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theathletic.com]
ATLANTA — Jared Goff will eventually fall asleep come the wee hours of Monday morning. It will be difficult, of course. And not likely to be steady. That would have been the case regardless of how the Rams’ 24-year-old quarterback played in Super Bowl LIII. Whether it’s coming down from an incredible high or trying to cope with a devastating loss, the adenosine gets blocked and the beta receptors are activated and sleep becomes virtually impossible.
The battle he wages against himself as he tosses and turns will be a brutal tug of war between wanting to forget yet understanding the value of retention. The pain of being the primary culprit in the Rams’ devastating 13-3 loss to the New England Patriots on Sunday is guilt he’d desperately like to banish.
“It kills,” he said, afterward, softly. “It kills.”
But this loss is one he promises to learn from and be better off for it.
He’ll convince himself of that because he has to. It’s the only way he can process what happened and how he played and how he failed the Rams in a way that will turn the experience from the career-defining blemish it could certainly turn out to be into the sword he uses to slay future challenges.
But he has some major work ahead of him after completing just 19 of 38 passes for 229 yards and an interception while accumulating a pitiful 13.4 total quarterback rating and coming up short time after time after time when the Rams needed him to make a big play.
“I think we can take away so many different things as far as the experience and different situations and different approaches,” Goff said. “There are so many different things.”
But only one solution: Goff needs to grow from this loss and the role he played in it.
It needs to be the fuel he takes into the offseason and the motivation he taps into during OTAs and the inspiration he calls upon through training camp and beyond.
“I’m a guy who believes in adversity and what it can do to you,” said Rams left tackle Andrew Whitworth, a 37-year-old veteran and in many ways the conscience and soul of the Rams. “It’s just how you respond to it. For him, I think it would be important to respond in the right way, which knowing the kid, I know that he will. This will make him stronger.”
It has to, otherwise Sunday might end up being an albatross Goff carries around for the rest of his career instead of a necessary learning experience from which he can emerge even stronger.
Rams coach Sean McVay tried to shoulder the blame for what happened Sunday as much as possible — “I’m pretty numb right now, but definitely, I got outcoached,” he said — and clearly the Rams offensive line didn’t play especially well and Todd Gurley again pulled a disappearing act. All of those factors contributed to what happened Sunday.
But this loss falls squarely on the shoulders of Goff, who had chance after chance after chance to make the one big play the Rams needed to push them ahead of the Patriots.
He failed each time, either by missing wide open receivers, as he did on a regrettable throw to Brandin Cooks standing alone in the end zone that sailed too long and too high, or missing open targets streaking across the field by getting locked in too long on someone else or holding the ball too long to force a sack.
Or, the most damaging error of all, rushing a throw off his back foot in spite of having time to stand tall and deliver a throw to Cooks as he broke up the sideline. By throwing off balance and in a hurry rather than setting his feet and taking his time, he underthrew Cooks so badly that the ball fell into the waiting arms of Patriots cornerback Stephon Gilmore for a devastating fourth-quarter interception.
“That’s my fault. I can’t put us in that situation,” Goff said. “I knew they were bringing cover-zero blitz there, and I tried to hit Brandin on a go-ball, and Gilmore was too far off for me to make that decision. It was a bad decision by me, and I have to be better.”
The Rams were on the move at the time of the interception and trailing by just seven points. A touchdown makes it a tie game with just 4:17 left. The way the Rams defense was jamming Tom Brady and the Patriots it wasn’t out of the question they would have gotten Goff and the offense the ball back one more time with the chance to finally end a Patriots dynasty that’s nagged and tormented the NFL for two decades now.
Goff had that power in his hands Sunday, on that play and many others in an incredibly tight defensive battle that merely required him to deliver one or two big plays to tilt the game in the Rams’ direction.
He didn’t deliver, though. In fact, he did the complete opposite. In a game the Rams needed Goff to just be OK, he couldn’t even be adequate. And that is a bitterly disappointing pill for the Rams to swallow given this was a game that remained within reach until the final minutes.
Had you told the Rams before Sunday they would hold the Patriots to 13 points, they would have already announced plans for a parade in downtown Los Angeles to celebrate their Super Bowl championship. It would have been a dream scenario for a Rams offense capable of hanging 20 points midway through some quarters, let alone complete games.
But then, who could have foreseen the kind of game their Pro Bowl quarterback would endure?
The Patriots took up residence in Goff’s head Sunday in a way their coach, Bill Belichick, can often do to young quarterbacks. In Goff’s case, it just so happened to be on the biggest stage in American sports in front of a worldwide audience that has always been skeptical of the true value he brings to the Rams.
Belichick doesn’t do it devilishly or delightfully, which only adds to the anguish. There is nothing personal in the way he goes about destroying the confidence of young quarterbacks with switching up coverages and flipping the script on tendencies and forcing them into mental chess matches they are neither prepared for nor able to win.
It’s just business for Belichick, who had Goff and the Rams chasing ghosts almost from the get-go Sunday by playing more zone coverage than they have for weeks and then continually changing things up through the course of the game to the point Goff was thinking one thing was going on only to find out by the time the ball was snapped something completely different was happening.
Sometimes the pressure was coming from the inside. On other plays, he was being attacked from the outside. And when he did have time to throw he’d look ahead to zone coverages that blanketed the field horizontally and vertically, rather than the man defenses he’d seen on film the last two weeks.
“They’re able to mix it up well and keep us guessing,” Goff said. “Especially early on, they were able to (keep us) completely guessing.”
There were answers on the field for him to seize and take advantage of. But the harder he looked, the more blurry it all got. And maybe that was the most painful part of it all. There was a path available for him to carry the Rams to a win. But they were hidden and disguised and covered up so well, he wasn’t capable of locating them.
“You think at some point you’re going to come out of it, as we have all year, and we almost did,” Goff said. “We were moving the ball there well at times in the game, and just one play, just one play. We couldn’t get one play.”
They couldn’t, though. Mostly because Goff, on this night, simply wasn’t capable of it.
“It is the toughest loss I have ever had. It kills. It is terrible,” he said. “There are some good things you can take from it, but right now, there is nothing. I wish I would have played better. I wish we would have been better on offense and offensively as a whole. I wish I could have had a million plays back, but there is nothing you can do about it. You just have to learn and move forward.”
It’s imperative that happens.
Otherwise what happened on Sunday will be in vain.
(Photo: Angela Weiss / AFP/Getty Images)
