The Eagles said they found an aspect of Jared Goff’s throwing motion to exploit. Goff isn’t sweating it.
After Jordan Davis and Jalen Carter combined for five batted-down passes in the Eagles’ 16-9 defeat of the Lions last Sunday night and then said they took advantage of the low trajectory of Goff's release, Goff said Wednesday that he's not thinking about it "at all."
"If it continues to happen, sure, you would certainly look at something," said Goff. "But right now, I consider that an outlier."
Davis, who had three of Philly's bat-downs, said that after studying the Lions' quarterback on film, "we knew that Goff kind of throws at an angle. You just want to take advantage of that." Carter, who had the other two, noted that Goff has a low arc release, so "if I see him about to release, I’m going to put my hands up."
Goff said he heard about the Eagles' comments from "one of our coaches," but otherwise paid them no mind. Asked about Carter's assessment, Goff said, "They did a good job. Whatever it was, they did a good job. Tip your cap."
Dan Campbell said Monday that "you can tell they were just reading his eyes, pushed as far as they could push, and then once they couldn’t push any (further), read his eyes and then match the hand. Something they worked on, and really, we have not had that problem here that I can think of since I’ve been here."
To Campbell's point, Goff, 6'4, hasn't been especially susceptible to batted passes in his career. He was the victim of just five in the first nine games of this season, per PFF, and eight all of last season. He hadn't had more than two in a game since Week 1 of 2023.
Campbell said he could have prepared his offensive linemen better in practice last week to handle Philly's bat-down attempts and that Goff could have tried "changing your arm angle on a couple things, knowing they’re just staring at you."
"It’s all correctable," said Campbell. "Im not worried about it moving forward, but I certainly could have made a better emphasis on it last week.”
To counter defensive linemen that might try to mirror what the Eagles did in the future, Goff said Tuesday that "there’s certain ways you can anticipate where their hands are going to be and try to avoid that, but that’s hard. That’s really hard to do in the moment."
"But there’s certain things that you can do to get them off of the scent of a quick-game throw or the ball coming out of your hands that quickly," he said. "And typically when they get one, they’re looking for the second one; they get the second one, they’re looking for the third one. So it’s a little bit of a domino effect there."
It was an all-around ugly day for the Lions' offense, Goff in particular. He completed just 14 of 37 passes for a career-low completion rate. As for what he learned from watching the tape?
"Gotta do better in certain areas and be able to put the ball where I want," he said.