His father was a fireman and, in a way, Jared Goff is one too.
Consider his career as a quarterback. Time after time, he has gone into a bad situation and ultimately made it better, extinguishing the wrong kind of fire and eventually igniting the right one.
“It’s not the most fun way to do it, I guess,” Goff told the Los Angeles Times in a phone interview this week. “Everyone would love to go and just win, win, win. But it’s a very rewarding and fulfilling way to go about it. Proud of myself, certainly, and all those teammates on those teams for being down in the gutter and being able to come out on top.”
Check the history. At the University of California, his teams went from 1-11 to winning a bowl game. His Rams went from 4-12 his rookie year to the Super Bowl two years later. And now with the Detroit Lions, Goff’s team went from 3-13-1 to now, a season-and-a-half later, 6-2 and one of the NFL’s top franchises.
The Lions, who play at the Chargers on Sunday, have generated at least 325 yards of offense in each of their first eight games, the first time they’ve done that since 1954. From Week 10 of 2022 through Week 6 of this season, they scored at least 20 points a game, establishing a franchise record of 15 such games in a row.
“They really force you to defend everybody on the field,” Chargers coach Brandon Staley said. “They have a lot of different guys who touch the football. Jared has a lot of experience playing that way. That is how he played with Sean [McVay] with the Rams, and that is how he is playing now. He is playing really smart football and he is getting the ball to his play-makers.”
The last eight years have been a winding odyssey for Goff, 29, the No. 1 overall pick in the 2016 draft. The Rams made dramatic moves to get him, then, just five years later, worked just as hard to replace him with Detroit’s Matthew Stafford — even though they had signed Goff to a $110-million deal. just two years earlier.
So two quarterbacks taken first overall swapped cities, and Goff, even though he already had been to a Super Bowl, had huge cleats to fill in Detroit.
Stafford was enormously popular in the Motor City and remains so, and his legend only grew when he went to Los Angeles and won a Super Bowl in his first season. They might as well have been the Detroit Rams with the way those Stafford-loyal Lions fans were pulling for them.
Meanwhile, Goff’s teams were really struggling. In his inaugural season in Detroit, the Lions didn’t win their first game until Week 13. Last season, despite glimmers of promise, they got off to a 1-6 start.
There was a strong belief outside the franchise that Goff was merely a placeholder keeping the seat warm for the next great Lions hope but clearly the club’s decision-makers had something else in mind. One of those people was general manager Brad Holmes, who came from the Rams and had been with Goff in L.A.
“The narrative when he got here was a little skewed,” Holmes said. “People thought he was a throw-in because of his contract. That was not the case. There were other quarterbacks who were on the carousel that year, and [Rams GM Les Snead] and I had a conversation specifically of, `Do you want Jared in the deal?’ And I was like, `Absolutely.’ ”
That turned out to be a shrewd decision, even though it took patience for coach Dan Campbell and the Lions to stick with Goff through the early turbulence while the foundation was being poured for the ground-up rebuild.