Jared Goff and the Lions: The NFL's most unlikely love story
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Hallie Grossman, ESPN Staff Writer
THE STORY OF Megan Stefanski’s devotion to the Detroit Lions is a story of loss.
She has witnessed hundreds of losses since she goes to every game, home and away, and for most of her 44 years, the city’s football franchise has been an exercise in finding clever and torturous ways to not win games. She lost her father, Donnie — who most people called Yooperman because the Stefanskis come from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula — and who was as committed to seeing the Lions (mostly lose) live as his daughter. He missed his granddaughter’s baptism because it conflicted with a football Sunday.
Yooperman was born in December 1957, about two weeks before the Lions won their third championship that decade. He died in 2019, about a week before the season, without seeing them so much as come close to another title. Before he had the chance to see this iteration of the Lions, the team that finally holds so much promise.
Last January, when the Lions hosted their first playoff game in 30 years, Detroit lost its collective sanity. The going rate to get into Ford Field was $1,200, and Megan insists she had the only empty seat in the stadium.
She brought her father’s ashes in a miniature urn. They sat in the seat beside hers in Section 100.
Before that game, when the Lions beat the Rams and Matthew Stafford, their old hometown hero, the stadium roared the name of the quarterback who took Stafford’s place. The Jared Goff chant was born that night, and in the year since, would go on to spring up at Lions road games, and Pistons games, and a high school cheerleading competition, and a Green Day concert.
“Jared Goff” chants broke out in Santa Clara 🗣️ pic.twitter.com/qzTzfkDfUd
— NFL on ESPN (@ESPNNFL) December 31, 2024
Yooperman has missed a lot in the five years he’s been gone, but Megan, in her own way, let her father see this much: the birth and blossoming of the romance between Detroit — a city and a team — and its once left-for-dead, now reborn star, Jared Goff.
THERE’S A VERSION of this story that doesn’t feature a happy ending for Jared Goff in Detroit. Or, technically speaking, a happy new beginning.
He was shipped off to this town — not his words, but his father’s, and his old college coordinator’s, and his current left tackle’s — where football failure had become noxious and pervasive, like the pollution from the neighborhood auto plants. In Los Angeles, Goff’s relationship with Sean McVay — wunderkind, offensive guru, Goff-whisperer, or so popular theory went — had frayed gradually, then quickly and painfully. In the span of two weeks in January 2021, Goff went from McVay’s “quarterback right now” to quarterback discarded to Detroit. Goff was, the Rams and the NFL intelligentsia seemed fairly certain, now someone else’s problem.
“For many guys, that would break them,” says Tony Franklin, Goff’s offensive coordinator and QB coach from his Cal days. For here, Franklin goes on, was the message delivered to Goff: “You’re not good enough, you’re not smart enough, you’re not tough enough, you’re not the guy that I want, we’re gonna trade you, get rid of you.”
He wasn’t merely offloaded in 2021. The Rams had to part ways with Goff and first-round draft picks to make the deal palatable for prospective trade partners. Once he landed in Detroit, he was, charitably speaking, relegated to bridge quarterback. The guy to tread water until the Lions could find The Guy. (At least outside the confines of Ford Field. Inside, then-newly-hired Lions GM Brad Holmes said he never once considered Goff a stopgap. “He’s been successful. He has a lot of wins. He’s been to the playoffs,” Holmes said in June 2021, before Goff had played a down for the Lions. “I don’t know why he doesn’t have a chance to be successful.” Put less charitably, he was damaged goods.
In those hazy, disorienting days before and after the trade — “We were spinning,” says Goff’s father, Jerry — the Goffs had neither the time nor clarity of mind to really ponder Dan Campbell, the new head coach Detroit had hired just 10 days before landing Goff. But Sonny Dykes did. Dykes had coached Goff in his three years in Berkeley, and his investment in Goff compelled him to pull up the tape of Campbell’s inaugural news conference. The new coach spent several minutes expounding on what his guiding principles would be in Detroit — which culminated, he promised without a hint of satire or hyperbole, with a commitment to biting kneecaps off.
“Jared’s in the right place,” Dykes thought to himself. “The two of ’em are gonna create magic.”
The Lions play Washington on Saturday night as the NFC’s No. 1 seed for the first time in franchise history, so magic was indeed created, even if it was a slow burn. In the first 24 games of the Campbell-Goff era, the Lions won four; since November 2022, they are 35-9. They added two playoff wins last season, double the franchise’s total postseason victories from the previous 66 years. And “bridge quarterback” Goff morphed into a quarterback the team doesn’t just win in spite of, or even with.
This season he has: the sixth-best QBR in the league (68.5); six games with an 80% completion rate, the most in NFL history; an NFL-best 18 touchdown passes on third and fourth downs, with no interceptions on such downs.
Even with a roster replete with stars, the Lions often win because of Goff.
In retrospect, Dykes says he wasn’t so much prophetic as he was observant. Perhaps Campbell’s exuberance veered into meatheadery, but Dykes figured what he was really advocating for was resilience. And in all of Dykes’ stops in college football — Louisiana Tech, Cal, SMU and now TCU — he had rarely had a player as resilient as Goff. “I think the thing that people probably underestimate the most about Jared is his toughness,” Dykes says. “You meet him and it’s kind of ‘aw, shucks.’ But there’s a killer underneath there.”
In Goff’s third start in college, Ohio State and Joey Bosa came to town, and Dykes surmises Bosa must’ve gotten to Goff 20 times that night. He would lay waste to Goff, then Goff would get up. He would wreck him again, and Goff would rise for more. Urban Meyer found Dykes after the game and told him Goff was one of the toughest kids he’d ever seen.
If Meyer was caught off guard that night, well, so are plenty of people. Jared Goff is gangly. When he runs, he looks like a baby giraffe out there. He is, skeptics like to point out (and point out and point out) a blonde California kid, which is really just a polite way of suggesting he might be too soft for the grit and grime of the NFL. Josh Allen is a freight train who will run you right over. You can try to tackle Jalen Hurts, but he’ll take you for a 5-yard piggyback ride first. Goff? His specialty is making the NFL look attainable for commoners. And that, right there, is his peculiar brand of durability.
“It’s a lot harder to be tough when you gotta stand in the pocket and know that, ‘I’m not benching 350 pounds,'” Franklin says. “‘I’m not leg squatting 600 pounds. I’m gonna get my brains beat out here, but I’m going to stand here and make the throw anyway.'”
He got his brains beat out against Ohio State when he was 18. And again, against New Orleans in his third year as a Ram and third playoff game in the league, when he was 24. Campbell was on the opposing sideline that day as the Saints’ tight ends coach, where he saw in real time how Goff got destroyed — just killed, Franklin says — on a pair of third downs late in the game. He completed both for first downs, then went on to win the game. The showcase was Campbell’s first real whiff of Goff’s fortitude.
“I think they are cut from the same cloth,” Jerry says.
It’s something more than a coincidence, then, that Goff’s revival happened here, in this place, and on the Lions, under Campbell’s watch. Campbell is rough around the edges to Goff’s polish. Campbell chooses thundering boorishness (a façade, but still; more on that soon) to Goff’s unassuming forbearance. But don’t let the odd couple act fool you. They are one and the same, a perfect football match, exactly who each of them needed.
Said Goff last month, “He’s breathed life into me from the moment I got here.”
MEGAN HAS HER superstitions, just as her father did. She has to wear her hair half-pulled back; her bracelets must sit a certain way; she puts in her Dan Campbell earrings before each game. Yooperman? He had to wear the same socks, the same jersey, the same cap — it started out as a plaid hunting hat, but his mother sewed a Lions decal on it, and it became his game-day hat.
But a strange, still-new feeling now sits alongside all these superstitions for Megan: belief. She loved Goff from the time he touched down in Detroit, but the moment she remembers knowing that Goff was the right person in the right place was the last game of the 2022 season. By the time the Lions took the field against the Packers that day, they had been eliminated from the playoffs. All they had to play for was keeping Green Bay out of the playoffs too. They did.
“You could just feel something in the air then,” she says. “That was what changed everything.”
EVERY SO OFTEN, in the middle of a team meeting, Campbell will pull up a game clip of Goff at work.
A few Mondays ago in December, he trotted out film from the Lions’ game against Packers. There was Goff, pointing his long, left arm to some place beyond the defenders plotting his demise. With ball in hand, taking seven loping strides back, he hung back in the pocket for half a breath, before a linebacker got truly up in his business. That was the moment Goff threw a missile to Amon-Ra St. Brown over the middle, which St. Brown caught but Goff did not see him catch, bear-hugged between two Packers defenders.
Campbell looked out at those assembled. “Just remember, guys,” he said, “16, back there, is a bad man.”
For all his bluster, Campbell is an emotional and interpersonal savant. He understands, in ways that are rare and a little bit telepathic, according to his team, what guys need to hear and when they need to hear it. So he offers this nudge — don’t forget, we’re lucky to have this guy; don’t forget, there’s no one we’d rather have here — to his team now and then. Because what quarterback wouldn’t relish a vote of his coach’s confidence, especially when those votes were in short supply elsewhere?
And to Campbell’s broader point, this 15-second time capsule is as good an illustration as any for why Goff is one of the best quarterbacks in the game.
The moment the ball leaves Goff’s hand — on most of his throws, especially ones over the middle — you won’t notice anyone open. But Goff knows when and where his man will be open. He’ll help create that openness by freezing a defender with his eyes locked on one receiver, clearing the field, then passing to a different receiver. He’ll do all this, throw the ball in time and in rhythm, while holding on to it until the last feasible second to allow for the play to develop.
Campbell didn’t show the two plays that followed, but a more complete viewing is worth the time for the story it tells. His throw to St. Brown was a case study in how and why Goff shines. What came after laid bare how and why Goff shines in Detroit.
These were the facts when Goff connected with St. Brown: Less than two minutes remained against the Packers; the score was tied at 31; on 2nd-and-17, Goff’s 17-yard pass secured a first down and put the Lions squarely in field goal and game-winning territory at the Packers’ 20-yard line.
Except upon further consideration, the referees decreed it a 16-yard pass (not 17), at the Packers’ 21-yard line (not 20), good for 3rd-and-inches (not 1st-and-10) — which the Lions promptly failed to convert. And this being the Lions, they tried converting again, on 4th-and-inches, instead of settling for three.
Since Campbell’s arrival in 2021, his team has stayed on the field for fourth down 32% of the time; the Browns, the next 4th-down-happiest team in that span, did so at a 26% clip. But this was a lot. This was too much, probably. Even if the Lions did go for it to get the first down and, two plays later, kick their game-winning field goal.
The Lions “take risks” and “play aggressive football” and “go against the grain,” but this isn’t a tale of audacity. It’s a story about trust and its attendant rewards.
“Jared has 100 percent confidence in Dan,” says Adam Dedeaux, Goff’s longtime personal QB coach, “because Dan’s shown 100 percent confidence in him.”
Goff, himself, has said he knows there were times in his dreadful early days here — the 0-10-1 start to 2021, the 1-6 start the next year — when Campbell could have cut bait on him. The prudent move — also the popular move and the self-preserving one) would have been to unhitch his wagon from a quarterback most had declared DOA at that point anyway.
Campbell, steadfast or just stubborn, did no bait cutting. In the throes of that 0-10-1 start, Campbell was not shy in his demand for Goff to raise his play. “I feel like he needs to step up more than he has,” he told reporters. But he was also clear-eyed on why he expected more.
“He is a pure passer, man,” Campbell said at his media session a couple of days later. “And if you give him a minute and give him a little protection, let him see it, I think he can make some pinpoint throws. … I think if we can stay in the normal flow of a game and we can function like we need to right now offensively, with what we are, I think we can win with him. I just do.”
Confidence begat trust begat success begat more confidence.
“Think about any job you have,” Jerry says. “If you’ve got a guy above you, a boss, and he’s like, ‘Dude, just go. Do your thing. I trust you 100 percent.’ Can you imagine how good that feels?”
Before all these good feelings, though, the aforementioned dreadful early days were dire enough to compel Campbell to make some changes, even if quarterback was not among them. Midway through the 2021 season and with the Lions in free fall, Campbell took over playcalling duties and promoted his tight ends coach, Ben Johnson, to passing game coordinator — and by that offseason, offensive coordinator. Which is how Goff found his game in his second perfect marriage in Detroit.
Dedeaux’s theory is that since this was Johnson’s first foray as coordinator, he didn’t come armed with the ego and rigidity of experience. He did prosaic things like ask Goff what kind of plays he felt most comfortable running. He made shocking decisions like including Goff as a collaborator in the offense they installed.
“Sounds simple, doesn’t it?” Dedeaux says. “I truly believe that in Detroit this is the Ben Johnson-Jared Goff offense. I just think Jared has absolute ownership over it. And I think that exists in maybe one or two other places.”
Johnson says the collaboration is practically science now. They make time early each week to watch practice together, to watch cutups together, to spitball together. “The things that he’s most comfortable with usually work on game days,” Johnson says. “So we want to give him a lot of liberty early in the week.”
The net result of this partnership is that when Goff is asked to do uncomfortable things like move the chains on fourth down more than just about any player in the league, he’s pretty comfortable with that responsibility because it is shared.
So the quarterback who was deemed a failure a few short years ago now feels free to play unafraid to fail.
More, the team that for so long — for generations — was defined by its enduring failure, now plays unafraid to fail too.
MEGAN WAS 13 when her father bought season tickets. Back then, in the mid-’90s, the team was doing something unprecedented in franchise history: flirting with the playoffs on a regular basis. It wound up with one postseason win that decade, which was at least one more than it had in the 1970s and 1980s. So this was how Yooperman prepared his daughter for life as a Lions fan:
“Lotta whiskey,” she says.
He preferred McMaster’s Canadian, and she still has one of his bottles, five years old and unfinished, rattling around the bus she and her tailgating compatriots call home before and after Sunday games. At his funeral, the family offered shot glasses of McMaster’s to those paying their respects. They could take one last shot with him, these people who loved Yooperman and loved the team he devoted his life to, even when that team hardly ever loved them back. A toast, in the end, to all the times the Lions made them drown their sorrows.
NESTLED INTO THE Eastern Market district, across the street from where Megan sets up her weekly tailgating operation and a mile down the road from Ford Field sits Bert’s Market Place. Bert Dearing was raised one block over and six blocks down from this very spot and has worked and lived within a two-mile radius of this corner of Detroit’s east side his whole life, save for the two years he served in Korea. He’s been here, on Russell Street, since 1987 when it was just a one-room shop. Now it’s a Detroit institution, like Bert himself. The hallways tell a story. A rendering of Bert as a boy in the 1950s, wearing the same tam he does these days, running his paper route. A 1951-era map of Black Bottom, the predominantly Black part of Detroit that was demolished for redevelopment in the ’50s and ’60s. A mural dedicated to Motown, Smokey Robinson, Berry Gordy. A painting paying homage to Lions greats, because even if winning never came to town, some of the league’s most dazzling players did. It’s Dick “Night Train” Lane, who still captures Bert’s heart, because Bert loved a man who could hit, and Night Train Lane was the kind of player who ushered in the advent of the face mask penalty.
“We’re savin’ the history,” he says. “If you don’t know your history, how you know where you’re going?”
Bert is a man who wants to remember. He remembers the 1957 title, when he was 13 years old. He remembers the scars of professional football in this town for the generations that came after it.
0-16.
The Hail Mary.
Dallas.
Barry.
Barry Sanders, who went to the playoffs five times in the 1990s and left with one playoff win. It was Detroit’s only playoff win over six decades. Barry Sanders, who retired via fax one day in the heart of his prime because his heart couldn’t stand the losing anymore.
Detroit was professional football’s graveyard. And Jared Goff? He was consigned there for his own career to die.
The banishment shocked him. Worse, it shook him, and his confidence, and Goff had never lacked for self-assurance. Back in his college days, Franklin would tell him that he was going to sign somebody better than Goff, somebody who would beat him out. Goff would look at his old coach and dare him: Do it. Bring him in. He liked the idea; he relished the idea of a fight. “But it wouldn’t a mattered if I’d brought in Peyton Manning,” Franklin says. “Jared would’ve competed and thought he could beat him out and thought it would make him better.”
But Goff was human, and he was hurt in the wake of his unraveling in L.A. The lowest Franklin had seen him in all the years of coaching and mentoring him, at least when it came to football. The game had never come easy for Goff, he had always had to work at it, but he had also always felt sure of his place in it, knew he belonged and knew what he could do. And here was a team and a coach in L.A. who had told him: You’re wrong. And there was that same team, in its first try in a post-Goff universe, winning the damn Super Bowl — while Goff watched, fresh off a three-win debut season in football Siberia.
“I’ll tell you this,” Jerry says. “It’s not for everybody.”
That Goff could break, then begin again, and do it on a team that was broken and beginning again too, is why he turned the locker room in Detroit into a bunch of Goff converts. Ask the Lions players when they felt sure the Goff experiment in Detroit would work. They didn’t circle when he became a winner — the eight victories they had in their last 10 games in 2022, or the playoff run last season. They evangelize the times long before he became one.
“He didn’t carry himself like a person who was down on his luck, ever,” says Taylor Decker, Detroit’s longtime offensive tackle.
But Goff did more than just put on a brave face, says Dan Skipper, Decker’s offensive linemate. He jumped headfirst into his new world. “When he walked in here, he embraced it,” Skipper says. “And said, ‘Hey, we’re in this together.’ I think that tells you a lot about a person real quick.”
Skipper popped in at guard in a game against Las Vegas last season. He’s a backup. It’s in his job description to pop in, but Goff knows what it can do to a person to be told you’re not good enough, you’re not up for this, you aren’t trustworthy. He also knows what it can do for a person to be told you are. He looked at Skipper in the huddle and told him: “No one else I’d rather have here right now than you.”
IT’S FOOTBALL’S UNLIKELIEST love story: When Detroit fans look at Goff, they see a reflection of themselves.
“We were losers for years,” Megan says. “Just like he was.”
Jared Goff was the quarterback no one wanted playing for a city and team no one wanted. Jared Goff is the quarterback redefining himself, playing for a city and team redefining themselves too.
“I love these people, man,” Goff said recently as, yes, a horde of Lions fans at Ford Field chanted his name. “They love me. I’ve found a new home here.”
The fans chant his name in the stadium and throughout the state. They put his face on billboards lining the highways into Detroit. They decree him as their favorite son. All Detroit lifers have ever wanted was something to believe in, and Goff believes in himself, and Campbell, and Johnson, and his team, and the city. So they’ve joined him. They’ve allowed themselves to consider the possibility that good times, the best times, super times, are ahead.
When the Tigers won the World Series in 1968, Bert walked out of the club he owned, made his way downtown and didn’t come back for three days. He was caught up in the energy, carried away by the joy of his city. He’s been waiting, ready for these Lions to carry him away his whole life.
THE STORY OF Megan Stefanski’s devotion to the Detroit Lions is a story of faith in the face of loss. It is a Detroit story.
“A lot of people know of loss,” she says. “You’ll hear that from every Lions fan. ‘My dad. My grandpa.’ Everybody has …”
Everybody has someone who can’t see all of this is what she can’t bring herself to say. Everybody has someone they wish could be here to see it. Yooperman never knew this era and its riches: the quarterback who turned himself around, the team he had a hand in turning around. But if they finally do what they haven’t before, Megan will make sure her father is with her for that too.
“If the Lions are there,” she says, “we’ll take his ashes to the Super Bowl.”
