It’s finally the start of training camp, and the question surrounding the Detroit Lions this year is not if they’ll be any good: it’s a question of just how good will they be? A year after winning the NFC North, a pair of playoff games, and reaching the NFC Championship game—a place many Lions fans had never seen their team in before—the expectations have risen. For the first time in most Lions fans’ lives, Detroit’s feasible goal is a Super Bowl, and as far as we know, hell is still running hot.
A recent post by someone who “writes about football” leads us to today’s Question of the Day...
After a season in which the praises of their starting quarterback could be heard from cheer competitions in high school gymnasiums to as recently the Faster Horses country music festival, the admiration and belief that Jared Goff is good enough for Detroit is still obviously very tangible. But the perception from outside the state of Michigan continues to question how good it really is, and according to Arif Hasan, the answer depends on what you mean by “good.”
Prior to this inquiry into the goodness of Goff’s quarterbacking, Hasan had earlier examined a player commonly found at the center of similar scrutiny in Brock Purdy, and most recently, wondered how good Jordan Love is after his uneven first year as a starter. In contrast to Purdy and Love, however, Goff has much more data to scrape from in order to arrive at sounder conclusions.
“For the most part, the evidence indicates that Goff should continue to produce at a reasonably high level,” Hasan wrote on “Wide Left,” his Substack covering football and politics you should absolutely subscribe to. “His stable performance indicators are reasonably strong and his history of production is well-documented. Should he finish, once again, in the top five in yards per attempt, that wouldn’t be a surprise.”
He highlights the things we’ve grown accustomed to seeing Goff do well: excels in play-action, delivers consistently from a clean pocket, and diagnoses coverages at the line of scrimmage to make the right play. And there’s enough body of work under multiple play-callers to not label him “a passive agent of a coach’s playcalling system,” according to Hasan.
But that isn’t to say Goff’s game is without limitations, namely his lack of athleticism, inability to create plays out of structure, or disinterest in throwing the ball outside the numbers.
“Given Goff’s limited athleticism, this primarily tells us that Goff doesn’t have a large toolbox to draw from when solving problems,” Hasan stated succinctly. “That means he doesn’t perform well as a scrambler, when forced outside of the pocket or later in the snap as the play decays. He may have a fairly strong arm, but he doesn’t use it to drive throws to the outside.”
“Tell Me What I Don’t Know.”
Hasan’s argument supplies a lot of compelling statistics that help back up his apt description of Goff’s shortcomings as a quarterback in today’s NFL—ones that I won’t be spoiling here because the article is part of the paid subscription to his Substack—but here are two graphs that support his assertion that Detroit’s starting quarterback isn’t one for creating plays out of nothing, nor is he someone who beats really good coverage any better than the average NFL thrower:
2023 QB EPA in system vs out pic.twitter.com/S7GKe246SB
— Jrfortgang (@throwthedamball) June 20, 2024
How QBs have performed when someone on D makes a coverage mistake (Y axis) vs when the defense makes no mistake (X axis) pic.twitter.com/fExq2sJ1gB
— Jrfortgang (@throwthedamball) January 5, 2024
Now, he’s not terrible in these areas by any means, and these aren’t the only measurements of what makes a quarterback great—or good, even. As you can see, he’s right around the league average among his contemporaries. Perception is reality, though, and the stink of Goff failing in Los Angeles under one of the brightest offensive minds in the league in Sean McVay might be harder to get rid of for some more than others.
ESPN just polled NFL execs, coaches, and scouts and ranked Goff as the ninth-best quarterback in the league, but Hasan references the national quarterback pundits like the 33rd Team’s Derek Klassen—who ranked Goff at 14th—and The Ringer’s Steven Ruiz, who placed him 17th. Both put Goff closer to the middle of the pack than the upper echelon, but after all of the numbers and evidence arranged by Hasan, we’re left wondering less about if Goff is “good,” and instead more wrapped up in the idea of how we define what it means to be a “good” quarterback—-and maybe mose importantly, a good enough quarterback to be a champion.
“Often that [a quarterback who isn’t well-rounded] can result in the kind of quarterback who takes their team to the postseason but struggles once they’re there—an issue that was enough for San Francisco to move on from the limited but extremely productive Jimmy Garoppolo,” Hasan notes.
Or, you know, like when the Rams traded Goff for Matthew Stafford...
As Detroit enters the 2024 season with championship aspirations, they’ll hope he’s still good enough to accomplish the ultimate goal.
Your turn.
