Jared Goff’s father happy he’s playing for Rams and not the Browns

All is good for Los Angeles Rams quarterback Jared Goff, who was the No. 1 overall pick in last week’s draft and now has become one of the faces of a franchise that’s re-embarking on its old city.

Fans are excited about the Rams, and they appear to be excited about Goff possibly taking over as the franchise quarterback in short order, too. But perhaps no one is more excited than the Goff family, namely father Jerry Goff.

Dad was a former major-league backup catcher with three teams in the early-to-mid 1990s and then raised his baseball- and football-playing son, who went on to star on the gridiron at Cal, the same school Jerry did in the 1980s.

And as great as Jared’s NFL ascension has been, there was a bit of a fear for a long time that his future team could be the Cleveland Browns.

“There was a time … we had a really good feeling he was going to end up in Cleveland, which isn’t — nothing against Cleveland, it’s fine,” Jerry Goff, now a firefighter in the Bay Area, told Mitch Melnick and Rod Francis of TSN 690 in Montreal. “That would have been great; just to get drafted and go anywhere is fine.”

Please, Jerry, corral your enthusiasm! But all that, of course, changed when the Tennessee Titans traded the first overall pick to the Rams, who squared in on Goff as their guy. It sounds like the Goff family breathed a sigh of relief — yes, because of the distance to their home in northern California. But perhaps also because … well, the Browns. Jerry Goff wouldn’t go so far as to say the latter.

“But when you compare the two, just logistically, [me] being an hour and 45 minutes plane flight away from L.A., and living in the same state you grew up in and so on and so forth is lucky. Timing is everything,” Jerry Goff said.

Jerry added that multiple teams were doing extensive background work on Jared throughout the process, saying that even casual acquaintances of the family received calls from NFL scouts looking to dive into his character, even back to Jared’s high school days and checking things on his social media accounts. But clearly, the Rams felt comfortable with everything they saw. We don’t know exactly how the Browns felt about Jared, but it sounds like they were pretty enamored, too.

Jared clearly inherited some of Dad’s athletic genes, but Jerry seemed to suggest that his son is clearly the superior athlete of the two of them. In a 90-game career, he batted .215 with seven home runs and 19 RBIs with the Montreal Expos, Pittsburgh Pirates and Houston Astros from 1990 to 1996.

But Jerry Goff’s final major-league game on May 12, 1996 — almost 20 years ago to the day — has to be one of the strangest ever. Goff had two hits, including a home run, against his former Expos team for which the played the majority of his career. But Goff also achieved (if that’s even the right word) in that game a stunning statistic — six passed balls allowed in eight innings.

It tied a post-1900 major-league record (with Harry Vickers in 1902 and Geno Petralli in 1987) that never has been met since. Goff also never played in the bigs again, sent back to AAA Tucson soon afterward and out of professional baseball the following year.

He clearly hopes that Jared’s career is longer and more prosperous than his own, and the opportunity with the Rams appears to be tremendous. Especially now that the Browns suffered their own passed ball, if you will, watching another team trade in front of them to take a quarterback they apparently really liked. The Goff seem quite happy with how it all unfolded in the end.

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Eric Edholm is a writer for Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @Eric_Edholm