Lions Are ‘Damn Good’ Thanks to Jared Goff’s Revival In Detroit

But even if Detroit should win the Super Bowl, the former Rams quarterback will still be questioned, debated, doubted and the rest.

Goff completed a career-high 67.3% of his passes, threw for 4,575 yards, and tossed 30 touchdowns last season. / Kelley L Cox-USA TODAY Sports

When the Detroit Lions traded Matthew Stafford in 2021, the quarterback they received in return (along with draft picks) seemed like an afterthought in a wider deal. To many, maybe. But not to him.

Jared Goff saw a team that wanted him, a general manager he was already familiar with and a coach among the easiest in sports to line up alongside for an Anchorman-style brawl.

Both his new franchise and the city it called home had fallen into disrepair. Both had also, generally, been mischaracterized, with depictions that were too general, overly harsh and lacking context. A franchise and a city that were similar to … him.

Goff, per an interview this summer and a conversation with his private quarterbacks coach, Adam Dedeaux, began his own Detroit rebirth by simplifying his approach. In later seasons with the Los Angeles Rams, the team that drafted him with the No. 1 pick in 2016, Goff’s growth had created unintended consequences. He sometimes felt pressure and made throws he shouldn’t have when anxiety began to amplify.

So the idea that first season in Detroit: Go back to the stuff Goff always did well on football fields, in order to build toward more creative play. Goff didn’t expect this back-to-school development, nor the trade, nor Detroit, nor three wins over the course of an entire season, his first in the Motor City. But he embraced it because he always embraces everything. He could see this experiment in building football culture beginning to take shape.

That coach, Dan Campbell, had hired Ben Johnson to coach tight ends through that initial 2021 season. Halfway through it, though, he promoted Johnson to offensive coordinator. Johnson and Goff clicked, right away.

In 2022, his second season in Detroit and first full year with Johnson as his OC, Goff made the Pro Bowl. His interception tally remained in single digits. His completion percentage perpetually hovered in the mid-60s, far above all but his final season with the Rams. A simpler, smarter game had yielded more than the intended results. Now, Goff was adding mastery—of the system and how he played within it, or, if we must, managed games (and, to be clear, quite well)—while eyeing ways both could be enhanced.

"The first year I worked with him, I said he was going to win Super Bowls.”

- Adam Dedeaux, Jared Goff's QB coach

“The first year I worked with him, I said he was going to win Super Bowls,” says Dedeaux, mentor to many a star quarterback. “The moment’s never too big. He ran into a buzzsaw in Bill Belichick [and the Patriots, who beat the Rams 13–3 in Super Bowl LIII]. But it wasn’t that the moment was too big.”

Before last season, Goff and Dedeaux began to shift their focus. Goff had the Lions’ offense down. He understood his role, his teammates’ roles and how each could be optimized. He completed a career-high 67.3% of his attempts, threw for 4,575 yards, tossed 30 touchdowns compared to 12 interceptions, and led the Lions—Detroit!—back to the playoffs, winning two games there. But those parts, each awesome, aren’t what stick with him.

The conference championship game loss at San Francisco still stung back in June. It seemed fair to wonder if Goff had perspective despite the Lions’ second-half collapse, if he and Campbell shared a moment that evening to recognize how far they’d come, together. Goff might as well have been told that Eminem doesn’t rank among history’s best rap artists. His face said what his mouth made far more diplomatic. Face said: worst question in the history of the world. Mouth said: “No, because we didn’t win.”

Come on! What a season Goff and the Lions put together. The end of so many narratives. The start of so many more. Pressed for why he couldn’t find those notions in the moment, his thinking becomes clearer. It starts with a simple fact. They didn’t win. Right, he’s told, but while every team in football says their goal in every season is to win the Super Bowl, there are maybe six or eight teams in any one season that can say that with a straight face and a realistic chance. “Yeah, and we were certainly one of them,” he says, with a light scoff that perhaps was more of a throat-clearing for what came next.

“Last year, what bothered me, at times, was people had this notion that we were happy to be there, and we certainly weren’t [that],” he says. “The Cinderella-story-type things. And it’s like, No, we’re just damn good.”

Asked to confirm or add to Goff’s sentiments, Campbell’s eyes all but twinkle from inside that break-glass-in-case look of his. “I love it, I absolutely love it, and he’s absolutely right,” the coach gushes. “Yeah, there is no moment, man. You’re dejected. And you’re off. And it hurts.”

Goff and Campbell came close to leading Detroit to its first Super Bowl appearance last season. / Kirthmon F. Dozier / USA TODAY NETWORK

One week or so after the Super Bowl ended in another Kansas City Chiefs title, Goff was back at individual practices, even earlier than usual. Months later, Detroit signed him to a massive extension—four years, potentially worth over $200 million, $170 million of that guaranteed. Goff knows that he must earn it, just not in the way most might think is obvious. He wants to earn another playoff run, another Super Bowl appearance and, this time, a championship.

Anyone who didn’t know that—and, to be clear, all probably did—was reminded of the work ahead early into Detroit’s voluntary OTAs this spring. After one terrible offensive practice, Campbell gathered the offense and made clear what already should have been the clearest thing in the world: His standards hadn’t dropped. They never would. The offense would, at minimum, need to rise and meet that baseline. Immediately. “Guys, great offenses in this league don’t do that,” Campbell boomed.

Detroit’s did rise, did meet their coach’s exacting standard, the very next practice. Which is both a small thing and not a small thing at all. Not when the Super Bowl is the only goal.

How often does Goff think about that? Every day, he says.

Goff only intensified preparations for next season. Now better in all areas of technique, with three more seasons of experience, higher accuracy and far fewer too-risky throws, he long ago realized how fortunate he was. Fortunate, yes, to be traded to the Lions. “The opportunity I had, yeah, and how lucky I was to get a chance to be in a place that hasn’t won, has been downtrodden, beaten down, told it’s not good enough,” he says.

To win a Super Bowl, now, in this place, after everything, would present the ultimate case for patience in pro football. “There’ll be no better, sweet feeling,” he says, adding the obligatory disclaimer. “But no one expects it to be easy.”

Goff, Dedeaux argues, already boasts an objective résumé that far outpaces his acclaim outside team headquarters. He has won shootouts against the “best” quarterbacks of his era. He has won playoff games—and, now, won them in Detroit. He’s still not, according to Dedeaux or a basic internet search, regarded as a candidate for a mythical status that would have been laughed away three years ago. Still not seen, by most, as a top-five NFL quarterback.

Other than taking more calculated, still risky chances, the bulk of their time together this offseason focused on fine-tuning everything they’ve built. It would, Goff says, be too boring and too granular to explain. Like a doctoral degree in quarterback play, he says. More efficiency overall. Smaller technical corrections. Introducing new, subtle tactics to maneuver defenders, rather than react to them. Considering details that were considered too finite in previous offseasons. Then making some throws he decided not to attempt in recent seasons; only now, stepping into each with renewed confidence and trust in his own ability.

That Johnson, his coordinator, didn’t leave to become a head coach elsewhere—another obligatory disclaimer: yet—helps tremendously. A second, consistent receiver option beyond star wideout Amon-Ra St. Brown, would help. But Dedeaux believes—he’s not alone—that Goff can carry the Lions through stretches of games and the overall season.

“Last year, what bothered me, at times, was people had this notion that we were happy to be there, and we certainly weren’t [that]. The Cinderella-story-type things. And it’s like, No, we’re just damn good.”

- Jared Goff

Sometimes, they have “candid conversations” about the quarterback market and how it’s changing, ballooning, based on potential and protecting assets as much as what happens on the field. Goff was once the potential guy. Now, he’s a fiercely debated piece in that up-up-up landscape for quarterback compensation. Neither Goff nor any of his coaches begrudge any quarterbacks who perpetually present immense talent, endless potential, and occasionally, when everything and everyone around them aligns, fashion a special season. Goff is not those players, and that’s a good thing, the evidence clear through no more than a quick glance at his statistics, advanced metrics or otherwise.

“I get where some people are super flashy, and Jared has not been flashy,” Dedeaux says. “He’s been solid. He’s been dependable, repeatable. He executes. He stays healthy. He’s present. It matters to him, to be in the building. He shows up. Does the little things. Easy to coach. And only getting better.”

Is Goff—cue the laugh track no longer—a top-five candidate, worthy of more widespread consideration for his talents? Dedeaux answers with a question of his own: Is he going to be as flashy as a Patrick Mahomes or a Josh Allen or a Lamar Jackson? Well, no. “But the accumulation of what he does certainly warrants” his standing near there, if not there-there.

So he plans to, yet again. Goff insists that optics don’t matter, not to him, this QB with the laid-back personality of a La-Z-Boy. Dedeaux will not say they’re irrelevant. In some, significant ways, they do matter. What he wants is for Goff to be considered more fairly, for his optics to come from what he has already accomplished. How he changed his voice and everyday routines to maximize his impact, to be heard; then, rebuilt his style of play; before starting on false narratives by not addressing them, directly, at all.

Should Detroit win the upcoming Super Bowl, a potential NFL dynasty, starting like the Patriots did in a championship victory carved inside the Superdome in New Orleans, Goff will still be questioned, debated, doubted and the rest. Probably less than before. But totally celebrated? No. “I still don’t know if he’d ever get the credit he deserves,” Dedeaux says.