Goff doesn't get a pass, but McVay really needs to look in the mirror and look hard.
He can be forgiven for the way the OL played in 2019 - he gambled we could replace Saffold and Sully, and lost. But after last season, what did they do? They pretty much continued on with the same names as the year before, including a guy named Blythe who turned into a weak link late in 2018 and has pretty much been a weak link most of the time since. Much of the performance of our OL has been rested on an old veteran, Whitworth, for whom we are lucky he hasn't retired. So the need for upgrades going into 2020 was pretty clear. And how did they handle it? The free-agency period was spent signing guys like Floyd and Robinson - valuable to our D no doubt, but they do nothing directly to help the OL and thus, the QB. And then came the draft - the focus was on another RB, WR, a few DBs, an edge rusher, a kicker who washed out ... and one OL very late in the draft who is there more for depth. So needing to upgrade the OL, no help was brought in through FA or the draft. Instead they just rolled the dice with pretty much the same personnel they had last year. While the results were a little better, they were hardly stellar. For one, the QB typically lacked time for longer pass patterns to develop, and our offense was more or less compressed to the point where defenders didn't have to defend as much of the field as they did in '17 and '18. And because of the OL, we often had to keep TE's in to block rather than going out for passes, taking another weapon out of our arsenal.
The failure to get upgrades on the OL going into this season is entirely on McVay and Snead.
On top of that, either through scheme or playcalling, McVay's offense has become stale. I have a friend who is a Titans fan, but whenever he watches a Rams game he tells me their playcalling is predictable, which many on this board have said as well. If my friend can see it and we can see it, you can be sure opposing defenses can see it. Many times we see McVay abandon the run when it's working. We never run out of the shotgun, making that a tell that a pass is coming for opposing defenses and thus making their job easier. And the redzone struggles have followed McVay from Washington.
We marvel as McVay's record with the Rams, but he and we also have to remember that Goff was the starter for all of those game save one.
McVay needs to fix himself and fix the OL first. If he tears up this team to get rid of Goff without doing those other things first, he is going to burn a lot of goodwill.
Hopefully, he's just trying to motivate Jared with his words the other day. But either way, he needs to do a ton of self-evaluation too. Without that self-evaluation, it won't matter who takes snaps for the Rams.
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