Raise up your hand if you seen it coming. Following news from last night that Lions are quarterback Matthew Stafford would welcome a trade to the Rams, we now hear that Los Angeles is shopping around their seated signal caller. Jourdan Rodrigue of The Athletic reports that the Rams have had “exploratory talks with multiple teams” about a Jared Goff trade.
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From a financial standpoint, trading Goff is easier said than done. As Rodrigue explains that the Rams would be stuck with $ 22.2 million in dead money if they were to trade the former first choice. However, a transaction would be more palatable if it happened after June 1, as the Rams would be left with just $ 6.8 million in dead money (plus an additional $ 15.4 million in dead cap in 2022). As our own Sam Robinson noted last night, Goff’s release is also unrealistic. The guarantees in the quarterback’s $ 134 million four-year deal will run through 2022, and the organization won’t have a cinch for it until 2023. While Stafford has a base salary of only $ 9.5 million and $ 12.5 million over the next two years, Goff’s contract certainly complicates any possible transaction.
After earning Pro Bowl nodes in his second and junior seasons (including a 2018 campaign in which he helped lead the Rams to a Super Bowl loss), Goff has seemingly reached a plateau in the past two years. He threw 16 interceptions in his career in 2019, and his 20 passing touchdowns in 2020 were the lowest total since his rookie year (when he started just seven games). By comparison, Stafford has only thrown less than 20 touchdowns once since 2011, and that happened during a 2019 campaign where he put together 19 passing touchdowns in just eight games.
As Sam pointed out last night, Ram’s head coach Sean McVay and GM Les Snead recently made comments indicating Goff’s status is less than safe. Rodrigue also notes that there is a link between the Rams and Lions front offices; new Lions GM Brad Holmes previously served as the director of scouting for the Rams. That’s not to say that every Goff trade necessarily involves the lions; given Detroit’s clear desire to start over, it doesn’t seem like Goff would fit into a hypothetical deal between Stafford and Los Angeles. Yet the connection between the front offices is too clear to ignore.
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