Somewhere in my apartment there’s a group chat with three people in it who used to work at the same place I did, none of whom work there anymore, and all of whom still show up for each other’s birthdays like nothing changed. I thought about that chat this week watching the discourse around Romy Goff’s first birthday, because the internet needed exactly one comment to build a rivalry that doesn’t exist.
Romy, daughter of Detroit Lions quarterback Jared Goff and his wife Christen, turned one this month, and Christen marked it with an “Our sweet girl is one!” post and a run of outdoor photos that the Detroit News covered as straightforwardly as a birthday post can be covered. The comment section filled with football-adjacent well-wishers: Brittany Mahomes, Claire Kittle, Normani, Patrick Mahomes, George Kittle, and a handful of others. Anna Marie Kupp, Cooper Kupp’s wife, wasn’t among them, and that absence matters, because the version of this story making the rounds right now conflates two different posts seven months apart.
That mix-up is the actual tell. The line everyone’s attaching to this week’s birthday post is really something Kupp’s wife left back in December, dug up and reattached to a fresher news peg because a nice word between two WAGs apparently needs a manufactured rivalry to be worth covering. The reflex says more about what gets treated as a story than it does about either woman.
Back in December, when Christen shared photos marking Romy’s five-month milestone, Cooper Kupp’s wife commented that “a more perfect duo has never existed.” One warm sentence on a five-month-old’s milestone post is the entire artifact this week’s framing got built on.
Here’s where the framing falls apart if you know anything about how these two men ended up on opposite ends of the NFC. Goff took over at quarterback for the Los Angeles Rams during his 2016 rookie season. Kupp arrived as a draft pick in 2017. They were teammates for four seasons before the Rams traded Goff to Detroit in the deal that brought back Matthew Stafford, and it was Stafford, not Goff, under center when Kupp won Offensive Player of the Year and Super Bowl MVP the following season. Goff had already left by then. He didn’t lose a ring race to Kupp; he’d already moved to a different building.
Kupp’s own departure from Los Angeles came later and on different terms. The Rams didn’t bring him back after 2024, and he signed with the Seattle Seahawks on a three-year, $45 million deal in free agency. The Seahawks beat the Rams in this year’s NFC Championship Game to reach Super Bowl LX. Kupp scored a touchdown in that win, treated in some corners as payback when it was really just where the roster math had landed him. Here’s Kupp celebrating with his family after the win:
https://x.com/SWXLocalSports/status/2015648820311544145
None of that looks like a rivalry from the inside. Lions and Seahawks aren’t division opponents, they’ve barely crossed paths on a schedule, and there’s no real on-field history to hang a rivalry narrative on beyond “both NFC.” Two men spent four years in the same building, then got scattered by a trade and a free-agency market, and their wives stayed friendly enough that one of them left a nice comment on the other’s baby photo. Call it an old coworker showing up for you, not a rival WAG storyline.
It’s not the first time a genuinely nice WAG moment got dressed up as something bigger than it was. Another WAG moment that said more than the game did worked the same trick in the other direction, treating a viral shirt like it needed a whole thesis. Anna Marie Kupp and Christen Goff aren’t enemy camps. Their husbands played on the Rams roster Kupp and Goff used to share before injuries, trades, and a QB change scattered everyone to their next teams, and their wives apparently stayed close enough through all of it to leave each other nice comments on baby photos. The “rival” label isn’t describing anything real between these two women. It’s describing what lifestyle coverage thinks it needs to make a comment section interesting.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DTy6AC9Fdaa/
Sports media has spent years teaching us that women adjacent to the league only matter in relation to conflict: draft rivalries, contract disputes, whichever team just won. I don’t think that’s a small habit. Applying that same lens to two wives who are, best anyone can tell, just fine with each other says less about Anna Marie Kupp and Christen Goff than it does about what we’ve decided is worth covering.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DMItnV6xp-8/
Maybe there’s nothing more to it than a nice comment on a baby photo, and I’m the one overreading a rivalry into its absence. But I’d rather sit with that than manufacture beef between two women whose only real connection is a locker room their husbands left years ago.
