Turf Show Times
Jared Goff revisited his Rams exit in Netflix’s ‘Quarterback’ trailer, but it may be time to move on.
We are more than five years removed from the Los Angeles Rams trading away quarterback Jared Goff to the Detroit Lions in exchange for Matthew Stafford. Goff has played just four fewer games with the Lions than he did with the Rams. Additionally, this will be his fifth season in Detroit which will match the number of seasons that he was in Los Angeles.
On Tuesday, the Netflix show ‘Quarterback’ will return for a second season and one of the quarterbacks featured in the season will be Goff. It shouldn’t be any surprise that one of the main storylines covered in the show will be how Goff was cast away in Los Angeles and revitalized his career in Detroit. That was certainly the case in one of the show’s trailers for season two.
While Goff being traded to the Lions is certainly an important chapter in Goff’s career, the question here is, after five years, how much longer will Goff and the media lean into the narrative that he was mistreated by the Rams? In the trailer, Goff says about the trade,
“A lot of people saw it as I was being cast away or I was being sent to my career to die and I think a lot of people in my former organization may have thought that as well.”
Goff is probably correct in that some probably saw it as he was being cast away and probably predicted that he would be a career backup within two years. It’s a credit to Goff that he has shown to be a quarterback worth building around for the Lions.
At the same time, the part where he says, “I think a lot of people in my former organization may have thought that as well,” is where the narrative gets murky. This seems to imply that Goff is saying that Sean McVay, Les Snead, and others in the Rams organization were wishing for him to fail.
Leaning too heavily into the mistreatment narrative runs the risk of misrepresenting what was, at its core, a football decision. Following the win over the Lions in 2021, McVay said afterwards,
“I thought he did a great job. He handled it well and made a couple big time throws. The first third down and nine where they caught us in a pressure and he delivers. I wasn’t surprised, he did a good job. You know, credit to him.”
It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that an athlete took being traded personally. However, from the Rams perspective, it was never personal. There are certainly some things that could have been handled better from McVay’s perspective. The Rams head coach has admitted as much. Back in 2022, McVay said,
“If I had it over again, what I would do is, before I had even gone to Cabo, when there was a possibility of, alright,...
