Jared Goff is holding the Rams back

The Los Angeles Rams lost their first game of the 2019 season, courtesy of four turnovers from Jared Goff.

Although Jared Goff nearly flipped the script for the Los Angeles Rams, he was the one who put his team in an early hole by throwing three interceptions. These were turnovers that the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ otherwise hapless defense, which was torched by Daniel Jones in his NFL debut, accepted gladly. And the offense took advantage of them, with Jameis Winston hooking up touchdowns to star receiver Chris Godwin.

The Rams were down 21-0 at one point in the first half before roaring back, as Sean McVay schemed up a perfect game plan to cook the Buccaneers burnable secondary. Goff managed to rack up 517 yards and help the Rams put 40 points on the board — seven of which were courtesy of Marcus Peters’ pick six — but they were the emptiest yards imaginable.

Goff held the Rams back in this game. There’s no way around that. He averaged 7.6 yards per attempt in the same game in which Winston averaged 9.4, meaning he never really put the Rams in a position to keep up with the Bucs. Cooper Kupp and Robert Woods each had massive games for the Rams, but Goff failed to use Brandin Cooks’s prodigious talent. And Kupp didn’t get going until later in the game.

While Goff admirably nearly pulled his team out of a hole, the game was only close in the end because of Peters’ pick six. Yes, the secondary deserves to shoulder some blame after falling back to earth from their Week 3 performance against Baker Mayfield and the Cleveland Browns, but Goff is the one getting paid $110 million in guaranteed money to win these shootouts.

It is unacceptable for Goff to throw three interceptions, look completely lost for an entire half and miss easy throws into the end zone to wide open pass-catchers.

A lot of these mistakes were the same ones Goff made in the Super Bowl loss to the New Englnad Patriots, and the narrative that Bill Belichick exposed Goff’s weaknesses in McVay’s otherwise perfectly-tailored offense will continue to persist.

Goff was awful against Cleveland, throwing two interceptions with an average of 7.1 yards per attempt. He was equally poor in Week 1 at Carolina, too, with 4.8 yards per pass attempt and under 200 yards with one touchdown and one pick.

So far this season, Goff has five touchdowns and six interceptions, yet the Rams are still 3-1 and came into this game undefeated, before Goff threw the entire contest away in the first half against his easiest defensive “test” of 2019.

Goff has talent, and the Rams bet on it when they gave him nine figures in guarantees to set the market at quarterback. The early returns have been poor, and it seems like Goff is preventing the Rams offense from hitting the next level with his poor decision-making and average physical tools. Goff is the kind of quarterback who needs to be nearly perfect with his accuracy and decisions, and he stands to reap huge rewards with talented skill position players and one of the league’s best head coaches on his side.

When he fails, his deficiencies are there for the whole NFL world to see — and that includes the defenses who know that there are turnovers to be had against the Rams offense. If Goff is worth $110 million in guarantees, that means the Rams see him as irreplaceable; they couldn’t feasibly find another quarterback to put up his numbers from 2018 in this offense. But now that the flaws have been exposed and the turnovers are coming, it seems as if Goff is actually capping the potential of the Cooks/Kupp/Woods trio instead of being the orchestrator of McVay’s offense’s success.

He needs to turn things around quickly. Otherwise the Rams could start to falter in an NFC West that now has two other legitimate contenders in the Seattle Seahawks and San Francisco 49ers. If he doesn’t, the nine-figure quarterback could be the worst player at his position in this increasingly competitive division.

Goff helped lead the Rams to the Super Bowl last season, but he’ll need to show the resilience to adjust and the intelligence to approve. Because in 2019, the pressure is on Goff in an entirely new high. Failure to step up his game will lead to defenses circling Goff as the Achilles’ heel in the Rams’ formerly unbreakable offense.