Raise your hand if you saw this coming. Following last night’s news that the Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford would accept an exchange for the Rams, now we are hearing that Los Angeles is shopping around its incumbent caller. The Athletic’s Jourdan Rodrigue reports that the Rams had “exploratory conversations with several teams” about a Jared Goff trade.
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From a financial perspective, negotiating with Goff is easier said than done. Like Rodrigue explains, the Rams would be stuck with $ 22.2 million in dead money if they negotiated the first choice before. However, a negotiation would be more palatable if it occurred after June 1, as the Rams would be left with only $ 6.8 million in dead money (plus another $ 15.4 million in dead limit in 2022). As our own Sam Robinson pointed out last night, launching Goff is also unrealistic. The guarantees in the quarterback’s $ 134 million deal will run until 2022, and the organization won’t have an easy way out of that contract until 2023. Although Stafford has base salaries of just $ 9.5 million and $ 12.5 million over the next two years , Goff’s contract certainly complicates any potential trade.
After winning us at the Pro Bowl in his second and third year seasons (including a 2018 campaign in which he helped lead the Rams to a Super Bowl defeat), Goff has apparently reached a plateau in the past two years. He set his career record of 16 interceptions in 2019, and his 20 pass touchdowns in 2020 were the lowest total since his debut year (when he started just seven games). For comparison, Stafford has released less than 20 touchdowns just once since 2011, and that happened during a 2019 campaign, where he compiled 19 touchdowns with passes in just eight games.
As Sam noted last night, Rams’ head coach Sean McVay and GM Les Snead made comments recently indicating that Goff’s status is anything but secure. Rodrigue also notes that there is a connection between the Rams and Lions front offices; new Lions GM Brad Holmes previously served as Rams’ university scout director. Now, this is not to say that any Goff negotiations would necessarily involve Lions; considering Detroit’s apparent desire to start over, it does not appear that Goff would fit into any hypothetical business from Stafford to Los Angeles. Still, the connection between the front offices is too obvious to be ignored.
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