The Rams had a big decision to make this offseason, so they trusted the guy who nailed it the last time they weren’t sure which quarterback to go with.
The fact he signs the checks helps too.
According to Jarrett Bell of USA Today, Rams owner Stan Kroenke thought back to the team keeping Kurt Warner when it was time to make the call to trade up and select Jared Goff with this year’s first pick.
He said then-coach Dick Vermeil asked him his opinion on what seemed like a smaller decision, asking him how he came down on the Will Furrer-Warner battle for the third-string job.
“Dick Vermeil asked me my opinion on who the third quarterback should be,” Kroenke said. “I had a great relationship with Dick. Dick loved Will Furrer, the type of guy we’d all want to marry our daughter. He worked his tail off. Came out of Virginia Tech. I liked Will. Nobody knew anything about Kurt, but I watched the scrimmage, and this is the similarity with Goff: I told Dick, ‘OK, I’ve never played football, but you want my opinion? The kid from Northern Iowa can see. He’s got vision. It’s like a really good point guard. Some guys have it, some guys don’t. Whether it’s Arena Football that gave it to him or whatever, but he can see.’
“And Jared has that. It’s the vision thing.”
No one has questioned Kroenke’s business acumen, as he’s one of the wealthiest of the wealthy club of NFL owners. And he’s kept a very low profile when it comes to football decisions, preferring to stay in the shadows and rarely giving interviews.
But he insisted the move for Goff wasn’t about making a splash in his new Los Angeles home, but making the best football decision.
“I said it had to be about football. It can’t be about headlines,” Kroenke said. “Headlines don’t win football games. Maybe that makes you feel good in the spring, but it doesn’t win you anything. But the cool part is that [coach Jeff] Fisher said, ‘If I were still in Tennessee, I’d do it.’ And then we ran analytics and felt the compensation that we gave up was right in the ballpark, that we weren’t super over-paying. So we felt it was thought-out well and done for the right reasons. Fine with me.”
If Goff works out as well as Warner did for the Rams, Kroenke will have no problem with the investment. And he’ll also probably be asked more often about football decisions.
