Jared Goff had the best passing performance in Rams history

Waiting for the Los Angeles Rams to start training camp is always a drag. Nothing like the excitement that it brings every year but man it’s quite the long slog to get there. For anyone who read my last post, I’ve been on a baseball kick lately while anxiously awaiting camp.

I hope this won’t become an annual tradition as watching baseball is similar to watching paint dry. Actually that might’ve been golf I was thinking of. Either way, neither sport is particularly exciting. I got bored and here I am. However, some great discussion points in connection to America’s Pastime have been brought to light:

There are a few NFL equivalents of a perfect game such as neither offense punting in a game, a kicker not missing a kick or extra point, an offensive line that doesn’t give up a sack and a perfect QB passer rating. I remember watching a broadcast where Troy Aikman chuckled to his colleague Joe Buck and said, “I don’t know how someone can have a perfect passer rating if they have incompletions”. With all due respect Mr. Aikman, that’s acute insight from a guy who never had such a game in his career.

In Rams history, only two signal callers have had a perfect passer rating while playing for the team. The first is undoubtably Kurt Warner who had two such games in St. Louis. Warner’s first came in a 38-10 win over the Bengals in which he completed 17-of-21 passes for 310 yards and three touchdowns. His second occurred in a 57-31 blowout of the Chargers where he threw for nearly 400 yards and four scores.

The other QB to have a “perfect game” in the NFL was Jared Goff in 2018 against the Vikings. Out of any passing performance in team history, Goff’s Week 4 dismantling of Minnesota might’ve been the best of all. Yes, even topping Norm Van Brocklin’s 72-year-old NFL record established back in 1951.

Why did I pick Goff above all the others? Because for all the crap that he’s been given by the fanbase since his trade to Detroit, most everyone tends to forget his highs. Early in 2018, there was legitimate chatter that the California kid was an MVP candidate. We tend to remember only the lows of his career the most which is a shame considering Goff was indeed perfect that September night.

His spectacular game featured the forth-most passing yards by a Rams player. In fact, Warner barely cracks the top-10 in that category. Instead, Goff is the passer with two of the highest yardage outputs. His highest was 517 in a 2019 loss to the Bucs but we don’t need to dive any further into that game. Outside of the Matthew Stafford Super Bowl no look dart to Cooper Kupp, this matchup featured the single greatest pass in the Sean McVay era:

The most impressive fact about this game is that Goff was the first QB in league history to ever throw for 400 yards and five TDs on three days rest. Keeping with the baseball theme, that would be the equivalent of a pitcher coming off the bench in the World Series and dominating off a day or two of rest. Goff truly harnessed a firestorm on the Vikings and gave them one of their worst defensive outings ever.

Three years after his greatest game in LA, Goff was traded to the Lions. He never transformed into the franchise altering QB the front office pegged him to be when they selected him first overall. While things for the young gunslinger didn’t exactly follow the Hollywood script, Jared Goff had an unbelievable night that hasn’t been talked about enough. Think about that before you decide to trash him yet again.