Super Bowl 53 was a complete dud, with only field goals on the board until late in the fourth quarter. The Los Angeles Rams were completely unable to move the football on the New England Patriots defense, and the Pats didn’t fare much better en route to a 13-3 win in the lowest scoring Super Bowl ever.
Rams quarterback Jared Goff struggled mightily in Super Bowl 53, going 19-for-38 for 229 yards and a crippling interception with less than five minutes to play and the Rams inching toward the red zone for the first time all game.
But once the dust settled and the unexpected was finalized, people started tearing into the performance of Rams quarterback Jared Goff. The third year quarterback had a strong season under center for the high-powered Rams offense, but in the biggest game of his life he looked more like a college freshman at his first house party. What I’m saying is he looked nervous, tried too hard, and he may have thrown up on himself sometime during the evening.
As football people took a better look at the film from Goff’s performance on Sunday, it only seemed to get worse. For The Win broke down some specific plays were Goff either completely missed open players or made the wrong read. There are a lot of them, and For The Win writer Steven Ruiz shared one on Twitter.
You know Jared Goff was bad last night. But he was actually worse than you probably realize. I used Next Gen Stats player tracking to show you just how awful he was… https://t.co/naIBkNFngG pic.twitter.com/TVDLLfc49D
— Steven Ruiz (@theStevenRuiz) February 4, 2019
The whole post made a pregame report on NFL Network about the Patriots’ game plan against Goff all the more ominous.
The #GoPats want Jared Goff to do WHAT during the #SuperBowl? Supposed to be a kid friendly show, guys (h/t @MikeGiardi). pic.twitter.com/77tpq0p2mF
— Sportsnaut (@Sportsnaut) February 3, 2019
Seriously, there was a lot to hate about Goff’s performance. The easiest place to start was his interception, which came right after Goff came up with one of his few good passes that unfortunately wasn’t brought down by Brandin Cooks.
WOW.@BumpNrunGilm0re PICKS OFF Jared Goff with 4:17 left in the game. @Patriots leading 10-3.
📺: #SBLIII on CBS pic.twitter.com/Yv2KXuTkaP
— NFL (@NFL) February 4, 2019
But there were other, more subtle things people noted that summed up how poorly Goff was playing.
Lmao, Robert Woods was calling out who had to come for him to be hot, because Goff is incapable of making pre-snap calls on his own pic.twitter.com/THYrcjymy1
— Steven Ruiz (@theStevenRuiz) February 4, 2019
Even halftime adjustments didn’t help.
https://twitter.com/JustinFreeman18/status/1092462984864124928
This one, in a game that saw one touchdown, was particularly brutal.
Jared Goff had a touchdown, WIDE OPEN to Cooks but waited too long.https://t.co/mq4IKMMaZq
— Dov Kleiman (@NFL_DovKleiman) February 4, 2019
Jared Goff couldn't get the ball to Brandin Cooks in time here.
I repeat: No TD here. pic.twitter.com/0BkmdXBtTE
— Henry McKenna (@henrycmckenna) February 4, 2019
Fans simply dismissing a game as “boring” because there isn’t a lot of scoring is something that happens in every sport. And yes, there was some great defense at work on both sides of the game on Sunday. But Goff was objectively bad in Super Bowl 53 which, given how the entire game played out, is more disappointing than anything.
