Gruden's words to Goff ring true

Link: http://www.espn.com/blog/los-angeles-rams/post/_/id/32420/jon-grudens-words-to-rams-qb-jared-goff-ring-true

Jon Gruden’s words to Rams QB Jared Goff ring true

THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. — There is a chance, though it still appears very slight, that Jon Gruden will be the next coach of the Los Angeles Rams.

The team’s most important player already has some history with him.

Rookie quarterback Jared Goff sat down for Gruden’s “QB Camp” leading up to this year’s draft, which began with the Rams taking him first overall. Goff said they spent three to four hours together, though only about a three-minute clip lives online. The focus of the video that remains for public consumption revolves around Goff’s freshman year at Cal. He was 18, the first true freshman quarterback to start a season opener in Cal’s history, and his team was awful. They finished 1-11, and Goff told Gruden it was “the hardest thing I’ve ever had to go through.”

“If there’s one thing I want you to write down today,” Gruden told Goff on the show, “it’s this right here: 1-11. I want you to keep that with you forever. I think it’s going to push you through some of the dark times. Somebody’s going to draft you early, and you know why they’re picking early? Because they’re probably 1-11. They’re probably going through a similar-type situation that you were in at Cal. They might not win the Super Bowl the next year. It might not be the second year. But it’s going to take somebody that has been through it that can lead a team out of the darkness.”

Those words ring truer than ever now.

The Rams — a team that had to move up 14 spots to select Goff, which means they weren’t necessarily in a rebuilding phase — had far greater expectations for their first season back in Los Angeles. But here they are. They have lost nine of their last 10 games, the last four of them by lopsided scores, and they have fired their longtime head coach, Jeff Fisher. They’re 4-10 now, playing out these final two games and facing an uncertain future.

Goff is winless in his first five starts and has posted a dreadful 24.6 Total QBR in that time, dead last in the NFL from Week 11 to 15.

But he has persevered before. His college coach, Sonny Dykes, recently recalled what Goff went through as a freshman and raved about how he “never blinked” in the midst of constant struggle. Dykes, speaking days before Goff’s NFL debut, “learned that he was incredibly tough physically, incredibly tough mentally” during that 1-11 season in 2013.

Goff still thinks about what Gruden told him about that.

“I think about it all the time, just as far as what we’re going through and what I’ve been through in the past,” Goff said after Thursday’s practice, his first since being cleared under the NFL’s concussion protocol. “It correlates, but it’s all different. We’re in a different situation, and I think our team right now is much better than my freshman team at Cal was. So I think that we have a good chance to turn this thing around here. I think it’s going to be just fine.”