Lions HC insinuates that Rams babied QB Jared Goff

Quarterback Jared Goff is enjoying something of a renaissance with the Detroit Lions, which prompted a pretty bold claim from the team’s head coach.

Dan Campbell said Tuesday that he believes Goff is a better quarterback now than he was with the Los Angeles Rams, arguing that the Lions ask Goff to do more offensively than Sean McVay and the Rams did.

“I think what you’re seeing is a guy who just put his head down and went back to work, worked on what he could, tried to improve on what he could. And now his confidence has really grown,” Campbell said of Goff, via Myles Simmons of Pro Football Talk. “And along the way, he’s really matured as a quarterback. He’s a better quarterback than he was there [in Los Angeles], in my opinion, because he can do more things. He’s mentally on it.

“We ask him to do a lot more, in my opinion, than what they were actually doing out there. 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 then a lot of the things — and watching him, really, over the last two years … we put a lot of things on him where I’m not so sure that’s ultimately what they were doing.”

This is a pretty big claim, both because of McVay’s offensive reputation and the fact that Goff did quarterback the Rams to a Super Bowl appearance. Of course, Goff has made it pretty clear that he holds some ill will toward how the Rams handled trading him for Matthew Stafford, so if he is Campbell’s primary source on the matter, the assessment of Los Angeles inevitably might not be all that positive.

While the Lions are at least preparing a potential Goff successor, they appear to have plenty of faith in him at this juncture. Expectations are high heading into the 2023 season, though, and Goff he has work to do to back up Campbell’s confidence.