BobbyLayne
Footballguy
The lack of resources around Goff certainly prevents him from excelling in this situation, but he's even squandered what few opportunities are being presented. He's missed a number of open receivers, and his ball placement on many completions has been suspect at best. He seems to bail and check down extremely early in the play, even when the pocket appears to be holding.
I knew he had limitations coming in to this, and that he was unlikely to thrive where things weren't going to stay on schedule with the offense. I didn't expect him to do so poorly when things did actually come together from one play to the next. He's actually failed to meet my already very low expectations for him. I really thought he was a better passer than he has shown. The little I had watched him in the past gave me the impression that he was pretty accurate when he could just set and throw. I haven't seen that this year.
He's hardly the cause of this start, it was no secret that this team was bereft of talent coming in to this year. It's year 1 of what was acknowledged to be a multi year rebuild. I guess I was prepared to see how he handled it, how he looked, in hopes that maybe he could recapture whatever made him the #1 overall pick in the draft. I wasn't ruling out that he could show enough that perhaps he could hold down the QB spot for the team beyond the 2 years we knew we were stuck with him. What I've seen so far has left me saying there is zero chance of that. He is not going to be taking snaps for a winning Lions team, if that ever comes to be.
I wrote about that this summer, it’s not a “his WRs don’t have talent” thing. I did some research at StatHead this summer and found - paraphrasing bc my trial ended, I don’t have the data anymore - Goff had the least number of splash plays (for purposes of my research I chose 35 yards) by a country mile. He had six completions of 35+ last year. Now to add some context, guys like Allen & Mahomes had like 23 or 18, Cousins or Brady were like mid-teens, dead -armed-about-to-retire Rivers has 13. Goff had a half dozen!
That’s with Kupp and Woods. But wait, wait, it got worse when I took a deeper dive. I went through the Rams play by play game logs and found out he hit Woods for a 56 yard TD in like early October, and it was THREE MONTHS before he completed another long pass that went 35+. Like Week 17 he threw a deep ball to a TE (forget if it was Everett or Higbee.) The other 4 completions 35+ were short passes that were mostly YAC.
Two long bombs the whole year when normal, competent, not even making Pro Bowl guys gets almost one a game. Twice in four months with a primo receiving corps. The issue is NOT the Lions WRs. That is AN issue but it doesn’t let Jared off the hook. IDK what happened after 2018 and the Super Bowl LIII loss. For two years he was a Pro Bowler who took deep shots all the time. Since that game v the Pats he hasn’t been the same guy.
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