Rams quarterback Jared Goff didn’t enjoy immediate success after being the first overall pick in last year’s draft as he sat for the first half of the season and then turned the ball over nine times while piloting the team in seven straight losses to end the season.
That helped pave the way for the firing of Jeff Fisher and the arrival of Sean McVay as the team’s new head coach. McVay will be installing a new offense with the help of quarterbacks coach Greg Olson, who said last week that nothing he saw from last season left him feeling like Goff would struggle to live up to expectations in the NFL.
Olson said Goff has a “really high” ceiling and noted Goff’s “tremendous arm talent” when discussing the reasons for that opinion.
“That’s the start, in my opinion,” Olson said, via ESPN.com. “When you look at evaluating the position, it’s, ‘What kind of arm talent does that player have?’ Certainly a very intelligent player when you look at his test scores and what he was able to do as a student. I just think there’s a lot of intangibles that we’ve all heard about him growing up, from high school through college and the NFL. Tremendous work ethic. So, there’s a lot of things there.”
The failure to develop a consistently effective offense held the Rams back throughout Fisher’s time as the head coach. Hiring McVay was a step to remedy that, but the effort isn’t likely to bear much fruit if Goff isn’t able to take a big step forward.