Jared Goff‘s first season with the Detroit Lions also happened to be Dan Campbell‘s first season with the Detroit Lions. It was a season where quite a few growing pains took place as the Lions finished with a 3-13-1 record. Goff and company followed that up with a 1-6 start to the 2022 season, giving them plenty of reasons to stop believing. But the coaches and players never stopped believing that things would soon turn around and that they would start winning a lot of football games. Following Sunday’s big win over the Minnesota Vikings, Goff spoke to reporters about why the players kept believing.
What did Jared Goff say about the Lions’ players believing?
After the conclusion of Sunday’s win over the Vikings, Jared Goff spoke to Albert Breer of Sports Illustrated and he explained why he and the players never stopped believing.
“I can speak offensively, just the O-line we have, the receivers we have, and the running backs we have are as good as I’ve been around,” Jared Goff says. “And I’ve been on some good offenses. And those guys together, it’s like, O.K., it’s going to come. Like, We have the pieces, we have the players, we believe in [coordinator] Ben [Johnson]. He’s calling good things during training camp and early on in the season, and it was even when we were struggling.
“That belief was never lost, ever.”
Jared Goff added that the Lions went from believing they COULD win to believing they WOULD win on a weekly basis.
“We were losing these close games against really good teams and we were playing good football,” Goff says. “We really were [in] a lot of those games that we lost early on. I mean, there’s a world and a scenario where we could have a plus record right now if we finished off some of those games early on. But that was kind of the learning curve that we had to go through.
And I was just saying to the guys, winning isn’t, like, some magic potion. It’s not something someone’s going to say in a team meeting. It’s really just emphasizing doing your job every single play, one play at a time and maybe be a little bit more focused in the fourth quarter to do your job. But we don’t need somebody to be Superman. We don’t need anybody to come out of nowhere and be a player that they aren’t. Just be who you are, do your job and things will fall where they may.
“For the last six weeks, we’ve done a pretty good job of that.”
Up next for Goff and the Lions is an important road matchup against the New York Jets.
