Shane Waldron excited to bring Gerald Everett along to Seahawks. https://t.co/JNaMSEFSlN

— ProFootballTalk (@ProFootballTalk) March 23, 2021

What went wrong with Jared Goff in L.A., and why new Lions QB can get right in Detroit

Dave Birkett, Detroit Free Press

https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/lions/2021/03/18/detroit-lions-jared-goff-trade-detroit-lions-sean-mcvay-what-went-wrong/4731209001/

Tony Franklin had a few things to get off his chest, so when he called Jared Goff in mid-January, after Los Angeles Rams coach Sean McVay started John Wolford over Goff in a playoff game then publicly cast Goff aside as quarterback in his postseason news conference, Franklin spent most of their hour on the phone talking.

Goff’s former offensive coordinator at Cal, Franklin was angry about how callous McVay had been with the quarterback who took the Rams to the Super Bowl just two years earlier.

McVay, Todd Gurley, Aaron Donald, everyone seemed to get credit for the Rams’ magical season in 2018. Everyone but Goff.

And now that the Rams had fallen on hard times — as if a 10-6 record and second-round playoff exit required some type of FEMA assistance — it was Goff who seemed to be shouldering the blame.

None of it sat well with Franklin, who was met mostly with confusion on the other end of the phone call.

“The thing that I reminded him of in that conversation was, is that what had made him unique and special wasn’t the fact that he had the best arm and it wasn’t the fact that he could outrun anybody,” Franklin said. “It was very simple in that he was a really hard-nosed, tough guy that played the game old-school, the way that it was supposed to be played, and that he was a really good teammate.

“And that regardless of what the Rams did — because I thought it was really unusual the way that they were kind of bashing him publicly. I had not seen that in the NFL to where they just kind of threw him under the bus and rolled back over him, burnt him with some rubber tires. I had not seen that. And I told him, I said, ‘You know, this is one of those things that you were made for. You play better angry.’”

Franklin went over some of Goff’s games at Cal and reminded him how he was at his best when he felt slighted, for instance, when he rallied the Bears from 21 points down for a 48-46 victory over Arizona State in the final regular season game of his college career.

And he told Goff, who signed a four-year extension with the Rams in September of 2019 that is due to start this fall, to brace for a change of scenery this offseason.

That proved prophetic a few days later, when the Detroit Lions traded Matthew Stafford to the Rams for Goff and three draft picks, a third-rounder this year and first-round choices in 2022-23. The trade is expected to be announced Thursday.

In a text message after the trade was consummated, Franklin told Goff that not only was the deal the best thing for him, but that Detroit was the perfect place to go; a place where a laid-back California kid could find his inner Marshall Mathers (“I’m a huge Eminem fan,” Franklin said) in a city that is starved for a winner.

“I felt like that he needed to be angry,” Franklin said. “And not angry every day, not mad at the world, but I think that the chip on his shoulder, that the fact that these people are saying that you’re not very good — they can say they didn’t say that, but the reality of it is the whole world, that’s what they were telling the entire football world is that this guy’s not that good and we just want to get rid of him. And so I wanted him to draw from that and so what I wanted to do was just remind him that in the times that I have coached him, he was really good when he reached inside and drew that part out of himself.”

Goff, who is expected to be introduced by video conference later this week, did not return phone calls for this story. But in a February interview with the Los Angeles Times, he said the trade was best for everyone involved.

“Ultimately, they wanted to go in a different direction,” Goff told the Times. “As the quarterback, as the guy that’s at arguably the most important position on the field, if you’re in a place that you’re not wanted and they want to move on from you, the feeling’s mutual.

“You don’t want to be in the wrong place. It became increasingly clear that was the case. (The trade) is something that I’m hopeful is going to be so good for my career.”

Ego trip

No one could have guessed this is how Goff’s Rams career would end: at 26 years old, with the second most regular season victories over the past four seasons (behind only Tom Brady), two months after returning from thumb surgery to lead L.A. to a road wild-card win over the division rival Seattle Seahawks.

Not when the Rams traded up to make him the first pick of the 2016 NFL draft (when new Lions general manager Brad Holmes was their director of college scouting). Not when Goff was going blow for blow with Patrick Mahomes in an epic Monday night game in 2018 — a game the Rams won, 54-51. And not when he signed that massive $134 million extension 18 months ago.

Back then, it seemed like Goff would be a Ram for life. Sure, his team was coming off a disappointing Super Bowl loss to the New England Patriots; the offense managed a measly three points.

But Goff was an ascending player who had just thrown for 4,600 yards and still was approaching the prime of his career.

The Rams, though, struggled in 2019, missing the playoffs with an offense that averaged eight fewer points per game than it had a season earlier.

Gurley’s knees were shot, and as defenses caught up to McVay’s offense, the young coach put more on his quarterback’s shoulders. Goff still threw for a bunch of yards that fall, topping 4,600 yards for the second straight season. But his interceptions ticked up, his completion percentage went down and the offense sputtered in late-season losses to the Pittsburgh Steelers, Baltimore Ravens and Dallas Cowboys.

Goff’s production tumbled again in 2020, and by the end of the season, McVay had lost enough faith in his quarterback that it became clear to people both in and outside the organization a change was coming.

“I think there was a four-game stretch (last season) where he had 10 turnovers and I think that’s where Sean McVay kind of threw his hands in the air and then, basically, if you were to go back and look at the articles, he kind of called Goff out and said, ‘Hey, our quarterback can’t turn over the football,’” said former NFL quarterback Jim Miller, now an analyst on SiriusXM NFL radio. “And if you go back even further, I think in a 39-game stretch, he had 32 turnovers in 39 games. So you can expect about a turnover a game. And Jared has to correct that.”

McVay spoke haltingly about Goff late in the season, even after Goff admirably popped his dislocated right thumb back in place to finish a game against the Seahawks.

Goff underwent surgery the next day, Wolford played the regular season finale, and McVay started Wolford in the Rams’ playoff win over Seattle, only to turn to Goff again after Wolford was injured on L.A.’s second series.

Asked after the season if Goff still was his starting quarterback, McVay offered a tepid, “He’s the quarterback right now.”

Goff told the Times the Rams never explained how or why soured on him, and that lack of communication is the biggest issue Franklin and others had with the dissolution of their marriage.

“The biggest egos in the world are in coaching,” Franklin said. “Every level you go up, the ego gets a little bit bigger. So you have a head coach and a general manager who were praised beyond belief for a few years. All these guys were the saviors. ‘Look what they’ve done. They’ve come in, they’ve done this, they’ve done that. Coach McVay is a genius. He can remember plays from when he was 12 years old. He knows every play call on second-and-7 since birth, and blah, blah, blah.’ And then all of a sudden he gets his butt handed to him in the Super Bowl by the real genius in (Bill) Belichick, and then the next couple years they’re still pretty good, but they’re not what they were and he’s not who he was.

“And so I think that when that happens, you got a decision to make and that is, either you adjust or you don’t. And the thing that confused me about the whole thing is like, it’s almost like that they didn’t even know who Jared was with the fact that you keep reading about, ‘Well, this is all McVay’s system. McVay has done this, McVay has done that.’ Well, the thing was is that they weren’t doing what Jared’s really good at, which is getting in the shotgun and letting him go through progressions and letting him throw the football around. He was under center, faking jet sweeps, play-action passes. …

“So me being an outsider looking in, this is never from a conversation with Jared, that’s the thing about it. He never spoke — not one time did he ever speak in a negative way towards Coach McVay or the ownership or anything else. (Goff) always took responsibility, he always said, ‘You know, I got to play better.’ So that’s the thing that is disheartening to me about how they handled it. Not him, he handled it like a grown ass man. To me, they handled it like a bunch of guys with egos that were tired of the press saying all of a sudden maybe they weren’t as smart as they thought they were.”

McVay told reporters last month he could have done more to help Goff and that blaming the Rams’ offensive struggles “exclusively on the quarterback” is an “unfair narrative.”

“There’s a lot of things that when I self-reflect, I certainly wish I was better for him in some instances and those are things that I think you have to acknowledge, move forward and make sure that you learn from every mistake that you make,” McVay said. “Certainly, I’m not going to run away from the things that I could have been better for him as a leader and as a coach. But there was a lot of really good things that occurred from ‘17 and on that I think we can eventually really have a much better appreciation for. We have had good conversations that were healthy and I think we were both able to both communicate openly and honestly with one another, but those details I’d prefer to keep between us.”

‘He can be fantastic’

Weeks after the trade, Goff was headed back to the lab to work with his personal quarterback coach, Adam Dedeaux of 3DQB.

Dedeaux said Goff, who was raised in the Bay Area — his father, Jerry, played professional baseball before settling into a career as a firefighter — and has spent his entire football career playing home games in California, is genuinely excited for a fresh start in Detroit.

“I don’t think his confidence is shaken at all,” Dedeaux said. “We talked immediately about an hour after the trade went down and he’s like, ‘I’m excited. I’m excited. This is great.’ This is going to be a fresh opportunity, a new opportunity to go do something that like, hey, I mean, think about it. He’s a California kid, he got drafted by the Rams. He’s never left. And I think there was a part of this like, ‘Hey, this is a whole new ballgame for me.’”

Goff’s offseason training program covers both the mental and physical sides of the game.

He and Dedeaux go over notes weekly during the season to identify trouble areas to target in spring — one point of emphasis this offseason is mobility — and Dedeaux said he encouraged Goff to talk to his old Rams teammates to find out where things went wrong in L.A.

“Failure is feedback,” Dedeaux said. “The more feedback we get, the more data points we have to draw from, the more opportunity we have to get better.”

This offseason, Goff also has a new playbook to learn, one the Lions have told him he will have input in and one he will try and digest with his new receivers, who he plans to bring to 3DQB’s California campus for workouts in the coming months.

The Lions have not committed to Goff beyond this season, with Holmes saying the team will consider quarterbacks with the No. 7 pick in the draft.

But Miller said he believes Goff can be more than a bridge quarterback for a franchise that made the postseason just three times in Stafford’s 12 seasons.

“I think you can build around him,” Miller said. “He’s already proven he can take a team to a Super Bowl. If you surround him with good talent, I think he can win a ton of games. But he’s still young in his growth. If he corrects that one issue that we just talked about, his turnovers, I think he can be fantastic.”

Former Rams defensive end Michael Brockers, who is set to be traded to the Lions on Wednesday, told TMZ that Stafford is a “level up” as a quarterback from Goff.

But Dedeaux, whose client list includes Stafford, Brady, Matt Ryan and Drew Brees, said Goff and Stafford are similar in many ways.

Both were No. 1 overall draft picks; the Lions took Stafford with the first pick of the 2009 draft. Both are revered for their toughness by teammates. And both are down-to-earth, reserved personalities off the field who do their best to avoid the limelight. Goff was known to show up to nonrevenue sporting events during his time at Cal and lived with some of his old high school friends in L.A.

“I’ve been with both of them for a couple of years now, and in terms of arm talent, yeah, Matt Stafford can do things that nobody in the league can do, if you ask me,” Dedeaux said. “But in terms of arm strength and ability to drive balls and put balls on the money, Jared throws as tight a spiral as anybody in the league. And when he’s right, you’re not going to see any drop off in terms of what Detroit fans have (been) accustomed to seeing with Matt. Jared’s going to be able to go out and light up teams just the way he did, and you’ll see. I know one of the things Matt, obviously he had 30-something come-from-behind victories. Jared, similarly, he can execute a two-minute drill as good as anybody, his urgency on the ball and the ability to succeed in the drop-back pass game, I think you’re going to see a lot of really positive things out of him that you’ve seen.”

While Goff’s play admittedly slipped the past two seasons, Dedeaux, like Franklin, said Goff should benefit from playing in more of a drop-back passing game in Detroit and that the new Lions quarterback is closer to the player who lit up the Chiefs for 413 yards in 2018 than the one who had struggled with turnovers last year.

“He’s excited to be in Detroit and cut it lose,” Dedeaux said. “I think his arm absolutely plays. He hasn’t lost one bit of ability in that way, and I think his confidence going into this offseason of just kind of retooling and working on a new offense, I mean, that’s going to be the big thing.

“I just think there’s another level of ownership for him to be able to walk into this situation, start fresh, take on a new playbook, work with new weapons. And I think it’s a huge opportunity for him.”

Highest pass-rush grade by season (among DL):

🔹2020 – Aaron Donald: 93.6
🔹2019 – Aaron Donald: 92.8
🔹2018 – Aaron Donald: 93.6
🔹2017 – Aaron Donald: 94.2
🔹2016 – Aaron Donald: 93.3
🔹2015 – Aaron Donald: 93.1 pic.twitter.com/OhWgUT9rtL

— PFF (@PFF) March 22, 2021

Albert Breer, from https://www.si.com/nfl/2021/03/22/mmqb-nfl-television-contracts-patriots-spend-carson-wentz-matthew-stafford

How the NFL’s New Television Contracts Position the League to Keep Growing

This family might have a younger kid consuming the sport on a Nickelodeon broadcast, a teenager only watching highlights on his phone, a mom keeping track of her office fantasy team through an app and a dad flipping over to a sports gambling show on a Megacast presentation. And then maybe grandpa sitting on the couch watching it the old-fashioned way—from start to finish on an over-the-air network.

How we get there over the next decade is unpredictable. When we get there is unpredictable. What it’ll look like after we get there is unpredictable, too.

But over the last couple months, the NFL made a rather handsome bet that we will get there. You can slice up the NFL’s 11-year, $113 billion set of media rights contracts that were announced last week a bunch of different ways—and we will in the column—but the overriding thing within their details isn’t hard to understand.

The NFL believes the world is going to keep changing.

These new deals allow the league to keep changing with it.

“We know how the market is changing, especially with young people and how they’re just on their phone or their iPad,” Patriots owner Robert Kraft said from his office on Friday. “I think that is the biggest difference in what we’ve done. And it’s interesting, if you look at it, your next big thing will be more interactivity and customization of the product that hadn’t been possible. ESPN has done a customized alternative viewing experience, which was really focused on sports betting. CBS used Nickelodeon to provide a youth-oriented game experience, which was, I don’t know if you saw that, but I watched it, I thought it was great.

“NBC pushed the Next Gen stats to really new levels and Fox has led the way in free-to-play ancillary games that attracted millions of casual fans. And then on Thursday, Amazon experimented with multiple alternative streams of the game, which included a Twitch-like EA Sports environment for those fans who love esports. … Building in these alternatives for the future, it’s pretty cool that we’re able to do this.”

Now, like a lot of you, I’m cool with how it is now.

But I also know my kids might not be. And that’s why these deals are the way they are.

The world of media has never evolved or changed faster than it has over the last 20 years and, with these contracts, the NFL’s telling you to buckle up, because they’re planning to be a part of accelerating what’s already changed the way most people watch games.

Kraft used to own the CBS affiliate in Boston, WHDH, so when he bought the Patriots in 1994, commissioner Paul Tagliabue asked him to join the league’s broadcast committee. At the time, the NFL had just done the groundbreaking set of contracts that brought Fox into the fold—a sea-change development at the time—and those had a total windfall of $4.4 billion over four years.

Which means that over 28 years, the value of the NFL on TV has increased tenfold.

“When I started in the role, it was pretty simple. We just conducted an auction for the fixed packages for the two conferences, and Sunday and Monday [nights],” said Kraft, who now chairs the committee. “And over the last decade and a half, it’s become a much more detailed, customized project, so that we’re looking at each game window, and not just how it is good for us, but how we’re presenting it to the changing tastes of our fans.”

The meat and potatoes of the new deal reflects that. Each legacy network is connected to a streaming service in the deal—Disney to ESPN+, NBC to Peacock, CBS to Paramount+ and Fox to Tubi—and those streaming services will be able to broadcast games, and in some cases do so exclusively (ESPN will have the option to put an international game on ESPN+). Also, as part of this, for the first time in nearly two decades, ABC will get back in the Super Bowl rotation, something Disney had been looking for.

Then, there’s Jeff Bezos’s behemoth, Amazon Prime, entering a room that’s pretty much had the same cast of characters, save for that 1993 addition of Fox, since the NFL first went on television, with Prime becoming the initial streaming-only partner to land an exclusive-rights deal (Thursday Night football).

So that’s the black-and-white, and there is, to be sure, a lot of grey area in the contracts. The NFL held back its gambling rights, because it’s trying to be judicious with those. There are contingencies baked into the deals that’ll allow for change as they go. And for obvious reasons, all of that’s by design—creating the sort of malleability the NFL’s giving itself with the games themselves (with the added ability to flex games to Monday night).

“It’s about being additive in those distribution models,” said Hans Schroeder, COO for NFL Media. “The one thing we know is the world’s going to continue to change. It’s gonna continue to evolve. For the fan and consumer that’s a great opportunity. For a content owner, we think it’s really exciting. And I look at a partnership like Disney and what they’ve done, and how quickly they’ve pivoted and grown their business. …

“[ESPN and ABC] are still really big, really broad, really scaled networks, but look at what they’ve done to add new models, what they’ve done with ESPN+, Disney+ has been incredible. For us, in the near-to-medium term, it’s about not being an either/or, but finding ways to add distribution.”

With that in mind, and after I dug around a little the last couple days, here are a bunch of elements that’ll change (or be added) under the new contracts that I figured would matter to all of you who watch the games at home.

• More Monday night doubleheaders are coming, though they can’t quite be called doubleheaders. There will likely be staggered starts to accommodate ABC’s primetime window (likely at 8 p.m. ET). I’m told the contract calls for three of them each season, including the traditional pair of Monday nighters in Week 1. ESPN will get 17 Monday night games, and ABC will broadcast the three additional ones on the nights there are two games.

• There will also be two games on the Saturday of Week 18, ABC will have them, and those games will be flexed in to ensure solid, relevant matchups get into those windows, which will give ABC a total of five regular season games.

• Amazon’s contract was negotiated to start in 2023, but I’m told there have already been talks to move that up year with Fox having signaled it’d be O.K. getting out of the TNF package a year early. So there’s a real possibility Amazon got TNF exclusively starting in 2022.

• The league also has the option to give Amazon a “Black Friday” game—probably some pretty good tie-ins there for them—since Amazon won’t get the Thanksgiving night game that traditionally goes to NBC.

• ESPN will also now get not just a wild-card round game, but a divisional round game as well, and Amazon can earn a wild-card game if it hits certain ratings markers over a period of years, which is a way of the NFL ensuring the audience is coming with it to Prime before a postseason matchup goes there.

• The NFL has maintained a level of flexibility here, too, with an out after seven years (after the 2029 season) in the deal.

The upshot of all this, again, goes back to Schroeder’s word: additive. More games, more screens, more ways to watch the NFL. “It builds on a very wide and broad distribution model that’s been really good to us over a long period of time with broadcast television,” he said. “Across all our partners, they’re adding meaningful digital reach and distribution on top of that.”

So all of this should be interesting on a macro level. And Kraft and Schroeder made a few other points on more specific pieces of this that I thought were worth sharing here.

The future of sports gambling. We all know it’s coming, and the NFL—not far separated from a time in which point spreads were the equivalent of four-letter words on the air—is readying to monetize it. Which will, of course, likely wind up being incorporated into the way the game is presented on television.

But both Kraft and Schroeder emphasized the league needs to make sure it’s done right.

“We’re planning because it’s going to come,” Kraft said. “There’s over 20 states that have legalized gaming and we’d like that to be maximized. But it’ll help so much [for that to continue], first of all, as we all know there’s a big illegal market going on. So why shouldn’t the states take advantage and generate revenue? I think the governor of New Hampshire loves Massachusetts residents because they come up to do their gaming across the border, generating terrific revenue. So eventually it will happen everywhere.

“But I think what it means, especially for younger people, for the interactivity [in game presentation], someone can post some modest amount of money up front and, the first play, is Cam Newton gonna throw or run? Who’s going to catch the first ball? … And then, of course, fantasy football and with the expansion of that, how people view that. We have to be creative but tasteful. And I think that’s what’s important.”

That interactivity is another big key. Kraft owns an esports team in the Overwatch League, so he’s keenly aware of how the younger generation isn’t so content to plop down on the couch and just … watch. So, as he sees it, adding to what people can do while taking in the games is another way the NFL can capitalize (in this case, the upcoming digital deals figure to be an important element).

“My grandkids are pretty much on their phones all the time, they do everything that way,” said Kraft. “The world of TikTok can be consuming. We just have to be hip to that and be able to adjust and make our product viable in the change. Part of it is social media and the access of our players to it. … Look how many followers we have between Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, it’s how we get our messaging out, it’s how we adapt to this new world.

“You’ll see in the next five to seven years how your kids’ tastes evolve in how they consume what they consume, and how people generally will. I think interactivity and gaming coming in with people under 45, they’re always doing something while they’re watching or doing whatever they do. And I think that we will give certain interactivity and gaming alternatives in the future, which should just help to keep our audience.”

The Monday Night flex. Schroder gave me an interesting fact—only 2.5 games per year have been flexed into Sunday night, which he says is a credit to the job Howard Katz and Mike North have done putting the schedule together. But the truth is, flexing a game within a day is not the same as flexing it to a different day. And the league knows that, and it’s part of the reason why it took a while to come around on allowing Monday flexes.

That said, they have experimented some with the late-season Saturday packages. And that’s given them confidence it’ll be manageable.

“This is just more of an evolution,” Schroder said. “A lot of credit goes to the commissioner, a lot of credit goes to Robert as the chair of our media committee, and the work they did with the work we did up front, well in advance of when we even got in the deal cycle, to think about how to evolve our deals in a way that’s better for our fans, better for our partners and better for the league. The commissioner and Robert were particularly focused on taking a longer-term view, pushing us to think about the right model longer term for us.

“And as we thought about that, there was an openness and a recognition that taking an element like flexing Monday night is an opportunity to create that win-win-win for our fans, for our partner, in this case Disney, and then for us, too, making sure the best games every week are getting the best exposure.”

In a lot of ways, this deal reflects one principle that has marked the commissionership of Roger Goodell, who was originally earmarked for the job because of how creative he always has been in generating revenue. Goodell’s focused on growing the league out (adding inventory) with little room left to grow up (with the domestic audience), and you can see that with the return to L.A., London and other international markets, the 17th game and expanded playoffs.

It also reflects Kraft’s vision for the NFL to stay ahead of where media’s going, something that was happening just as he joined the league, with Fox, and now is happening again, with Amazon.

So the two guys who led the deal most certainly have their fingerprints on it, as do league office folks like Schroeder, Brian Rolapp, Kevin LaForce, Will Deng, Janet Nova and Lee Goldsmith, who were in the trenches over the last few months getting a deal in place.

This was not all easy. But in the end, the NFL was able to land the plane with two years left on the existing deals, and plenty of time to turn the focus to ancillary elements like the digital contracts and the future of Sunday Ticket (DirecTV has two years left).

“I’m really happy,” said Kraft. “We worked very hard to have all of the deals land at the same time and come in at the same time. It was really hard to do that. And you think of five major companies. And I’m really happy we were able to keep our four traditional partners and each of them have a package that they deemed to be the most important content to them. And then bringing Amazon in with all its entrepreneurial ways. And they understand.

“A lot of these tech companies, they’ve grown so fast and gotten so much power sometimes, I’m not sure they respect some of the traditional ways of operating. And I think in this case Amazon really sees this as a great opportunity for them and a way for them to be out front and ahead of everyone, the way they’ve been in so many other ways. So I guess for me, I’m proudest that we could keep everyone in and add Amazon.”

And, in the process, give the rest of us a whole lot of football to look forward to.

While I had Kraft on the line, I had to ask about what Bill Belichick and his football operation had just pulled off: committing more than $130 million guaranteed to eight new players coming in (Matthew Judon, Jonnu Smith, Hunter Henry, Nelson Agholor, Jalen Mills, Davon Godchaux, Henry Anderson and Kendrick Bourne). And Kraft confirmed to me that he took in the same way a lot of people on the outside did.

“It was very exciting,” Kraft said. “Look, we want to win. We’re spoiled. We got used to winning all the time. And that’s our objective. It’s a very competitive sport, it’s all geared to having every team be 8–8 over a long balance of time, the way the draft is, the way we all have a salary cap. This was a unique year in the sense that the cap came down, and because we had s

from https://lionswire.usatoday.com/2021/03/21/brad-holmes-lions-matthew-stafford-trade-offers-rams/

In his press conference on Friday introducing Goff to the Detroit media, Holmes let it be known he had multiple strong offers for Stafford. But in the end, he was drawn to getting Goff as part of the return.

There was quite a number of teams, not to say anyone specifically, but quite a number of teams that had all aggressive offers,” Holmes said. “So, when we started discussions with the Rams and with (GM) Les (Snead), obviously, that’s when Jared (Goff) came into play. I did think that out of all the aggressive offers, and competitive offers that we were weighing, that to be able to acquire a quarterback at the status level of what Jared has accomplished, I thought that was very, very intriguing from a compensation standpoint.”