Jared Goff has always been something of a tale of two quarterbacks, as Lions legend Herman Moore recently described. The Goff playing without pressure from the defense is consistently one of the NFL’s better quarterbacks. The Goff under pressure, well, not so much…
That was certainly the case in Detroit’s Week 2 loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Goff posted some solid production with 307 passing yards, completing 34 of his 55 pass attempts. However, he did not throw a touchdown pass and did get picked twice, though one of those absolutely should have been defensive pass interference (the box score doesn’t care).
Part of the problem in the Lions loss, and a big reason why they only scored 16 points despite posting over 450 total yards, was that Goff had a very rough day when pressured by the Tampa Bay defense. The analytics folks behind Next Gen Stats revealed just how much Goff sputtered when pressured in Week 2.
Sandwiched between nuggets on Jalen Hurts and Jayden Daniels in the Zebra Technologies weekly newsletter is this unsavory tidbit on Goff,
Jared Goff went 9/17 for 117 yards, 2 INTs, and had a 35.3 passer rating when under pressure in the Lions’ home loss vs. Tampa Bay.
That’s a rough split from the overall statistics, and that’s also something that has been fairly characteristic of Goff’s NFL career.