After Sean McVay talked about the trade that sent him to Detroit, Jared Goff acknowledged his former head coach’s comments on Tuesday.
The major storyline around Sunday’s game between the Detroit Lions and Los Angeles Rams is the quarterbacks who were traded for each other last offseason. Matthew Stafford is of course facing the Lions for the first time, and Jared Goff is headed back to Los Angeles to face the Rams.
On Monday, Rams head coach Sean McVay acknowledged how the trade was handled. More specifically, he expressed regret about the communication with Goff.
“Yes, I wish there was better, clearer communication,” McVay said Monday. “To say that it was perfectly handled on my end, I wouldn’t be totally accurate in that. I’ll never claim to be perfect, but I will try to learn from some things that I can do better, and I think that was one of them without a doubt.”
“You don’t want to catch guys off guard,” McVay said. “It came together a lot faster than anybody anticipated, but yeah, of course I think that any time that tough decisions and things like that where people are affected, you always want to be as understanding, as empathetic as possible…”
Goff said he was blindsided by the move. He said he didn’t hear from McVay from the end of the Rams’ season last year to the call about the trade that sent him to Detroit as part of the package for Stafford.
Jared Goff acknowledges, and kindly dismisses, McVay’s regret about trade
Goff made an appearance on 97.1 The Ticket’s the Karsch and Anderson Show Tuesday. He was asked if McVay’s regret about the trade meant anything to him.
“I mean, yeah, that’s good to hear, of course. That’s good to hear,” “But at the same time, it was the handled the way it was and there’s really not many hard feelings. It’s just the way the business is. We’ve had our talks obviously since the trade, back when it happened, but its alright. I mean, I appreciate him saying that, but it was handled the way it was.”
The Rams clearly upgraded under center by getting Stafford, and McVay shouldn’t have any regrets about the trade even if he felt the need to say so publicly. The contract extension the team gave Goff coming off a Super Bowl appearance is another story.
Sean McVay should not have regrets about how the trade of Jared Goff went down. McVay should have major regrets about giving Goff a massive contract in June 2019.
— ProFootballTalk (@ProFootballTalk) October 19, 2021
There’s no way Goff is going to go scorched-Earth by saying anything other than what he said about McVay’s expression of regret over how the trade was handled. But the punch line of Goff’s words on Tuesday, “it was handled the way it was” suggests it’s still a bit of a sore point. If he could have more coldly dismissed what McVay said without looking bad, maybe he would have done so.