Report: Sean McVay decided to start John Wolford over Jared Goff early in the week
When the Rams made quarterback Jared Goff active for their wild-card matchup against the Seahawks, it made people wonder all over again: Who would be Sean McVay’s starting quarterback? Would it be Jared Goff, who suffered an injury to his right thumb in Week 16 against Seattle in Week 16, or would it be John Wolford, the former AAF starter who looked pretty solid against the Cardinals in his first NFL start in the Rams’ 18-7 Week 17 win?
McVay delayed the announcement as long as he could to try and make things more difficult for Seattle’s defense and coaching staff, but decided in the end that Wolford would be his guy. And as FOX Sports’ Tom Rinaldi reported right before the game kicked off, McVay actually made that call days ago.
“Typically, when teams meet for the third time in a season, there aren’t many mysteries,” Rinaldi said. “In this case, there was one: Who the starting quarterback would be for the Rams. Sean McVay made the decision early in the week, telling his team early in the week that it would be John Wolford. As a result, Wolford got the majority of the snaps through the week, as he’s had the full support of Jared Goff, who continues to recover from surgery on that throwing thumb.”
This week, Cam DaSilva and I wrote a piece detailing why Wolford would be the better choice whether Goff was completely healthy or not: Wolford has proven able to make throws Goff can’t make (we provide two specific examples), and he’s much more of a running threat. Both are big deals against a Seattle defense that has improved exponentially in the second half of the 2020 regular season. What this says about Goff’s future remains unclear, but it’s not a great look for a guy who got a $134 million contract extension in 2019, has underwhelmed for the most part ever since, and would be a $65.2 million dead cap hit were he to be released in 2021.
