He had just finished an appearance on stage with the NFL commissioner and more than two hours of scrambling to interviews, teleconferences, photo shoots and autograph signings.
Alone in a quiet room off a hallway in the Auditorium Theatre, the No. 1 pick in the NFL draft lifted a Los Angeles Rams cap off his head and finally exhaled after demonstrating that a quarterback known as a pocket passer could maintain his poise on the run.
“I can move around a little bit, apparently,” Jared Goff said, chuckling.
The Rams, making their first pick as a Los Angeles franchise in more than two decades, on Thursday selected the 21-year-old Goff to be their quarterback of the future.
An organisation that made a splash by trading up the top of the draft sounded like it believed it did it again by selecting Goff.
“We didn’t want to just come home, we wanted to come home and contend — and contend consistently,” General Manager Les Snead said during a news conference in Los Angeles, adding, “This was the right thing to do at the right time for us.”
Goff, 6 feet 4 and 215 pounds, was a three-year starter at California and he is expected to compete for the Rams’ starting job immediately. Coach Jeff Fisher did not rule out the possibility of Goff starting the season opener on Monday Night Football against the San Francisco 49ers.
“We feel like Jared is our guy,” Fisher said in Los Angeles. “This is historic, monumental.”
Goff became the second quarterback in seven years to be selected No. 1 by the Rams. They took Sam Bradford with the top pick in 2010.
Speculation about who the Rams would choose raged for two weeks after they worked a deal with the Tennessee Titans that enabled them to move from No.15 to the top of the draft.
Would they take Goff or Carson Wentz, the North Dakota State quarterback who helped lead his team to two Football Championship Subdivision titles?
Goff said he did not know that the Rams would select him until Snead and Fisher called him a few minutes before Commissioner Roger Goodell announced the pick.
“‘You ready to be an L.A. Ram?’” he said they asked.
His answer: “Absolutely.”
But Goff, who grew up in Novato in Northern California, was regarded as the favourite to be the Rams’ choice in the days leading up the draft. Fisher said he addressed the possibility with Goff “subtly” via text message earlier in the week.
“It was, ‘Travel safe, enjoy the experience in Chicago, you earned it,’” Fisher said. “Asked him if he had any plans tonight, (Goff) said ‘No, have nothing going.’ I said, ‘Good, we’ll talk later.’”
Goff seemed to take it all in stride Thursday, from the moment he hit the red carpet with his mother on his way into the auditorium, to the time he exited into a car waiting outside the building.
The blond-haired Goff was dapperly dressed in a dark navy suit, white shirt, a navy tie flecked with a gold pattern and a white pocket handkerchief. He looked the part of a quarterback headed to star-driven Los Angeles and the NFL’s second largest market.
Not surprisingly, his colour palette was close to the Rams’. “I had a few different options but, you know, the navy blue with the gold dots was a little fitting,” he said.
Snead’s wife, former NFL Network reporter Kara Henderson, said at a rally at L.A. Live that Goff looked like actor Ryan Gosling.
“I’ve heard that,” Goff said later, grinning and shaking his head. “It’s a good guy to be compared to, I guess.”
Goff said he planned to make a name of his own for a team that has not had been to the playoffs since 2004 and has not had a winning record since 2003.
Case Keenum was the presumptive starting quarterback heading into off-season workouts and Nick Foles and Sean Mannion are other quarterbacks on the roster.
Goff said he planned to learn from the veterans and work hard to gain teammates’ respect. The decision about where he fits will be up to the coaches, he said.
He will travel to Los Angeles on Friday and cannot wait to get his hands on a playbook as the Rams prepare for their first season in Southern California since 1994.
“It’s exciting for the fan base and exciting for the city and something I’m ready to step into and take control of,” he said. “But at the same time, I’m going to go in there and work as hard as I can and be the best teammate I can be and be the best leader I can be.”
Goff planned to enjoy a celebratory dinner with family and friends late Thursday night. He said the reality of what had just transpired would not sink in until he was about to fall asleep.
“Probably then, I’ll be like, ‘All right, this is real,’” he said. “I’m just trying to enjoy it.”