The California Cool Of Jared Goff

In the midst of a wild three-year career arc that has taken him from rookie bust to MVP candidate, the Rams quarterback has learned to enjoy the ride. How far can his surge lift LA?

- Tim Keown

NOT LONG AGO, the keepers of football’s sacred texts detected a tragic flaw. The college game was spreading out and speeding up. It had become too simple, too bloodless—and the repercussions could cripple the NFL. What they were witnessing was an insult to the thousands of men who sacrificed their bodies and brains on the game’s altar. A quarterback standing 15 feet behind the center, catching a snap and throwing the ball to a receiver before the defense could even react? This was an act of pure expedience, a shortcut in a sport that does not abide them. Who was left to teach a young quarterback to nudge up close to the center, put his hands in another man’s haunch and take a proper snap? A quarterback should be close enough to feel fear, and to smell a nose guard’s rancid breath, and the suggestion that these gimmicky offenses would work in the NFL—against grown-ass men, they thundered—was an affront to the legacies of every great American who ever took the time to teach a man the seven-step drop.

But one by one, the thundering old men were replaced by younger men who identified an opportunity within the perceived decay, and the sacred texts began to be rewritten. These new men, unburdened by the psychic lore of Joe Namath’s creaky knees or Joe Montana’s jigsaw-puzzle spine or Y.A. Tittle’s bleeding forehead, took the obvious skills of the spread quarterbacks and set them loose against NFL defenses.

And now what is this we have before us— fun? Yes, a league that can’t define a catch without seven pages of footnotes is being overrun by this most endangered concept. Fun destroys the myth that everything must be difficult and exhausting and earned. Fun puts the game’s inherent martiality at risk. Turns out you can make your way down the field faster, more efficiently and far more often by standing back there and finding the receiver most open.