LOS ANGELES — Stan Kroenke couldn’t help but get a bit nostalgic.
Betting the farm on prized rookie Jared Goff reminds the Los Angeles Rams owner of the time he signed off on another quarterback, one who went on to make quite a name for himself — Kurt Warner.
It was the summer of 1998. Warner, who spent that spring in the now-defunct NFL Europe league, was trying to stick as a street free agent at the team's camp in Macomb, Ill., while Kroenke maneuvered in the shadows as a minority owner.
“Dick Vermeil asked me my opinion on who the third quarterback should be,” Kroenke recalled during a wide-ranging interview with USA TODAY Sports.
As he sat in a lounge adjacent to the Rams’ war room during the draft, Kroenke, 68, sounded incredulous while pondering that Vermeil, the accomplished former coach of the Rams, asked him for advice one evening following an intra-squad scrimmage. Warner was competing with Will Furrer.
“I had a great relationship with Dick,” Kroenke said. “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.”
Kroenke has some first-hand experience with point guards.
“Stan was quite the basketball player,” Hall of Fame tight end Kellen Winslow told USA TODAY Sports.
When they attended the University of Missouri during the 1970s, Winslow and Kroenke were teammates on a city league team in Columbia, Mo., which was organized by former NFL receiver Leo Lewis. Winslow remembers the highly competitive league played on Tuesday nights, and that Kroenke was the big guy wearing knee braces who consistently drained long-range jumpers.
Maybe this doesn’t qualify as “street cred” now, but Winslow said the easy-going Kroenke was a “gym rat” who earned much respect for his game back in the day.
“The original three-pointer!” Winslow said.
And a man who could see an undrafted quarterback's talent from way downtown.
So add another anecdote to the legend of Warner, a likely Hall of Famer. He was endorsed by a man who has built a fortune ($6.3 billion, according to Forbes last September) in real estate development, not in the NFL scouting ranks.
“I’ve heard a number of stories, but I have not heard that story before,” Warner told USA TODAY Sports on Thursday. “It seems like there was a lot of indecision. One story is that coach went around the room during a meeting, asking the offensive and defensive coaches, and it was 50-50.”
Vermeil undoubtedly made the final call, but confirmed to USA TODAY Sports that he considered Kroenke’s opinion.
“When he made a statement, you listened to him,” Vermeil said.
Kroenke didn’t become the Rams' majority owner until 2010, but Vermeil said that even when Kroenke was in his minority role, he tried to persuade him to have a larger presence.
“I used to aggressively try to bring him in to talk to the team,” remembers Vermeil, who coached the Rams for three years before stepping down after Warner, the surprise league MVP, led the 1999 team to victory in Super Bowl XXXIV.
"He preferred to stay in the background. It’s not because he’s a snob. He’s just so humble.”
Kroenke still carries a low profile, publicly, but it’s striking to consider how his involvement with the team has changed with his all-in ownership stake. Although coach Jeff Fisher and general manager Les Snead run the football operations, the huge trade with the Tennessee Titans to land the top pick in the draft wasn’t finalized until Kroenke approved it.
On the heels of the franchise's relocation from St. Louis, the trade provided — intended or not — an aggressive statement that resonates while the Rams rebuild their L.A. fan base.
“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 (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.”
The Rams moved up from the 15th slot in the first round for Goff, their undeniable target. Yet they continued to vet the decision over the ensuing weeks. The process included a dinner interview.
“I made sure I sat next to him, because I wanted to get a sense of him,” Kroenke said.
His takeaway?
“Very mature,” he said of Goff. “And the other thing I’ll tell you I think: I just saw what I see. You don’t know how this all works. It’s a probability thing. But he was very comfortable, very confident. He will not be overwhelmed, being in L.A.”
The Rams’ process included reaching out to at least one person who doesn’t work for the franchise or otherwise have a deep connection to Goff: Warner.
“I got a call from Les Snead, three or four days before the draft, asking my opinion,” said Warner. “It was the same idea, like with Vermeil. ‘We’re going to vet everybody.’ It’s kind of ironic. Years ago, they vetted me.”
And look at how that turned out.
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Follow NFL columnist Jarrett Bell on Twitter @JarrettBell
