Sunday night represents a chance for Goff to get his revenge on Rams
No matter what temperature you like it at, revenge is dish that's best served, well, served at all. Detroit Lions quarterback Jared Goff has the opportunity to serve it harder than most ever get the opportunity to serve it on Sunday. While Goff is carving out a really good career in Detroit, he was once […]
No matter what temperature you like it at, revenge is dish that's best served, well, served at all. Detroit Lions quarterback Jared Goff has the opportunity to serve it harder than most ever get the opportunity to serve it on Sunday.
While Goff is carving out a really good career in Detroit, he was once the golden boy for another team until that team very publicly threw him away nearly overnight. Let's go back in time and take a look at how this breakup went down.
Back in early 2021 Sean McVay benched Jared Goff and went with John Wolford to be the Rams starting quarterback in their wild card matchup with the Seahawks. Goff wound up playing in that game and would help lead the Rams to the win after Wolford got hurt during the game. You could tell that the McVay and Goff relationship was starting to fall apart.
It wasn't long until Goff started to get the Josh Rosen treatment from McVay and the Rams. Stuff like "Jared Goff is a Ram right now." That's what Ram's GM Les Snead said days before the Rams traded him to Detroit for Matthew Stafford.
The way the trade went down made matters so much worse. Days after the Rams made the "he's our guy" comment, Sean McVay and his wife were in Mexico with Matthew Stafford and his wife in Mexico. Both parties say they just so happened to meet there and it wasn't a trip together for what it's worth. McVay drunkenly called Snead that night and talked him into a trade for Stafford. Everything happened so fast that McVay never even had a chance to talk to Goff before the deal happened. Something that he now says he wished he would have done.
That brings us to Sunday when the Lions host the Rams at Ford Field. The storyline that everyone keeps bringing up is that this is Matthew Stafford's return to Ford Field and this is Stafford's chance to win a playoff game at Ford Field as if the Super Bowl wasn't a big enough deal or something. Not nearly enough people are discussing that this is Jared Goff's chance to show that the Ram's didn't just throw away a subpar quarterback. They threw away a guy that's proven that he's one of the top 10 quarterbacks in the NFL in the last two seasons.
Even while both parties talk about closure and how they both have it, this feels more like a situation in which the phrase 'forgive, but never forget' comes into play. Whether anyone wants to say it out loud or not, there's no way that this game doesn't mean more to Jared Goff than anyone.
We'll see what happens on the field on Sunday night. Jared Goff could either go out there and play the best game he's ever played in his career and the Lions will win, or he'll crumble under the pressure of revenge and the Lions could possibly lose. If sports has shown us anything over time, it's that, at least in this world, revenge pays off way more often than not. See you Sunday.
Did the Lions offense hit on their preseason stat projections?
All the way back in August we decided to do something new. We took the Lions offense and we attempted to predict the statistical output at quarterback, receivers, tight ends and running backs. The plan was always to come back after Week 18 and see how close we got. Here we are. Let's take a look […]
