Main thing for me with Goff is the question of whether his struggles were reasonable, given the play of the line.
On almost any given play the OL would spring a leak and put a rusher in his face just like it would put a tackler in Gurley's face on so many runs. When that happens over and over the human being starts to anticipate that and it will affect their play. Gurley seemed to mope and withdraw himself over it, and also was not nearly as aggressive at breaking runs upfield electing instead to string plays out and get to the sideline if he didn't think it was there. But Goff to my eye at least was different. He certainly pressed, yes. He pressed all season long and we saw more INTs, fumbles, and missed open targets as a result.
But in this character study, if you want to call it that, what I took away is that Goff still managed to keep his eyes downfield waiting on his wideouts. He didn't fundamentally change his attacking mindset which is really important. We were still in just about every game in large part IMO because our QB battled the way he did. There were so many plays where I wish he would have checked down because in this offense an on-time checkdown will often have a chance to bust a big play, but the fact that he didn't is a mix of good and bad. It's good that he's got the cajones to try to stay on course with what McVay wants to do which is stretch the field deep as well as laterally. But it's bad that he'd miss the open options for easy conversions, and all the other stuff like the fumbles and INTs.
Back to the first thing for me, though, is that his struggles were reasonable. Young QB + poor protections + poor run game generally = disaster. But 2019 was not a disaster. So moving forward it could be that 2019 will serve as a huge learning season for him and that he'll be a better QB for it.
