Breaking down some of the worst overreactions from the Detroit Lions’ loss to the Washington Commanders.
When a season as highly-hyped as the 2024 Detroit Lions sees such a devastating and sudden ending, it’s bound to draw anger. The Lions—Super Bowl favorites for most of the year—didn’t win the Super Bowl. They didn’t even get to the NFC Championship game or win a playoff game. For fans and players alike, it’s as upsetting as it is unacceptable.
With frustration still coursing through the veins of the fanbase—and some NFL writers —there have been some emotionally-charged, irrational takes on the 2024 Detroit Lions. While I certainly went through my own grieving period, I believe we’ve had enough time to see things a little more clearly now. Let’s put to bed some of the bad opinions out there in the wake of Detroit’s shocking loss to the Washington Commanders.
Jared Goff is not good enough to win a Super Bowl
This take is born out of what frustrates me most about sports discourse: an overanalysis of postseason play. Yes, players and coaches are all immortalized by how they perform in championship moments, but the truth of the matter is there is an intense overreaction based on a very small sample size of games. Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson are constantly criticized for not getting it done in the playoffs, despite the fact that both are irrefutably top-five quarterbacks in the game and both have gotten their teams to conference championship games.
Goff has been treated similarly his entire career. And while he doesn’t have the resumé of both those players (and it’s not particularly close), he’s also proven he can have postseason success. Goff has been to a pair of conference championship games himself, and he would’ve been in two Super Bowls had his receivers not let him down in San Francisco last year. Moreover, those near-championship runs were all on the shoulders of offenses he was running. Here’s the DVOA (an overall efficiency metric) of the playoff teams he was part of:
2017 Rams (0-1 in playoffs)
- First in points scored, 12th points against
2018 Rams (2-1 in playoffs, lost in Super Bowl
- Second in points scored, 20th in points against
2020 Rams (1-1 in playoffs, lost in Divisional Round)
- 22nd in points scored, 1st in points against
2023 Lions (2-1 in playoffs, lost in Conference Championship)
- Fifth in points, 23rd in points against
2024 Lions (0-1 in playoffs, lost in Divisional Round)
- First in points, seventh in points against
In all but one of Goff’s postseason runs, he’s headed a top-five offense. In two of his five playoffs, he was carrying bottom-half defenses, and you could argue it was really three with the condition Detroit’s defense was by the end of the 2024 season.
Now, Goff’s performance in the playoffs certainly doesn’t look great when looking at the overall stats. In 10 games, here’s Goff’s statline:
61.2% completion percentage, 2,450 yards, 9 TDs, 5 INTs, 85.1 passer rating
That certainly isn’t good enough, but it’s also an incredibly small sample size. Last year, Goff put together an impressive three-game run in the postseason. He went 77-of-111 (69.4%) for 837 yards, 4 TDs, 0 INTs, and a 103.3 passer rating. His 52.1 percent success rate that postseason was better than the three other quarterbacks in the conference championship games: Patrick Mahomes (51.1%), Lamar Jackson (46.8%), and Brock Purdy (45.5%).
Maybe I’m naïve, but if a quarterback can put up near-MVP numbers all season, produce one of the best postseasons of any quarterback in 2023, and has carried his team to the cusp of a Super Bowl on two different occasions, I believe that’s enough proof that if/when things align, he’s more than enough.
The Lions need a mobile quarterback to win it all
I can at least understand this viewpoint. Just looking at this year’s conference title games, you’ll find four quarterbacks whose mobility is a part of their game: Mahomes, Allen, Jalen Hurts, and Jayden Daniels. I won’t deny that the extra element of mobility presents a very big challenge to opposing defenses and gives offenses a better chance—particularly against playoff-level defenses in this league. Without a doubt, it helps.
But, again, Goff and the Lions led the No. 1 scoring offense in the league without the threat of a rushing quarterback. They were a half away from the Super Bowl last year without it. Two years before that, pocket passer Matthew Stafford won the Super Bowl.
Is it easier to win a Super Bowl with a dual-threat quarterback? Undoubtedly. But the Lions are better off trying to build a good, healthy defense to complement Goff than starting over at the toughest position to find a generational talent.
Ben Johnson, Aaron Glenn were too distracted by head coaching opportunities
This is just a ridiculous insinuation. Last year, both Johnson and Glenn took coaching interviews in the middle of a game week, and helped the Lions win a pair of playoff games. This year, they took those interviews during the team’s bye week, when Dan Campbell had excused the rest of the coaches from the building. They had no team to prepare for at the time.
I obviously cannot say for sure whether the coaches were thinking about their head coaching opportunities during Commanders week, but there is nothing to suggest that was the case. Johnson answered a few questions about the topic before shutting the media down and saying his focus was on this week. And Glenn—a former Pro Bowler in this league—couldn’t get as far as he has as a coach and player if he wasn’t able to compartmentalize when and where his team needed his focus. It’s quite frankly insulting to suggest these coaches—who have given their players and fellow coaches their all for four years—suddenly became selfish in what may be their final moments as Lions coaches.
The Lions are too aggressive to win playoff football
This is obviously a narrative that started after last year’s NFC Championship game, after analysts and fans misdirected their anger at Dan Campbell for his fourth down aggression—and not at the players for failing to execute in those high-stakes moments. Ever since, it seems like everyone is just waiting for Campbell’s team to slip up in another high-pressure situation to refresh this narrative.
Campbell didn’t do anything overtly aggressive against the Commanders, but that didn’t stop The Athletic’s Mike Sando from questioning whether he has the chops to win playoff football. In his column, he curiously pins the third-and-1 empty-set passing play that resulted in a strip sack on Campbell, as well as the Jameson Williams trick play that ended in an interception. He even tried to argue that some of Goff’s forced throws in the game was a result of trickle down aggression—the Lions quarterback taking cues from his aggressive head coach.
Let me tackles those in reverse order. For one, Goff has been one of the most reserved, careful quarterbacks in football. He rarely pushes the ball downfield (he ranked 40/43 in average air yards) and rarely tries to throw into tight windows. If anything, Campbell has been overly conservative in coaching Goff to prioritize taking care of the ball vs. forcing the ball.
The Williams trick play was bad. There is no defending it both in terms of its design and the timing of the call. Sando says Campbell could have overturned the decision to call it—and he’s right—but part of what makes him a great head coach is allowing to coordinators to be who they are. And we also cannot praise Campbell and Johnson for their execution of trick plays all season only to complain about their overaggression the one time it doesn’t work. Any suggestion trick plays don’t work in the postseason is provenly false, as evidenced by the success of Detroit’s other two trick plays on the day, their successful reverse in the NFC Championship game, and endless other examples from across the NFL.
Finally, there’s the third-and-1 call. While I don’t love telegraphing the pass with an empty backfield, the truth of the matter is the Lions got the exact look they wanted. They had Amon-Ra St. Brown with a linebacker in coverage, but the All-Pro receiver just slipped, and protection broke down way too quickly. It was supposed to be just a quick, three-step drop and fire, and everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. Execution, again, was to blame more than the play call.
And while you may wonder, “Why take the risk? Just run the ball and keep the drive alive?” It’s the same reasoning that people make for taking a shot on second-and-1. You have the defense in a vulnerable position, and because the Lions were fully intending on going for it from fourth-and-1 (Campbell admitted as much on Monday), Detroit has a shot to get an explosive play with minimal risk. Unfortunately, that minimal risk just so happened to manifest itself.
