Jared Goff has become an elite QB and deserves a big, new contract from Detroit Lions

Bridge quarterback. Placeholder. Trade afterthought. A poor man’s Matt Ryan.

Jared Goff has been described in all these ways. But one of ways the Detroit Lions quarterback is rarely if ever described is “elite.”

Until now. Because elite is the most accurate term to describe a guy who has led the Lions to a 5-1 start as they start to pull away from the rest of the division while they’re tied for the best record in the NFL.

Elite is how you describe a guy who has thrown 27 touchdowns and four interceptions in his past 17 games. This year, he’s on pace for 31 TDs and nine picks, which is definitely in MVP territory, even if Dan Campbell doesn’t know what defines someone playing at an “MVP level.”

“Yeah, look, I don’t know what MVP is or isn’t these days,” the Lions coach said Wednesday. “But I know this: He’s playing at a very high level, he’s making the throws that are there, he’s seeing the field and he’s exactly what we need and he’s doing exactly what we’re asking him to do.”

Then Campbell paid Goff another compliment, maybe the highest he could, by calling him an “evolving quarterback.”

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“He’s developing,” Campbell said. “He’s been developing and he just keeps getting a little bit better, little bit better.

“And that’s a credit to him. It’s a credit to the coaches, but it’s a credit to him. I mean, he’s somebody that does believe he’s always got more to give and he’s growing.”

Campbell likes to praise players for getting better because it suggests they aren’t finished products who have nowhere to go but down. With Goff, it’s true. Since he arrived in 2021 as a Sean McVay castoff, Goff has progressed steadily, if not always spectacularly. He struggled under Anthony Lynn’s play-calling but soon found his way under Campbell and Ben Johnson.

I didn’t see Goff as the long-term answer for the Lions. I thought he would be serviceable until they could find the right successor in the draft. I even applauded the Lions for drafting Hendon Hooker in the third round this year, because I didn’t want Goff to become the next recipient of the Matthew Stafford-Ford Family Quarterback Scholarship.

I appreciated the struggle Goff went through in Los Angeles, but I still wanted him to earn his spot and his salary and not feel entitled with the Lions. It worried me when Brad Holmes praised Goff in January and said “it's a lot easier to get worse at quarterback than to get better at quarterback.” Here we go again, I thought. Might as well call him Jared Stafford.

Then the Hooker pick happened, which signaled this regime wasn’t going to be blindly loyal and accommodating to Goff the way previous regimes were to Stafford. Goff never flinched. And he’s gotten even better. In his third season, he has wildly exceeded my expectations and I would bet those of many other people.

But not Campbell’s.

“No,” he said. “No, I mean I’m extremely pleased, but I never saw necessarily a cap on this guy. I didn’t see a — the only thing you know that he’s not is this tremendous running quarterback, mobile, whatever.

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“And he’s got enough to move and maneuver and he breaks out on some runs. But everything else it’s all a matter of, hey, here it is. He’s protected, he sees it. And so, no, I’m not surprised. I knew he was tough, knew he was resilient and he’s just — he’s grown.”

What’s clear is that all that growth is going to come at a price for the Lions. If Goff, 29, keeps playing at this elite level and keeps taking this franchise where it hasn’t been for a very long time, the Lions will have to give Goff a pricey extension before the final year of his contract in 2024.

In September, Holmes only went as far as to say he’d had “good dialogue” with Goff’s agent on contract talks. So I asked Campbell for an update Wednesday, knowing full well coaches enjoy talking about players’ contracts during the season as much as kids like talking about the dentist on Halloween.

But I asked Campbell anyway if Goff’s superlative play has sped up the team’s process for working on Goff’s extension.

“I can’t even go there,” he said. “I’m not — I don’t want to get into contract talk, this, what we have, what we haven’t. All I can tell you is he’s playing at a high level, and he needs to be with us. So I know that.”

But what if Johnson leaves? Will Goff turn into a pumpkin?

I’m not as worried about that anymore because Goff has proved, with McVay and then Campbell and now Johnson, that he can be an elite quarterback with the right coach. I hardly think he’ll turn into trash the minute Johnson takes the Bears or Chargers job.

And here’s the good news if you believe in Goff and want him stay. I hear he’s happy and feels valued by the organization. I don’t know if that will necessarily make it easier for the Lions to re-sign him, but it can’t hurt.

“I think, yeah, I’ve done some good things,” Goff said when I asked if he had exceeded his own expectations.

And is he playing better now than he did with the Rams, who he took the Super Bowl?

“Yeah,” he said without hesitation. “Yeah. Much.”

The end of Goff’s tenure with the Rams was ugly. But he kept it classy and told the L.A. Times that even after everything he still took “extreme pride” in helping rebuild the Rams and bringing “L.A. football back to prominence.”

I asked Goff if he felt he’s brought football back to prominence in Detroit, where fanaticism for the Lions is at its highest peak in 30 years.

“Yeah, again, it’s so early,” he said. “We’ve done some good things and yeah, we feel the excitement from the city and from the fans and it’s fun. Certainly, home games right now are on a different level than I’ve experienced and now some of the away games have been on a different level than I’ve experienced as well.

“So yeah, we feel that energy and we certainly feel our fans behind us right now and it gives us that wind in our sails to kind of keep going and hopefully stay on this trajectory. But it’s a lot work, man. It’s a lot of hard work and we’re so early on and I know everyone’s so excited, as are we, but we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

Here’s another way you can describe Goff after he led the Lions to victory in Tampa: NFC Offensive Player of the Week. Or maybe something even more impressive: a rich man’s Ryan Fitzpatrick.

Contact Carlos Monarrez: cmonarrez@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @cmonarrez.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit Lions need to pay up for Jared Goff, who's now an elite QB