Jared Goff leads the NFL in completion percentage, yards per passing attempt and misperceptions. He has been mistakenly defined over a sinusoidal career as a draft bust, a Super Bowl failure, an inadequate franchise quarterback and a trade throw-in for a rebuilding franchise that surely would dismiss him. Even now that he has broken out as a full-fledged MVP candidate, the football public still misses his central quality.
What explains Goff is not how he plays. It is how he kept scraping himself off the ground.
“The thing people never understood about him — and maybe they still don’t — is that he is a guy that has this toughness that he doesn’t get the credit for,” said Tony Franklin, Goff’s college offensive coordinator at California. “Because he doesn’t physically look it. You don’t look at his body and go, ‘Oh, my God, this is the toughest guy.’ If you watch him in the pocket, he doesn’t flinch. He can get brutalized, beaten. He doesn’t point fingers, he doesn’t blame, and he doesn’t flinch.”
At 30, eight years after the Los Angeles Rams selected him with the first pick, Goff has ascended to the top of the NFL. As they enter Sunday’s NFC North showdown against the Green Bay Packers, the Detroit Lions he quarterbacks have become a juggernaut. They lead the NFL’s toughest division at 6-1 and own the league’s best point differential. His stunning statistical profile combined with his team’s superiority have vaulted Goff into strange territory: the thick of the MVP race.
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Goff has approached the idea of winning the league’s top individual award with nonchalance. Among those closest to him, MVP is a term that does not get broached. “Never,” Jerry Goff, Goff’s father, said this week. “Not a word. Nope. That doesn’t motivate us.”
“Typically, the guys on the best teams in the league that happens to,” Goff said. “A whole bunch of guys on this team could be in that [MVP] talk. We’re just going to try to keep winning games.”
For Detroit’s abundance of excellent skill players, Goff is not just part of Detroit’s dominance. He is driving it. For the past month, Goff has flirted with perfection. In his past five games, he has completed 88 of 106 attempts (83 percent) for 1,171 yards (11 per attempt) and 12 touchdowns with just one interception. During that stretch, the Lions have scored more touchdowns than Goff has thrown incompletions. To keep his passes off the turf any less, he would have to fill the football with helium.
End of carousel
The Lions extol Goff for his attitude as much as for his performance. On a team loaded with talent, he has become an unquestioned leader. After a blowout victory over the Dallas Cowboys, Goff spoke to the team in the locker room and handed the game ball Coach Dan Campbell had just presented him back to Campbell.
“The guy’s got arm talent, there’s no question,” Campbell said after the Lions beat the Minnesota Vikings on a last-minute drive. “But it’s what he’s got here” — Campbell pointed to his head — “and what he’s got here” — Campbell pointed to his chest — “that’s what makes him a dangerous player, and it’s what makes him one of these guys you can build around.”
Goff’s understated approach is part of the overlooked toughness Franklin described. Goff may be a skinny, laid-back, blond guy from California, but he’s also a competitive badass. As a 24-year-old, facing a 13-0 deficit in the NFC championship game inside the erupting Superdome, Goff screamed at bickering teammates to “shut the f--- up” in the huddle before leading a comeback.
When Rams Coach Sean McVay benched Goff for a playoff game in 2021 and then traded him along with multiple draft picks for Matthew Stafford, Goff still never doubted himself. When the Lions started 0-10-1 while Stafford was leading Goff’s old team to a Super Bowl in the first season after the trade, Goff maintained faith in his ability. Even as others viewed him as a lost cause, he never stopped viewing himself as the player whose talent got him picked first overall.
“If you don’t have that belief in yourself, nobody else is going to believe in you,” Jerry Goff said. “He’s having a great year. He’s got a bunch of folks around him that’s making that happen. It’s never easy. It’s never going to be all roses, and he’s been through some dark times. But I don’t think he ever wavered in his belief in himself.
“It’s what you make of yourself when things aren’t going the way you want them to,” he added. “The folks that come out the other end of that are the ones that are built a little bit different.”
A drill, renamed
In the NFL of 2024, Goff’s traditional playing style makes him an outlier among top quarterbacks. The passers alongside Goff in the MVP discussion — Lamar Jackson, Josh Allen, Patrick Mahomes — play with an improvisational athleticism that coaches wouldn’t teach even if they could. Goff matches their efficiency with conventional, disciplined technique. They create magic. Goff finds slivers of space and hits the open man, over and over.
To Franklin, the on-field key to Goff’s ascent lies in imperceptible movement. At Cal, Franklin would put Goff through footwork training he called the Manning Drill, after Peyton Manning. After the last step of a dropback, the quarterback would shuffle his feet, never bouncing or hopping but chopping laterally, like fingers over a typewriter. Franklin would instruct quarterbacks to move right or left. When he clapped, the quarterbacks threw.
While moving, Goff always kept his feet shoulder-width apart, allowing for a consistent, six-inch stride into his throw. If his feet came together while he moved, he would have to take a longer stride to pass, which wrecks accuracy.
“You can move to avoid the rush, but your feet don’t step,” Franklin said. “When you’re stepping and your foot comes off the ground, you can’t throw. You’re off-platform to throw. There’s a huge deal today about off-platform, sidearm throws. I always tell guys this: That’s freakish. That’s not normal. You can train yourself eventually to get better at that, but most people can’t. What the rest of the world has to do is work and find those throwing lanes.”
Franklin told his pupil he would rename the drill if he ever got good enough at it. After Goff’s time at Cal, Franklin started calling it the Manning-Goff drill.
Throughout Goff’s NFL career, Franklin said, he saw Goff’s footwork decline as he adjusted to the league’s speed and coaching systems. In the summer of 2023, Franklin visited Detroit to watch a training camp practice and catch up with Goff. He noticed Goff’s footwork — he was doing the Manning-Goff drill.
“His feet for a period of time in the NFL were not as good,” Franklin said. “The last two years, his feet are as good as they were in college.”
Those improvements surface most when Goff is under duress. Last season, Pro Football Focus graded Goff as the 19th-best quarterback against the blitz; this year, he is ninth. According to PFF’s accounting, Goff posted a 61.0 quarterback rating last season when throwing under pressure, which ranked 31st. This year, he ranks sixth at 93.8.
One play typifies Goff’s leap. In the second quarter two weeks ago, Vikings defensive coordinator Brian Flores — known for his exotic, diabolical blitzes — aligned seven defenders at the line. Six of them rushed as Goff received a shotgun snap.
Goff made a quick little shuffle to his right, keeping his feet close to shoulder-width apart, creating just enough space to find a throwing lane and provide a split second for wideout Amon-Ra St. Brown to plant his foot and cut upfield. Goff lofted a perfect pass. St. Brown cruised under it for a 35-yard touchdown.
After the game, Franklin sent Goff a text message praising his footwork on the play.
The weekly referendum
As Franklin discussed his former pupil, he contrasted his current hot streak to “back when everybody thought he was done because of the way McVay threw him under the bus and gave up on him.”
Despite the bitter ending, McVay once helped revive Goff. His rookie season under Jeff Fisher was a debacle. He was inactive for the first half of the season, and then he went 0-7 in an antiquated offense behind a rickety offensive line. Goff went to the Super Bowl two years later, but he and the Rams never again reached those heights. Teams chipped away at McVay’s scheme, and McVay came to believe he needed an upgrade at quarterback.
“McVay was really good,” Franklin said. “McVay’s a great coach; there’s no doubt about it. My issue with McVay is, the moment that it wasn’t easy, you couldn’t look in the mirror and say it was you.”
The feelings from the trade may have motivated Goff at first. But they were exorcised in January, when Goff outdueled Stafford and the Lions knocked the Rams out of the playoffs.
“I don’t think that whole thing is still motivating him,” Jerry Goff said. “He kind of put that to rest in the postseason last year. But I think it’s a constant. Guys that play that position, it’s a week-to-week thing. If you have a good week, you’re the greatest. If you don’t have a good week, you stink.”
On Sunday, Goff will walk into Lambeau Field for one of the biggest games of this NFL season as one of the best players on the field, quarterbacking at a higher level than he ever has. He reached this point not because of his talent but because, no matter what anybody else thought, he never stopped trusting in it.
