Lions GM Brad Holmes 'very, very proud' of Jared Goff, rejects 'lazy' bridge quarterback narrative

Roughly two and a half years after he was shipped off to what was supposed to be a wasteland in Detroit, Jared Goff is playing the best football of his career.

The Lions are 4-1, and Goff has played a key part in Detroit's strong start. Since Week 9 of 2022, Detroit has gone 12-3 with Goff as its starter, with the quarterback posting a fantastic 26-4 touchdown-to-interception ratio. He ranks in the top 10 in completion percentage, passing yards and passing touchdowns through five weeks in 2023.

If you hopped into a time machine, traveled back to spring of 2021 and told anyone this, they'd laugh in your face -- for a long time. That's how far Goff has come with the Lions, morphing from expected bridge quarterback to possible long-term answer under center.

"Very, very proud of Jared," Lions general manager Brad Holmes said Wednesday on The Insiders on NFL+. "Again, like you said, I never thought of him of just a bridge or stop-gap or whatever just because I was all around the success he had early in his career in L.A. (with the Rams). It seems like when he got here (Detroit) when the trade was made that all that success was forgotten about. It was just this narrative that he was just a bridge. I always thought that was a lazy narrative. ... Just because of, I guess, the narrative of how the trade went down and all of that.

"In '21, he was in a very difficult situation. We didn't have a lot of talent around him, we didn't have much money to spend in free agency, we had a lot of injuries. I mean we had to make a midseason OC (offensive coordinator) change. It was a lot. So, then everybody just hogged on to the narrative of the trade. Then what he had to go through in '21. It was like 'he can't be the quarterback' but no, we