Jared Goff had helped the Rams reach the Super Bowl. He had helped them win a playoff game with a broken thumb, just a few weeks ago. And now he was being shipped out of town?
Without any forewarning?
Goff said he was "extremely disappointed and upset" last Saturday night upon learning of the trade that sent him from the Rams to the Lions, in an interview Tuesday with the LA Times. Of course he was.
Then he got a call from an old friend, the man who pounded the table for the Rams to draft Goff first overall in 2016: new Lions GM Brad Holmes. Despair quickly turned into excitement.
"You get to be somewhere you’re believed in," he said. "That clearly wasn’t the case here anymore, and when that happened, I don’t know."
Goff said his chat with the Lions, about 30 minutes after the trade went down, “is what made me go, ‘oh my God, this is how it’s supposed to feel. This makes me feel great,’ how excited they were, how fired up they were.”
In Detroit, Goff is reuniting with two former Rams execs who watched his success in LA up close: Holmes and Ray Agnew, the club's former director of pro personnel who's now the Lions' assistant GM. He's also joining a head coach in Dan Campbell who believes in Goff as Detroit's quarterback of the future.
Pretty far cry from LA, where Goff had fallen out of favor with head coach Sean McVay and GM Les Snead after signing a four-year, $134 million contract ahead of the 2019 season. So even if it hurt initially, Goff knows the trade could be for the best.
“As time has gone on over the last few days, and even the end of that night, it becomes a positive and you start to feel really good about yourself again," he said. "You start to feel, I don’t want to say relief is the word, but you start to feel happy, grateful, ready for a new opportunity. That’s the biggest feeling that I was overcome with that night, and even in the days following."
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Goff will almost certainly be the Lions' starting quarterback in Week 1 next season. Where it goes from there is up to him. He's signed through 2024 for $33.5 million per year, tied with Aaron Rodgers for the fifth-highest QB salary in the NFL, but the Lions could release him after the 2022 season at zero cost.
For Goff, those are future concerns. And what happened with the Rams is in the past, even if it feels like yesterday. Eventually, he said he hopes to have 'some conversations' with the team about where it went wrong, for his own understanding if nothing else. For now, Goff is happy their decision led him to a new opportunity.
“Ultimately, they wanted to go in a different direction," he said. "As the quarterback, as the guy that’s at arguably the most important position on the field, if you’re in a place that you’re not wanted and they want to move on from you, the feeling’s mutual.
“You don’t want to be in the wrong place. It became increasingly clear that was the case. [The trade] is something that I’m hopeful is going to be so good for my career."