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Eric Woodyard, ESPN
ALLEN PARK, Mich. — Detroit Lions coach Dan Campbell delivered a bold claim during Tuesday’s mandatory minicamp session, calling Jared Goff “a better quarterback” in Detroit “than he was there” in Los Angeles — despite Goff’s having led the Rams to a Super Bowl appearance in 2018.
Campbell said he has witnessed maturity in Goff as he enters Year 3 with the Lions.
Goff, 28, landed in Detroit after being traded in January 2021, along with a slew of draft picks, for Matthew Stafford.
“He hung in there, and I think what you’re seeing is a guy who just put his head down and worked on what he could, tried to improve on what he could, and now his confidence is really, it has grown, and along the way, he’s matured as a quarterback,” Campbell said. “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 light-years ahead of where he was two years ago. He’s got a real good grasp of what we’re doing, where the issues are, where the problems are, and that’s something that we really wanted him to get good at and he wanted to get good at, and he’s worked at it, and he’s improved.”
Campbell also described Goff’s mindset as “comfortable” after settling in the past two seasons, and while the first overall pick of the 2016 NFL draft agreed with his coach, he says he’s not satisfied.
After the Lions went 3-13-1 in 2021, Goff led the team to its first winning season since 2017 as Detroit finished 9-8, winning eight of its final 10 games. But Goff says he has a “hell of a lot to prove this year,” despite the offseason hype surrounding the organization.
“I think we all understand that we’re not going to just show up and win because we were good for the last 10 games last year. There is no reason for that,” Goff said. “If anything, it’s gonna be harder, teams are gonna give us a better shot this year and we have to be prepared and have to approach it that way.
“If we try to walk out there, like we won eight out of 10 last year and it’s just going to keep on rolling, it won’t happen,” he said. “We need to show up and continue to get better.”
Goff is coming off a season in which he set the franchise record for the highest touchdown-to-interception ratio (4.14-to-1) after passing for 4,438 yards with 29 touchdowns to just seven interceptions. Goff finished the year on a streak of 324 consecutive pass attempts without a pick, which is the fifth-longest streak in league history.
As he was in the midst of last year’s hot streak, Goff stated a handful of times that he felt as though he was playing the best football of his career.
“We ask him to do a lot more in my opinion than what [the Rams] were actually doing out there,” Campbell said. “They had a lot of pretty good pieces out there as well, as we know. Damn good defense. All those things, but I just feel like, I know from speaking with him and watching him really over the last two years, I just feel like … we put a lot of things on him where I’m not so sure that was ultimately what they were doing.”
