Jimmie Ward on Matthew Stafford: "What was the problem in Detroit?"

Tommy Huxley, a 49ers fan watching live on YouTube, asked Ward if he thinks he will continue to play well against the Rams now that Matthew Stafford is their quarterback instead of Jared Goff.

Grant Cohn | Jul 12, 2021

This might have been the best moment of my hourlong interview with Jimmie Ward, and I didn't even ask the question that led to it.

Tommy Huxley, a 49ers fan watching live on YouTube, asked Ward if he thinks he will continue to play well against the Rams now that Matthew Stafford is their quarterback instead of Jared Goff.

I expected Ward would give a generic answer and sidestep the question, offending no one. He did not. He launched into his true feeling about Stafford, Goff and the Rams, God love him.

Here's what Ward said.

WARD: "I like Stafford, but they still will have the same players that he'll be throwing the ball to. He's the same quarterback who was on the Detroit Lions and they still didn't go to the playoffs, and they had Megatron (Calvin Johnson). What was the problem over there in Detroit? Are you going to blame the city? What was the problem? Was it the money? If they city didn't have enough money to bring players over there, why even have an NFL team? That's a big question mark.

"They went and traded Jared Goff, who went to the playoffs several times and went to the Super Bowl. Yeah, he lost. He went to the Super Bowl, though. I've yet to see that with Matt Stafford. And I'm saying, he's still great. I believe he's a top 10 quarterback, maybe top 5. I don't know. We'll see. I'm just going off of what I see. And I see Jared Goff got those boys to the Super Bowl."

You can watch the full interview below.

Published Jul 12, 2021

GRANT COHN

Grant Cohn has covered the San Francisco 49ers daily since 2011. He spent the first nine years of his career with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat where he wrote the Inside the 49ers blog and covered famous coaches and athletes such as Jim Harbaugh, Colin Kaepernick and Patrick Willis. In 2012, Inside the 49ers won Sports Blog of the Year from the Peninsula Press Club. In 2020, Cohn joined FanNation and began writing All49ers. In addition, he created a YouTube channel which has become the go-to place on YouTube to consume 49ers content. Cohn's channel typically generates roughly 3.5 million viewers per month, while the 49ers' official YouTube channel generates roughly 1.5 million viewers per month. Cohn live streams almost every day and posts videos hourly during the football season. Cohn is committed to asking the questions that 49ers fans want answered, and providing the most honest and interactive coverage in the country. His loyalty is to the reader and the viewer, not the team or any player or coach. Cohn is a new-age multimedia journalist with an old-school mentality, because his father is Lowell Cohn, the legendary sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1979 to 1993. The two have a live podcast every Tuesday. Grant Cohn grew up in Oakland and studied English Literature at UCLA from 2006 to 2010. He currently lives in Oakland with his wife.