Jared Goff has been there. He’s seen a team go from bad to good in a hurry. So even as the Lions lost six of their first seven, even as Dan Campbell’s record dipped to an unsightly 4-19-1 over his first 24 games as Detroit’s coach, and even as the defense struggled to get its footing and the offense went up and down, Goff could scroll back in his mental Rolodex to find optimism.
The quarterback has been on good teams. The Lions, even at 1–6, were close to being one.
That idea, of course, might have been a tougher sell on some players—mostly those who’d been in Detroit long enough to get that feeling—than others. But even so, it persisted with all the guys who were punching the clock for Campbell. And eventually, that belief would actually amount to something, even if no one outside could see that coming.
“You never know how long the bad times are going to last, I guess,” Goff said shortly after getting home early Sunday evening. “The work we were putting in and the players we have and the coaches we have, we always believed in it. It was just a matter of time. In some ways, we were like,
“A lot of it is trust and belief, no doubt.”
On Sunday, against a 10–2 Vikings team, it looked like a lot more than just that. It looked like a group that ran the ball efficiently, with 134 yards on the afternoon, and kept it rolling when the opposing defense knew it was coming. It looked like a team capable of big, explosive plays for scores on offense, the same as it was grinding its way down the field more methodically. It looked like a resourceful defense, somehow capable of mitigating damage even as Kirk Cousins threw for 425 yards.
It looked like the Lions were what they thought they were back in October, when it looked to all of us like the wheels were coming off. It looked to them like a group about to hit the gas. That, quite simply, is a good team.
“It’s an unshakable group of players and coaches,” Campbell says via text. “They never wavered—none of them!”
So they knew it all along. With a fifth win in six games, this one 34–23 over a Vikings team looking to clinch the NFC North on Sunday, now the rest of us know, too.
