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Jared Goff was a good quarterback with the Los Angeles Rams. He had a couple of poor seasons, but in 2017 and 2018, he was a top-15 quarterback in the NFL and was a big part of the Rams’ rapid turnaround under Sean McVay.
When the Rams traded him to the Detroit Lions, he was only 26 years old with a lot of good football ahead of him. And according to Lions coach Dan Campbell, Goff has only gotten better during his time in Detroit.
Campbell told reporters on Tuesday that Goff is a better quarterback now than he was with the Rams.
“Along the way, he’s matured as a quarterback,” Campbell said, via FanNation. “I mean, he’s a better quarterback than he was there, in my opinion. Because he can do more things, he’s mentally on it. We’ve come lightyears ahead of where he was two years ago when he walked in and just started teaching him protections. He’s got a real good grasp of where the issues are, where the problems are, and that’s something we wanted him to get good at. That’s something he wanted to get good at and he’s worked at it and he’s improved.”
Though Goff had more team success with the Rams, Campbell is probably right about him being a better quarterback in Detroit than he was in Los Angeles. In two years with the Lions, Goff has 48 touchdown passes and only 15 interceptions – 3.2 times more touchdowns than picks. With the Rams, he had 107 touchdowns and 55 interceptions, not even twice as many scores as he had picks.
Where Campbell’s argument gets even stronger is in the fact that Goff is asked to do more in Detroit than he was with the Rams. There’s no questioning that.
“We ask him to do a lot more, in my opinion, than what they were actually doing out there,” Campbell said. “They had a lot of pretty good pieces out there, good defense. I just feel like I know, from speaking with him and watching him the past two years, we put a lot of things on him where I’m not so sure that was ultimately what they were doing.”
With the Rams, Goff had Todd Gurley helping carry the offense in 2017 and 2018, leading the NFL in rushing touchdowns both years and being voted a first-team All-Pro each season. The Rams only ranked 12th and 20th in points allowed those two years, but he still had a defense that featured Aaron Donald, Marcus Peters, Ndamukong Suh and Aqib Talib. And at receiver, there was Cooper Kupp, Robert Woods and Brandin Cooks.
But perhaps where Goff got the most help was from Sean McVay and his QB-friendly offensive scheme. Not to take away from the job Goff did in that offense, but at the time, it was one of the best and most difficult to pretend, featuring a lot of motion and play action.
With the Lions, Goff doesn’t have a dominant running game to lean on or a top-15 defense to bail him out. Detroit actually allowed the most yards in the NFL last season, yet the Lions still finished 9-8, in large part thanks to Goff’s 29-touchdown season with just seven interceptions.
Amon-Ra St. Brown is one of the only consistent playmakers Goff has had in Detroit after the Lions traded away T.J. Hockenson and D’Andre Swift; 2022 first-round pick Jameson Williams only played six games as a rookie and will miss the first six games of 2023 due to a gambling suspension.
Goff has taken the necessary steps to improve in Detroit despite joining a team that doesn’t have the supporting cast that the Rams surrounded him with for years. That’s what makes Campbell’s argument a strong one.
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