Are Jared Goff and Case Keenum that good, or was coach Jeff Fisher a QB killer?
There wasn’t a term for when a coach’s poor game plans undermined the skills of his quarterback. Until now …
After 22 seasons as an NFL head coach, five leading the Los Angeles Rams, Jeff Fisher and his staff were fired last season. Like many failed staffs, Fisher’s crew probably convinced themselves that they would have succeeded if they had only found a decent quarterback. By bubble-wrapping their egos in that theory, most coaches enjoy peace of mind for many years. But poor Fisher wasn’t even afforded a year of self-delusion because Jared Goff and Case Keenum became very good NFL quarterbacks almost immediately after being freed from his tutelage.
This season, Goff is 8-3 as the Rams’ starter under the guidance of 31-year-old rookie head coach Sean McVay. Goff was 0-7 a season ago. Keenum ended up in Minnesota with the Vikings, where he assumed the starting role after Sam Bradford, another former Fisher quarterback, got hurt. Keenum has gone 7-2 for his new team. He went 4-5 with Fisher in 2016. But their records aren’t the only evidence of improvement. With a Total QBR of 18.3 last season, rookie Goff was being called the worst quarterback of all time. So far this season, his QBR is 55.2. That places him right at the league average, which is promising for a player in his second season, his first as a Week 1 starter. At the beginning of last season, Goff was deemed unfit to even be a backup by Fisher and crew. He was third on the depth chart.
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The Vikings are Keenum’s third team in his five-year career. The first two seasons he spent in Houston, where his QBR was 48.6 and 39.3. Then he went to Fisher’s Rams for a couple of seasons, where he had the two lowest QBRs of his career (34.8 and 37.5).
To be fair to Fisher, he is a defensive-minded coach, so maybe the quarterback failures are not a result of his poor game plans. But hiring a complementary staff is one of the chief responsibilities of a head coach. And Fisher went through three offensive coordinators in his time with the Rams, so it doesn’t seem that he knows how to find the right guy. Goff and Keenum are surrounded by more talent than they had under Fisher, so that could account for some of the quarterbacks’ improvement. That explanation, though, isn’t strong enough to restore Fisher’s reputation. Only winning could do that, and no franchise is going to give the 59-year-old anti-quarterback whisperer a chance now. Which is probably for the best.