Jared Goff wasn't the problem with the Lions' offense against the Buccaneers

Leave it to some Detroit Lions fans to just ruin the party for everyone. The Lions' win over the Bucs on Monday night was super impressive. They just went out there and beat a 5-1 team with a group of guys you've never heard of. So it's a bit annoying to hear 97.1 The Ticket in the morning and hear fans doing more complaining than celebrating.

The bulk of those complaints comes against the quarterback Jared Goff. Look, I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that Goff had a good game. For the most part, he didn't. But . . .

Jared Goff's struggles tell a very small percentage of the story of why the Lions' offense didn't have their best stuff

To start, there's this idea that the Lions are just gonna drop a forty burger on everyone every week. They had a chance to do that because the Lions' defense afforded them an opportunity, but this Bucs' defense is no slouch. No at all. In fact, aside from the Packers, this was the best defense this team faced all year.

Let's also consider that this is what games between these two teams look like. This was thier fourth matchup, and the Lions have been low scoring in each of them. They've put up 20, 31, 16, and 24 points in those games. I don't know why anyone was shocked that they didn't blow this team out. Goff has also never put up big numbers on this team.

Jared Goff's stats against the Buccaneers in the last four matchups

• 114 completions out of 172 attempts
• 67.2 completion percentage
• 1,189 passing yards
• 5 touchdowns
• 3 interceptions

This has been pretty much what every quarterback in the league looks like against this Bucs team. They're a good team. They did a good job of bringing pressure with 17, and they got to Goff four times. Some of those pressures came on beating guys like David Montgomery and Brock Wright.

On top of that, the Bucs took Sam LaPorta and Jameson Williams off the field. This was a defensive strategy that was similar to what the Bengals did. They wanted to keep everything in front of them and take the explosive play off the board. They did that. The Lions didn't have any passes of 20-plus air yards in this game. So that took a level of the offense out of play.

Goff certainly made matters worse for himself on some plays. I don't know what he was trying to accomplish on his interception, and he tried the spin-out thing again and which led to a sack. Other than that, he completed 69 percent of passes, which is nice. He threw for nearly 300 yards, and he put his running backs in good positions to do things. It was aggravating that Detroit's offense couldn't blow out the Bucs, but this was not a problem of Jared Goff being super bad. It was the problem of this being a good team with a good defense.