Stafford trade indicates Lions ready to launch a slow rebuild
super bowl? We’ll get to that this week, don’t you worry about that. Today, we’re talking mostly about the super trade that went down Saturday night between the detroit Lions and the Los Angeles rams.
That blockbuster deal, which is unofficial, will send a former No. 1 overall quarterback (Matthew Stafford, 2009) to the rams for a former No. 1 overall quarterback (Jared Goff, 2016) along with two future first-round draft picks (in 2022 and 2023) plus a third-round pick this year.
This, according to a slew of reports.
understand that no off-season NFL trade can become official until the start of the 2021 league year on March 17. So if either side gets cold feet over the next seven weeks, the other can’t say or do diddly about it.
In reality, it’s a done deal. Who are the winners and losers? As with any blockbuster, we won’t really know for a few years.
What are the predominant shortterm takeaways? Ah, we can go there now. My top three:
1. What the Lions really wanted
The Lions and Stafford informed the world a week ago they agreed it was in each party’s best interest for the club to trade him this off-season.
That it immediately followed reports saying the Lions had signed head coach dan Campbell to a sixyear contract — uncommonly long for a first-time NFL head coach without any other known suitors — probably was no coincidence.
The lengthy term screamed to Stafford — and to us all — that the Lions finally are serious about reinventing their long-wobbly football-operation wheels via a proper, thorough, slow rebuild.
Amid the ashes of yet another failed regime, and with the club now having gone more than six decades without so much as reaching a single NFL championship game, let alone winning one, new principal Lions owner Sheila Ford Hamp perhaps has bought into the worthy idea that no team can keep starting over with new coach and/ or front-office regimes every three to four years and hope to win consistently.
All of which means a team embracing a slow rebuild is no place for a quarterback who turns 33 this coming Sunday.
That the Lions got so much for Stafford lends credence to reports that a slew of teams
— including San Francisco, Indianapolis, Washington, Carolina and denver — were interested.
The cost for the three lofty picks detroit received from
Los Angeles wasn’t just Stafford. It was Goff.
I’d bet the Lions would have far preferred to receive just the three picks in exchange for Stafford. but no way the rams would have sent those without boxing up Goff and the way-overpriced contract he signed in September 2019, too. Particularly, the remaining four years and us$104 million in salaries and bonuses.
The Lions’ new football hierarchy — led by executive VP and GM brad Holmes and big-picture executive Chris Spielman — must reason if Goff works as a bridge Qb until some new phenom (that is, a new Stafford) can be drafted, great. If not, hey, they’re slow rebuilding.
2. Goff wasn’t worth it
How can anyone not conclude as much?
because who trades a No. 1 overall quarterback (Goff ) just five years after surrendering a boatload of picks (including the following year’s first-rounder) for the right to move up that high from No. 15 overall?
Indeed, Goff might have led the rams to an NFC championship two seasons ago but head coach Sean Mcvay publicly refused to stand by him anymore following the rams’ offensively feeble divisional-round playoff loss two weeks ago at Green bay.
The argument easily can be made that Goff has only looked good, at best, in seasons (2017, 2018 and 2020) and games in which the rams could run successfully.
Without the aid of a potent rushing attack, however, Goff struggled. Often big time. Seldom did his rams ever win because he singlehandedly passed them to victory, which we routinely see from top 10 NFL passers.
Was Goff a bust? No. but was he worth the No. 1 overall draft pick? No way.
3. Is Stafford worth it?
In detroit, Stafford consistently performed among the top 10 or 15 passers in the league over the past 12 seasons. He threw for 45,000 yards and 144 touchdowns.
He needed more help that never came.
Annual roster holes always were plentiful, especially in the absence of a complementary, load-lightening (for Stafford) rushing attack. Once — even once — did coaches of a Stafford-quarterbacked Lions team go into a game going, “you know, we won’t be able to pass much today, so today we’ll just ride our run game to victory?”
No.
The Lions won only 74 of the 168 games Stafford started from 2009-20, including three playoff losses. They’d have won a lot fewer if it weren’t for Stafford; 31 of those 74 victories — or an insane 42 per cent — required him engineering a fourth-quarter comeback.
The respect Stafford garnered around the league, and not just for his top-shelf throwing abilities, is lost on many if not most (understandably) impatient and quick-tocriticize Lions fans.
What’s more, this ironman bled, broke and bent for this franchise. Since 2011 the only starts he missed (eight) came in the last half of the 2019 season. yeah, he was worth it.
The rams might conclude likewise about this trade.