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bleacherreport.com]
Case Keenum's blooper reel is turning into an entire half-hour episode of NFL Follies.
Keenum had the ball poked right out of his hands and into the air by Thomas Davis during a sack in Sunday's 13-10 Rams loss to the Panthers. Luckily, Benny Cunningham caught the fumble to prevent a disaster.
Keenum threw a simple rollout pass in the second quarter that was so far off-target that boos rained down from the Los Angeles Coliseum crowd. "Tyler Higbee was within the hemisphere," announcer Kevin Burkhardt quipped, trying to identify the intended receiver.
Keenum wound up to throw a pass in the fourth quarter, changed his mind for some reason, switched hands and shot-putted a left-handed throw to Benny-on-the-Spot Cunningham.
Maybe Keenum heard the crowd calling for Tim Tebow and wanted to give them a southpaw thrill. What he could not give them was a win. On a day when the Rams defense so dominated the Panthers that any competent quarterback would have engineered a win, the Rams lost.
How much more of Keenum are Rams fans, football lovers and sane human beings expected to take?
Now is not the time to start Goff. Last month was the time to start Goff. After the four-interception London catastrophe and bye week was the time to start Goff. Now is long, long past the time to start Goff.
There is no good football reason to keep Goff on the bench. Oh, there are plenty of plausible-sounding-but-bad football reasons. Emily Kaplan itemized them in a recent MMQB feature: He's learning footwork and terminology, learning how to read defenses, adjusting from an Air Raid college offense with fewer adjustments and variables than the offense the Rams hypothetically run, and so forth.
Piffle, poppycock and balderdash. These are the same things every rookie quarterback must learn. None of them are left moldering on the bench while a third-string-caliber veteran pretends to be a switch-pitcher.
Either Goff is spectacularly unready, even by the standards of rookie quarterbacks, or the Rams have no idea how to properly develop him. Goff did not look spectacularly unready leaving Cal, no one on the Rams coaching staff has developed a quarterback in this millennium, and Kaplan quotes Rams coaches stating that they won't change their offensive scheme (masterpiece that it is) to acclimate the rookie. So this mystery of whether Goff or Jeff Fisher's staff is the problem doesn't seem all that hard to solve.
The Rams need to start Goff immediately. If he really cannot outperform Keenum, then it's an indictment of the brain trust that traded up to acquire him, one that should cost all of them their jobs. That may be precisely why Goff isn't playing. Better to bury the kid on the bench and be thought a fool for one more year than stick him in the lineup and remove all doubt.
That's the kind of reasoning that has kept the Fisher Rams under .500 for years. The only thing funny about it is Keenum's highlight reel.
