bathroom.

Most students of a new language need to be immersed in a culture for a period of time before they can follow an explanation this detailed when spoken in the rapid fashion of a native speaker. If their lessons were mostly in a classroom and practice sessions with a language partner, this situation would be virtually impossible for them to comprehend. Their brains are likely hung up on key words that didn’t sound familiar and it forced them to miss what they otherwise would have recognized. The fact that they desperately need to use the bathroom wouldn’t help either.

This scenario is a lot like Goff entering a ball game against the top percentile of the world’s football-playing athletes in terms of physical, technical, and intellectual skill for the game. While many new students of a language usually go to a new country with a buddy who either knows the language well or has a guide book and a dictionary, Goff’s companions (his receivers) refused to watch game film with him on their own time.

Even so, there were positives from Goff’s first season that most glossed over. One thing I’ve noticed consistently is that Goff throws a nice deep ball and he wanted to be aggressive.

It’s not a pinpoint throw but there’s a good balance between having air under the ball with a decent amount of velocity for a pass that travels 53 yards from pitch to catch. Anytime a quarterback can deliver the ball 45-50 yards with this requisite velocity, his arm strength isn’t an issue.

Goff often showed a quick processor for a guy learning the West Coast Offense with verbiage and choreographed movement that is often the most difficult offensive scheme in football (don’t get this statement confused with the Rams play calling decisions which were criticized as “high school like”).

Here’s another example of seeing the correct opening. He misses the throw due to a compressed pocket, but the recognition was there.

Rams receivers also dropped their share of passes in critical moments last year. The Thomas drop in the first quarter of the Seahawks game shown above was one big-time example. Here’s Brian Quick doing the same on a good tight-window throw in the middle of the field.

Here’s an on-time throw that bounces off Kenny Britt’s hands in the red zone.

What isn’t mentioned enough is Goff’s pocket presence. He’s good at executing small movements to avoid pressure in a timely fashion, reset, and fire with accuracy. A lot of quarterbacks can move, but they can’t reset and fire accurately. This is where Wentz struggles more often than Goff.

Here’s another timely slide and throw on the move to his left for a first down. Goff often waited until the last moment to make his move in the pocket against interior pressure at Cal, and this is a positive against interior pressure.

While we’re seeing a lot of short throws this preseason, Goff displayed skill in the intermediate game repeatedly last year. Here’s a pinpoint throw after great recognition of the blitz and coverage behind it.

This year, Goff has a coach with a modern grasp of offenses, more receivers with a proven work ethic and greater skill, and a year of experience with West Coast Offensive principles. Are the odds against him? Yes. Are they against him because of last year’s stats? No, they are against him because politically, Goff’s coach isn’t tied to him, the team is still in rebuilding mode, and the NFL has a great deal of impatience with developing quarterbacks.

However, if Goff shows improvement, he has much better receivers in Sammy Watkins, Robert Woods, and Cooper Kupp, who could deliver excellent value this year. It also means that those getting their shovels ready for Todd Gurley might also be premature. The examples above reveal that Goff has a lot of the tools. The question is whether he has enough.

For the Rams, figuring out what they have in Jared Goff outweighs everything in 2017

VINCENT BONSIGNORE

link: http://www.ocregister.com/2017/09/07/bonsignore-for-the-rams-figuring-out-what-they-have-in-jared-goff-outweighs-everything-in-2017/

BLISHED: September 7, 2017 at 4:55 pm | UPDATED: September 7, 2017 at 5:02 pm
At some point Sunday night, after a full day of NFL games conclude and the leftover wings and brats are wrapped up tightly and tucked away in the refrigerator and the barbecue grills are scrubbed clean and neatly covered, a whole bunch of tired heads will hit a whole bunch of pillows across Los Angeles.

What happens next — whether sleep arrives rapidly and happily and satisfied for Rams fans, or it is prolonged, anxious and concerned — will rely heavily on how a certain second-year quarterback plays Sunday afternoon against the Indianapolis Colts.

It’s not like all the angst and optimism and worry and confidence and doubt and conviction about Jared Goff will be validated or invalidated.

It will take much more than the opening game of a new season to fairly arbitrate the varying degrees of credence or apprehension about Goff, the polarizing first overall pick in the 2016 draft whose disastrous rookie season was either the fault of the impossible situation the Rams put him in or damning evidence he was miscast as the future face of the franchise.
We likely won’t won’t be anointing him the next big thing or kicking him entirely to the curb based on one game, either.

A season opener at that.

But deep down in our football souls, a place where the lasting snapshots of the greats, the average and the busts among the hundreds of NFL quarterbacks that preceded Goff impartially reside, we’ll have a much better idea where all this is headed.

The direction of which will define the Rams’ second year back in Los Angeles and the immediate future that follows.

Goff, to his credit, seems eager to embrace the challenge. And it would be disingenuous to claim he hasn’t provided snippets of evidence he is much further along now than at any point last year.

Aside from an All-Pro caliber play by Chargers pass-rush demon Joey Bosa to strip sack Goff and force a 76-yard touchdown fumble recovery and one very lousy overthrow by Goff for an interception, the former Cal star was mostly effective during the preseason while completing 24 of 32 passes for 250 yards and a touchdown. Of the first six drives he presided over, he directed the Rams to scores on four of them, connecting on 75 percent of his passes.

Throughout OTAs and training camp, he looked much further along this year compared to last.

This isn’t the overwhelmed Goff we saw last preseason, the one who didn’t make the active roster for the season opener and then sat nine weeks before finally getting his chance to play. He looks, acts and, at least through most of the preseason, has played the part of a productive NFL quarterback.

“I feel confident compared to last year,” Goff said. “I think that obviously getting all the reps through the offseason has been huge and understanding what we’re trying to do and like I just kind of said, understanding so much more about the game and about what everyone’s intent is on the field. Ultimately, just comfortability and just being where I want to be mentally, physically, emotionally, everything.”

He needs to be.

There is an incredible amount riding on his performance.

Forget the Aaron Donald holdout.

Or the beginning of the new era of Rams football under first-year coach Sean McVay.

Set aside the Fight for L.A. slogan pinning the Rams against the Chargers, their new Los Angeles neighbors by way of San Diego. It’ll be years before the winner of that battle is truly calculated.

It’s not about wins and losses, per se, or attendance figures and television ratings.

The 2017 season is all about Jared Goff and whether he proves he’s the quarterback the Rams can confidently march into the future with or a miscalculation they need to move on from.

If that sounds hasty and harsh, well, that’s how it goes when it comes to the NFL and quarterbacks.

You’re in business when you’ve got a real one.

You’re lost with a pretender.

You are relevant with a very good to great one.

You’re just a faceless team in the crowd with just an OK one.

The Rams have been lost for years, sorting through one would-be permanent quarterback after another, and their relevancy as a bona fide NFL franchise, a team opponents fear and fans flock to, has steadily dwindled.

It was glaring problem in St. Louis, where they stumbled through 13 straight non-winning seasons before packing up and moving back to Los Angeles.

But it was regionally confined, given the market they played in.

The stage in Los Angeles offers no shade, no place to hide or retreat. You spin your wheels here, you might as well be pedaling backward off the side of a mountain. That’s no way to rekindle a romance in a new city, especially with the Chargers moving into town and vying for the attention and hearts and wallets from many of the same fans the Rams are wooing.

But until they get their long-term quarterback situation solved, that’s exactly what they’ll be doing.

Beginning at 1 p.m. Sunday, we’ll start getting a better idea if those wheels finally found some traction.

“I think anytime that you get guys in the games, that’s where you get a chance to really evaluate them,” McVay said. “I think we’ve been really pleased with what we’ve seen in practice – the pocket movement, the ability to work through progressions. The best test is when you can truly get tackled and I think in spurts, he’s showed some really good positive signs of going in the right direction with what he did in the preseason. ”

Everything the Rams did since last season was to ensure this year provides a fair representation of what they actually have in Goff. Not the finished product, necessarily, but frank, valid proof he’s their guy.

They fired defensive-minded coach Jeff Fisher and replaced him with McVay, a 31-year-old offensive prodigy who has surrounded himself with assistants heavy on offensive design and quarterback development experience.

They replaced Greg Robinson, the worst left tackle in the NFL, with Andrew Whitworth, one of the best.

Robert Woods, Sammy Watkins and Cooper Kupp were added at wide receiver, transforming one of the least dangerous groups in all of football into one opposing defenses now have to respect.

From coaching to personnel, you can make the case almost everything around Goff has been improved.

The bad coaching and even worse talent around Goff last year rendered judgment on him unfair. As bad as the numbers were – an 0-7 record, 112 of 205 passing with seven interceptions and five touchdowns and an incredible 26 sacks – it was much more the by-product of poor coaching and insufficient talent. In many ways, Goff was just a victim of circumstance.

But the Rams have removed that crutch, making this season a much more reasonable microscope from which to dissect Goff. Even he notices a major difference.

“I think as a whole we’ve really improved everywhere – not only offensively, but defensively, special teams, everywhere we’ve improved. I think I speak for a lot of people when I say we feel really good where we’re at.”

The question is, will a bunch of anxious Rams fans feel just as good when their heads hit the pillows Sunday night?

Jared Goff, NFL disruptor? Rams QB may be the blueprint for transition from spread

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/jared-goff-nfl-disruptor-rams-qb-may-be-the-blueprint-for-transition-from-spread/2017/09/15/e6380210-998d-11e7-82e4-f1076f6d6152_story.html?utm_term=.8ed13f654ec7

Tony Franklin happened to be in the Los Angeles area, on a recruiting trip, so he attended the first Los Angeles Rams practice Jared Goff had under new Coach Sean McVay. Franklin was Goff’s offensive coordinator at Cal, and he held two steadfast beliefs: His former pupil could thrive in the NFL if the league didn’t let him down, and the league had plenty of coaches capable of letting him down.

Franklin, now the offensive coordinator at Middle Tennessee State, felt relief as he watched McVay work. The practice moved at a rapid tempo. McVay focused less on a predetermined system than on actions Goff performed well. The prior season had been different, Franklin believed, and set up Goff for failure. Franklin left the practice convinced Goff would excel under his new coach.

“The big thing in the NFL is getting lucky with getting a coach that actually knows what they’re doing,” Franklin said. “He got fortunate they hired McVay.”

The Rams selected Goff with the first overall pick in hopes he could lift their franchise, both in a new city and a league bereft of quality quarterbacks. The future of the NFL may depend on the ability of evaluators and coaches to translate the skills of passers who, like Goff, played their whole lives in spread offenses, the dominant system in college and every level beneath the NFL. The league so far has flailed with mixed success in turning prolific spread passers into capable NFL quarterbacks. Goff will be another data point, and perhaps the best illustration yet of the role coaching plays.

In his rookie season under Coach Jeff Fisher, Goff averaged a paltry 5.3 yards per attempt, completed 55 percent of his passes and threw seven interceptions against five touchdowns. The Rams lost all seven of his starts, and many around the league doubted any chance at future success despite the fact he was just 22 years old.

Goff has played only one game under McVay, against a dreadful Colts team that may be the worst in the NFL. But the difference was drastic. Goff completed 21 of 29 passes for 306 yards and a touchdown without throwing an interception, finishing the week as the league’s third-highest rated quarterback.

“I think you see him get more and more comfortable, just like anyone else would,” McVay said. “It just might be a different philosophical approach. It’s really been about over the last handful of months, figuring out what he’s comfortable with and what fits our players.”

In recent years, NFL coaches and executives have lamented the difficulty in evaluating and training spread quarterbacks. The league has borrowed concepts from the spread, but two primary features — spacing of players and quarterback runs — can be smothered by fast, sophisticated NFL defenses.

Still, the success of the spread in college ensures it is not going away any time soon. NFL teams, then, do not need to find better quarterbacks. They need to find coaches who have creativity and a feel for what the next generation of quarterbacks can do well.

“When you look around the league and you see people, they constantly make excuses,” Franklin said. “It gets really old. ‘He played in this; he played in that.’ I think 99 percent of the time, they have no idea what they’re talking about, no clue. They talk about our offense and say, ‘He never went through a read progression.’ That’s all we do. That’s all Jared did from the time he got” to Cal.

Goff, having transitioned from the spread to running an NFL team, chafes at the idea that spread quarterbacks have to learn a completely different game. Learning how to take a snap from under center, for example, was a painless process. Dak Prescottcame from Mississippi State, where plays demanded he decipher only half the field, and led the Cowboys to 13 victories as a rookie.

“It can be a bit overblown,” Goff said. “The main thing that teams should understand is, if you approach it the right way, you can teach anyone anything. A lot of times, people don’t think of it that way. They try to fit something that doesn’t work. By no means was that the case with me, but you see it happen all the time.”

Redskins backup quarterback Colt McCoy, who played in the spread and has spent eight years in the NFL, was asked how NFL teams can better acclimate spread quarterbacks.

“Good coaches,” McCoy replied, shrugging.

Franklin pointed to the case of New England quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo, who played in the Baylor offensive system under Dino Babers at Eastern Illinois, “truly as far away from an NFL offense as it could be,” Franklin said.

“The guys that don’t do it are the guys that are going to die as dinosaurs,” Franklin said. Patriots Coach Bill Belichick “just goes and learns; that’s why he goes on to win every year. All these other guys just kind of switch jobs and continue to lose every year.”

[Remember when the future appeared so bright for Andrew Luck and the Colts?]

Last year under Fisher, Franklin said, Goff played in “a true, old-school, NFL-style offense. Everything is slow. There is no rhythm changes. Everything is about not losing a game rather than winning a game. Incredibly conservative.”

In Week 1, Franklin saw McVay use tempo to prevent the Colts from substituting and allow Goff to call plays at the line, based on what the defense showed. McVay employed play-action passes that simplified Goff’s decisions. He encouraged Goff to throw deep. Most of all, he designed an attack meant to emphasize Goff’s strengths rather than stifle his weaknesses.

“It seems to be there’s this group of people that sell the NFL where they want to think this brand they have is so much better, and the only people who can play in it are the most incredibly gifted, intelligent people, and the game is so complicated that unless you’re a genius, you can’t understand it,” Franklin said. “That’s the exact opposite of what I believe a teacher does.

“A teacher takes something that could be incredibly complex, and they try to make it simple to the brain of the student. That’s what we did. Jared and I have talked. The concepts they run are somewhat similar. They may call it something different. They may have a way of verbalizing it differently. It doesn’t mean one is better than another. They’re just a different way of saying the same thing.”

McVay, a charismatic and creative 31-year-old, may use Goff as an example of how to integrate spread quarterbacks into the NFL. But teams still will need to sift through what is applicable, and what is not, when drafting quarterbacks playing in systems designed to work against slower defenses, on fields with hashmarks that, crucially, make the wide side of the field more spacious.

“These offenses they run in college are so different than what’s actually ran in the NFL,” Redskins left tackle Trent Williamssaid. “You really can’t expect players who never even took a snap under center, who never took a seven-step drop, who never had to throw a ball into a tight window, never had a three- or four-read progression on a pass play, it’s hard for them to expect them to come in and do that at an elite level. I know it’s extremely hard on teams picking quarterbacks.”

NFL teams, though, have no choice but to adjust. They must improve at untangling which skills will translate. The Cowboys selected Prescott in the fourth round last year, in part, because offensive coordinator Scott Linehan was impressed with his aptitude and leadership when he coached him in Senior Bowl practice.

“What’s important as far as working that transition to the NFL is doing a great job with the evaluation of the person, to see how those skills would translate,” McVay said. “How do they process information? Are they able to make quick, good decision with the football?”

The speed of NFL defenders will prevent some spread concepts, such as offensive linemen spaced out further apart, from ever immigrating to the NFL.

——————-

“You give Aaron Donald a three-foot split and see how long he makes your day,” Williams said.

It also mitigates how much teams can subject their quarterback to contact.

“These college offenses that expose the quarterback to hits, when they step up a level, the pro game can’t change to the college game, because quarterbacks would get killed,” one NFL executive said. “Then that becomes a business decision as well.”

The NFL cannot fully mimic how college offenses operate, but they borrow enough concepts to maximize a spread quarterback’s talent. Goff has many more weeks to prove his 2017 debut wasn’t a fluke, but he and McVay may be providing the latest template for how to turn a college quarterback into an NFL success.

“They know what they’re doing,” Franklin said. “They know how to do it. They know how to play to his strengths. I think he’s going to be a really good football player, because he’s got a really good coaching staff.”