The Rams gave up a lot to trade up to the No. 1 pick and take their latest franchise quarterback, Jared Goff. But the team apparently has no plans to rush the former Cal star into the lineup. Goff is currently working with the second-team, and coach Jeff Fisher said Wednesday that former undrafted free agent Case Keenum remains atop the depth chart.

“[Keenum] made some really good throws,” Fisher told reporters. “I mean, some really good throws throughout practice. That’s what you expect out of your starter.”

Historically, it wasn’t uncommon for coaches to sit rookie quarterbacks, even those drafted near the top of the first round. But that thinking has changed in recent years; in 2011, first-overall pick Cam Newton started 16 games and Blaine Gabbert, drafted 10th, started 14 times. In 2012, the top two picks, Andrew Luck and Robert Griffin III, started a combined 31 games and led their teams to the postseason. Blake Bortles, the No. 3 selection in 2013, started 13 games as a rookie, and the top two picks in last year’s draft, Jameis Winston and Marcus Mariota, combined for 28 starts.

Coaches, a conservative lot by nature, often go with youth and inexperience because if you’re drafting in the top 5, it means you’re coming off a losing record and your job is likely on the line.

But despite all the losing, Fisher’s job appears to be safe. The Rams are just 27-36-1 since he took over, and in addition to four straight losing seasons, his teams have a .430 winning percentage, 26th in the league since 2012. Just as depressing: The Rams’ point differential from 2012-2015 is -145 (it’s been negative each season), which ranks 25th in the league.

Then again, maybe Fisher casually mentioned Keenum as the starter to take the early training-camp pressure off of Goff.

The reality is that there’s little risk in throwing Goff right into the mix, and he’ll benefit from sharing the backfield with Todd Gurley. That said, history has not been kind to quarterbacks drafted first or second overall. We wrote about this back in April and the findings are sobering. Since 1970, the average winning percentage of quarterbacks taken either No. 1 or No. 2 is .514. Remove Peyton Manning and it drops to .496. (Of course, wins aren’t the best measure of quarterback success — there are also things like Pro-Football-Reference.com’s Career Approximate Value, and more conventional stats like completion percentage, yards per attempt and TD-to-INT ratios, which we discussed here.)

But if the Rams can now manage Goff in much the same way guys like Ben Roethlisberger, Joe Flacco, Andy Dalton and even Colin Kaepernick early in his career were brought along, there’s reason to believe they could be something more than average. With a stifling defense, and a Gurley-led running game, this is a good situation for a promising young quarterback to get on-the-job training.