The Riverside Press-Enterprise
STEADY AS HE GOES
Former Rams QB Goff has calmly led Lions to the NFC Championship Game
Jared Goff is California cool, staying easy breezy in good times and bad.
The veteran quarterback, who is from the San Francisco Bay Area, has led the Detroit Lions to the most success they’ve had in generations with two playoff victories in one postseason for the first time since winning the 1957 NFL title.
And yet, he has refused to get too emotionally high about that feat.
Goff also would not get too low — at least publicly — when the Lions won just three games in his debut season with them in 2021 and followed up the next season with a 1-6 start.
“He’s the captain of the ship,” Detroit center Frank Ragnow said Wednesday.
“He’s as steady as it gets.”
The Lions will lean on Goff to stay the course for at least another week.
He is heading home to play the 49ers, about an hour from his hometown and alma mater, in the NFC Championship Game on Sunday.
Goff is from Novato, attended nearby Marin Catholic High and starred at Cal before the Rams drafted him No. 1 overall in 2016.
He helped the Rams reach the Super Bowl in his third season, they traded him away two years later and were eliminated by the castaway in a wild-card game earlier this month.
Outside of the Lions’ organization, Goff was viewed as a stopgap quarterback when he was acquired along with a pair of firstround picks and a third-round selection nearly three years ago for Matthew Stafford.
Goff has been much more, validating the faith Lions general manager Brad Holmes had in him when dealing a popular star for a player his former employer didn’t want.
He got in a groove during the 2022 season, lifting the team to eight wins over their final 10 games and stayed in it during much of Detroit’s breakthrough season in which the franchise won its first division title in three decades and ended an NFL record nine-game postseason losing streak that lasted 32 years.
Goff threw 383 straight passes without an interception, a mistake-free run that