Leading OFF
The Goff Club is accepting applications for membership
LOS ANGELES – The football cognoscenti spent much of the season on the banks of the Schuylkill River, loading up the Wentz Wagon.
With the NFC-leading Philadelphia Eagles and quarterback Carson Wentz idle last weekend, attention turned west to another budding bandwagon.
Los Angeles Rams quarterback Jared Goff, the second-year quarterback who was labeled a bust after starting his career 0-7 as a starter, was the reigning NFC Offensive Player of the Week.
Just in time, it seemed, for everyone to put in an application to join the Goff Club.
The occasion brought experts and analysts to a rare agreement. Peter King of Sports Illustrated used the season’s midpoint to predict the Rams would win the Super Bowl in February.
Football Outsiders had the Rams as the top-ranked team in its all-encompassing DVOA metric.
With their points per game average at parity, the current Rams were compared to the Greatest Show on Turf champions of the franchise’s St. Louis tenure.
Just eight games into the Sean McVay era, the hype threatened to bubble into the Rams football headquarters in Thousand Oaks, Calif., and carry it down Olsen Road.
Goff stoically summarized the hot-and-cold nature of NFL conventional wisdom in the week leading up to the Rams’ Nov. 12 game against the Houston Texans.
“In this league, it’s so week to week,” Goff said. “You’re good one week and then you’re bad another week. We were the worst team ever last year and now everyone loves us.”
For one half on the 12th, during its 33-7 win against Houston at the Coliseum, the Rams threatened to follow up the fireworks of the previous week’s rout of the New York Giants with a whimpering dud.
Los Angeles, the NFL’s No. 1 scoring offense, was kept out of the end zone by the Texans, mustering nine points on three Greg Zuerlein field goals.
“They continued to just stay resilient, mentally tough,” McVay said. “Defense played really well throughout the course of the game that kept us in it when we weren’t playing very well offensively.”
After a half of reminding the home crowd of last year’s punchless 4-12 team, the Rams exploded for three touchdowns in an eight-minute span, spurred by Goff’s 94-yard scoring strike to Robert Woods.
“It was beautiful up in the air,” center John Sullivan, “and (it was beautiful) to see Robert run right under it and get into the end zone.”
The play-action strike to Woods running free on a post pattern was the third-longest play in Rams history, and the franchise’s longest offensive play in 53 years, since Bucky Pope reeled in a 95-yard touchdown pass from Bill Munson against Green Bay on Dec. 13, 1964.
“It felt like all day, we needed a play to get us going,” Goff said. “That one did it.”
Goff finished with a careerhigh 355 yards passing and three touchdowns, completing 25 of 37 passes. He became the first quarterback in franchise history to throw for at least 300 yards, three touchdowns and no interceptions in consecutive games, according to Randall Liu of the NFL.
“I put him in some bad spots and I thought he just stayed to- gether,” McVay said.
Several times last week, McVay labeled his group a “connected” team. Which means all three phases, from the offense to the defense to the special teams, pull in the same direction during game day.
That was tested in Week 10, when the offense managed to muster only six first downs and 131 yards of total offense in the first half. But the sideline didn’t splinter.
“It wasn’t as much hooting and hollering as when things are going well, but, at the same time, what we always talk about is ‘Nobody blinks,’ ” Sullivan said. “We weren’t panicking. We were just playing football.
“Guys are trying to pick each other up. They’re encouraging each other. There’s no finger pointing. You don’t see people throwing their helmets. This is a connected, mature football team. We might be young, but guys have the right mindset about what it takes to win games.”
The Rams are now 7-2, sitting atop the NFC West and heading into a matchup with the 7-2 Minnesota Vikings, because all three phases are complementing one another, both during the week and on Sundays.
“Week in and week out, we’re trying to do what’s necessary to win,” Sullivan said.
It might be too early for the young Rams to really be Super Bowl favorites, but the Goff Club is open and actively taking memberships.
“This is a momentum league and we’re building some momentum right now,” Sullivan said. “The focus is just on going out this week, getting everybody healthy, preparing for Minnesota and keeping this thing rolling.”