Stafford still looking to get better
Quarterback entering ninth season with Lions, but playoff success has remained elusive
MALLEN PARK, Mich. atthew Stafford is becoming one of the iron men of NFL quarterbacking. The rocket-armed passer hasn’t missed a start for the Detroit Lions since 2010. Now at age 29, Stafford is in his ninth NFL year, in the prime of his career.
The expectation in Southeastern Michigan is the Lions and Stafford are close to another long-term contract extension.
This one will probably make him the NFL’s richest quarterback, in terms of annual salary. His next deal likely will average upwards of US$25 million per year.
And yet, still, here the Lions are, with that old-style figurative scoreboard still showing a rusting, fading, moulding “1” in the “playoff victories since 1958” slot: a 1991 NFC divisional-round win over the visiting Dallas Cowboys.
The Lions franchise has yet to reach a Super Bowl, let alone win one, even though two Detroit-area stadiums have played host to one. Detroit’s last NFL championship came 60 years ago, in 1957.
The Stafford-era Lions have reached the post-season three times in eight years, losing wildcard games at New Orleans (2011), at Dallas (2014) and, this past January, at Seattle.
The 6-foot-3, 226-pound Stafford, the NFL’s No. 1 draft pick in 2009, talked about Detroit’s 26-year playoff-victory drought and more Tuesday following the Lions’ third practice of training camp. Here’s an edited transcript:
Q: Are you leaner this year? More buff? What’s going on?
A: I’m just a couple pounds down from where I normally am. But nothing too crazy. Just trying to be in as good a shape as I can possibly be in.
Young QBs in the NFL talk about needing the game to slow down for them. Does that process still happen for someone like you in your ninth year?
I think you get better and better with experience. When it slows down for guys initially it’s a matter of, I’m no longer worried about what everyone else is doing around me. I think at this point in my career it’s, how can I pick up every single little detail the defence is about to show me, and get us in the absolute best play? And that’s when it gets to be a lot of fun, when you’re so comfortable in what you’re about to do … and you’re just going to town.
How are you a different quarterback from three or four years ago?
Aw, man. I think through experience you become a better decision-maker. I think I am that. And this offence really suits me — the ability to kind of just play at the line of scrimmage, to get in and out of plays and just take what the defence is giving us. That’s something that three or four years ago I didn’t have a ton of experience with, and probably would not have been as comfortable with, maybe.
Since last we spoke four years ago, you haven’t missed a start. You’re like an iron man now, and not that you haven’t been hurt. But do you attribute that to anything?
Like you said, everybody kind of gets dinged up, gets hurt. It’s just whether or not you’re lucky enough to be able to play through it. My first couple of years, I couldn’t play through those (such as his separated shoulder in 2010). In 2011 I broke a finger. Last year I messed up a finger. I’ve had ankles and ribs and all that kind of stuff, but you can play through them. In my first couple of years I was just unlucky in that I couldn’t. Everybody across the league is in the same boat I’m in — they get dinged up. There are a bunch of iron men out there.
What’s the one thing you need, or this franchise needs, to get over the playoff hump?
I think if you just sit there and start looking for that, you’re in a bad place. More than anything you’ve just got to trust and embrace in the process of getting better. If you sit there and go, ‘This is the one thing we need to achieve to get us over the hump,’ you’re in a bad place. But if you just say, ‘Hey, we need to do this little bit better today, this little bit better the next day’ … now you’re fully encompassing ways to get better as a team. That’s really what you have to do.