end of the season assessment articles on Goff

i’m really liking what he has to say. i like the body language.

i hope to hell a guy like shanahan sees that potential and is burning for a chance to coach this team. i want this guy to succeed. he’s tough. he’s the son of a major league catcher and fireman. he’s gotta be tough.

and i hope he takes this experience, and like he says, uses it to obsessively prepare himself for next season.

Though Jared Goff had a half-season as a starter, any kind of assessment is incomplete

By VINCENT BONSIGNORE

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/goff-740026-rams-season.html

LOS ANGELES – One by one, Jared Goff made his way over to his teammates in the Rams locker room Sunday night.

While the sting of the season-ending loss to the Arizona Cardinals hung thinly in the air, the much heavier presence was the stench from the just concluded 4-12 season that turned their triumphant return to Los Angeles into an embarrassment, got their head coach fired and will likely result in sweeping changes from the football personnel department all the way to the locker room.

It was an unmitigated on-field disaster from beginning to end, with Goff, the would-be future face of the franchise, violently getting flung from one end of the field to the other over the last eight weeks.

For nothing, really.

The last two months told us very little about the Rams rookie quarterback.

We’re as unsure today as we were eight months ago whether he’s the franchise quarterback they so desperately need or someone they reached incredibly too high on by trading six picks to acquire at the top of last April’s draft.

Not his fault in the least, either. Goff may or may not end up being a franchise quarterback, but it’s unfair to judge him one way or another playing behind an offensive line as bad as any in the league and with wide receivers who strike no fear in opposing defenses.

Goff got sacked seven more times Sunday, bringing his season total to an absurdly high 26 over seven games. And that doesn’t even count all the times he got slammed into and hammered into the ground after getting rid of the football.

“He probably got hit more than me, actually,” running back Todd Gurley said.

Considering the circumstances, the lack of help and the downright awful infrastructure around him, it’s impossible to judge Goff or put any of the Rams problems on him.

The only fair thing is to give him an incomplete.

Which makes the last two months almost a waste.

Or is it?

See, as Goff made his way around the Rams locker room Sunday, his message to teammates was clear.

Don’t ever forget how you feel right now. Don’t dismiss this season. Don’t write it off. Tuck it away some place deep in your soul or psyche if you must.

But don’t ever forget it.

“Just remember what this feels like,” Goff said. “It’s going to drive you through the offseason. It’s going to drive you into next season. It might even carry with you the rest of your life.”

It was Goff emerging as a leader.

And it’s a subject he is well-versed in, having gone through an eerily similar situation four years ago as a true freshman at Cal.

The Golden Bears were as bad then as the Rams are now, struggling through a 1-11 season while their quarterback got beaten to the pulp.

“It’s pretty identical,” Goff said Sunday.

But what could have been a wasted year too easily swept under a rug became the open wound Goff and his teammates healed and grew from. And it was the impetus for change in the program.

“The best part about it was that, we weeded out the people we needed to weed out,” Goff remembers. “We changed the culture in the building.”

By Goff’s junior year, Cal won eight games and advanced to a bowl game.

“That’s kind of what I expect here as well.” Goff said.

The weeding out process for the Rams began three weeks ago when they fired Coach Jeff Fisher. Soon a new coach will arrive, maybe even a new general manager.

And in the coming months, the Rams locker room will likely undergo a dramatic overhaul.

Or, as cornerback Trumaine Johnson put it: “You bring a new coach in, he can wipe out everybody.”

It’s for the best.

And it was clear in the Rams locker room Sunday that everyone is bracing for it.

“We need to do some things,” Goff conceded. “We need to get the culture changed. With that comes higher standards and better players and more talent.”

That wasn’t meant to be a slight at anyone in particular. It’s just the nature of winning only four games and the inevitable changes that results from it.

The Rams have been meddling about for awhile now, and while Fisher’s teams weren’t nearly as bad as the ones that preceded him, they never advanced beyond the point of mediocrity and this season they face-planted into downright terrible.

The offense never grew, done in by a lack of imagination and bad personnel decisions. And while Fisher was appreciated as a players’ coach, the lack of discipline was apparent in the frequency with which the Rams were penalized, dropped passes and committed mental errors.

“We just … I don’t want to say the wrong thing, we just need to really have somebody that can motivate us, not that Jeff Fisher didn’t, but we just need somebody to motivate us, get on our butts when we mess up,” tight end Lance Kendricks said. “Whether it’s each other or the coaches, whoever it is, we have to be on each other. Obviously things that happen in practice, they carry over.”

In the absence of that new voice, Goff took the reins Sunday by going from player to player with words of encouragement or to shore up off-season training programs.

“As a quarterback of this team and a leader of the team it’s big, especially going through a little bit of a change and a shift,” he said. “But I know I won’t have to do it all on my own. I know there’s guys in there that think the same way I do and understand that things need to be changed and the culture needs to be changed and a million other things have to be changed and I don’t have to do it by myself because those guys are in there.”

The seven games Goff started told us little about him as a player. That’s not his fault. He was the victim of circumstance.

But he’s determined to make sure the experience wasn’t a waste. For himself, and the future of the franchise he’s being entrusted with.