old issue–Goff & McVay

From How the Jared Goff-Ben Johnson partnership has elevated both of them — and the Lions

Dan Pompei

https://theathletic.com/4640839/2023/06/28/lions-jared-goff-ben-johnson/?access_token=3564

Over the previous 31 games, Goff had thrown 38 interceptions — most in the NFL. Goff’s limitations, the narrative went, had shackled Sean McVay, his brilliant coach.

Ben Johnson, Lions’s offensive coordinator, had questions. As did Goff.

Zac Taylor had answers.

The head coach of the Bengals had been Goff’s position coach with the Rams in 2018. He also worked with Johnson on the Dolphins staff for four years.

Taylor texted Johnson, telling him how much he enjoyed his time with Goff. He said he’s coachable and even fun to be with. The QB is the same guy every day, Taylor texted, always ready to work and learn, and he operates without ego.

Taylor kept going, addressing the negativity surrounding Goff, telling Johnson he didn’t buy into it. To Taylor, Goff was not on a downward trajectory, nor had he plateaued. Taylor thought Goff’s best was still ahead.

“Super talented,” Taylor told Johnson. “He’s one of those guys who can make every throw in the book. High-level player.”

Next, Taylor messaged Goff, telling him he would love working with Johnson and that the coach would be great for him. He said even though Johnson wasn’t his position coach, Goff could pick his brain and trust him. Then he called Johnson one of the smartest people he had ever been around.

Taylor saw something in Goff others did not. And he knew something about Johnson that hardly anyone else could.

So now, the tight ends coach and quarterback were entwined.

The son of a former major league catcher, Goff set 26 records at Cal, the school that gave the NFL Aaron Rodgers, Steve Bartkowski and Craig Morton. He was the first pick of the 2016 draft by the Rams, who traded two first-round picks, two seconds and two thirds to position themselves to take him (they also received a fourth and a sixth in return).

As a rookie, Goff lost all seven of his starts. In his second season, when McVay started pulling the strings, Goff led the Rams to the playoffs for the first time in 13 years, was voted most improved player and became a Pro Bowler. It was more of the same in Year 3 as at 24 years old, he became the youngest quarterback to win an NFC Championship Game before losing to the Patriots in the Super Bowl. His fellow NFL players ranked him the 32nd-best player in the league.

This seemed like Camelot for Goff, who outperformed Stafford and most other NFL quarterbacks over a two-year span, became a luminary in his home state, began dating Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Christen Harper (they are now engaged to be married) and signed a four-year contract extension with $110 million guaranteed, the most ever at the time.

Attaining, he then learned, was easier than sustaining.

Bill Belichick had disrobed the Rams offense in the Super Bowl, and in the following two seasons, that offense continued to get exposed. Goff couldn’t prevent the unit, which finished third in scoring in 2018, from spiraling to 22nd in 2020. His disappointments and McVay’s impatience were an assault on Goff’s confidence.

By the time the Rams reached the playoffs in 2020, McVay’s enchantment with Goff clearly had faded. In the Rams’ wild-card game, backup John Wolford, who had spent the previous season with the Arizona Hotshots of the Alliance of American Football, was given his first NFL start. Goff was coming off thumb surgery but was healthy enough to play and entered the game after Wolford was injured in the first quarter.

By then, Goff was a former Ram in waiting.

In Detroit, Goff played as if his Rams experience was in his head, failing to win in his first 10 starts and turning over the ball 10 times. There were excruciating losses to the Ravens, Vikings and, of course, the Rams. In an October loss to the Eagles, fans booed him and chanted for his unheralded backup — “We want (David) Blough!”

“It was the hardest year I’ve had professionally, coming off of a lot of hard events in my football life,” Goff says. “And I think it took me a while to admit that. But it was very hard.”

Goff still was coming to terms with being traded, and he played like it. “There was emotion there for sure,” he says. “You try to avoid it and block it out, but it’s kind of impossible. You spent so much time with those people, and then things don’t happen the way you envisioned.”

As Goff struggled, frustration layered on doubt, which layered on insecurity. Goff volunteers to be blamed for his difficult start with the Lions, but the offensive issues, as always, were gray.

The team thought two of its starting wide receivers would be Breshad Perriman, who was cut before the season started, and Tyrell Williams, who never played after the first game. The offense and the play calling were the domain of Anthony Lynn, whose vision was not entirely aligned with the vision of head coach Dan Campbell.

Clarity and direction were casualties of change, in the opinion of Johnson.

“When you have 11 guys on the field, I think it’s really important they understand the intent of what you’re trying to do each play,” Johnson says. “To move the ball, get first downs and score touchdowns, you need all 11 to be aligned with the same mission in mind. It took more time than I think all of us wanted for that to come together.”

Jared Goff has returned to form in Detroit, sparking the Lions offense under the direction of offensive coordinator Ben Johnson. (Gregory Shamus / Getty Images)
There were times when Goff needed someone to vent to, and he went to the tight ends coach. Mostly, Goff was disturbed about the urgency, intensity and focus with which the offense was preparing, Johnson remembers.

“He was always a guy, when things were hard, that I could confide in,” Goff says of Johnson. “Sometimes he had no answer — he’d sit there and listen to me, and that would be the end of it. Sometimes he’d give me a little bit of help. But mostly, he was just a good resource of knowledge and somebody I could rely on.”

After eight games, Campbell took over play calling and gave Johnson more game-planning responsibilities, particularly in the passing game. Goff’s passer rating soared from 85.4 in the first eight games to 101.8 in the final nine.

In the latter stages of the season, Goff and Johnson worked together more, and trust continued to take root.

Unlike the resumes of some coaches who have risen rapidly, Johnson’s resume had no rings or crowns.

What it had was failure.

Before last season, the nine NFL offenses he was a part of finished higher than 20th in yards only once — in 2014 the Dolphins ranked 14th.

“You learn,” he says, “from your failures.”

This offseason, Johnson showed his players a photograph of himself from June 2019. He was with his 1-month-old son, Kennedy, and 2-year-old daughter, Emory, looking buff and blissful.

The picture lied.

It was taken during what Johnson says was one of the darkest times of his life.

After the 2018 season, Dolphins head coach Adam Gase was let go. His replacement, Brian Flores, fired Johnson. For nine months, Johnson couldn’t find a job. He was asking himself some hard questions when Lions head coach Matt Patricia fired offensive quality control coach Brian Picucci near the start of the 2019 season.

Patricia didn’t know anything about Johnson, but offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell did. Bevell had worked with Kevin Rogers on the Vikings, and Rogers had worked with Johnson at Boston College. So on a recommendation from Rogers to Bevell, Patricia gave Johnson a chance. To continue doing what he loved, Johnson accepted a six-month contract for $40,000.

After the season, Patricia promoted him to tight ends coach and gave him a significant raise.

When Campbell replaced Patricia, he made Johnson his first official hire. Campbell had worked with Johnson in Miami.

“I knew during that time that he’s a bright coach and a good teacher,” Campbell says. “He was just young.”

It didn’t take long for Goff to see Johnson’s promise either. When Johnson still was the Lions’ tight ends coach, Goff was telling people he thought Johnson was going to be an NFL head coach in the not-too-distant future.

“I’ve been around a handful of great coaches who became head coaches in the league, and he reminded me of them,” says Goff, who played for Matt LaFleur and Kevin O’Connell when they were assistants, in addition to Taylor.

After the 2021 season, Campbell says it was a “no-brainer” to make Johnson offensive coordinator. But first, he talked with Goff, who told him he endorsed Johnson’s promotion.

“They already had somewhat of a relationship,” Campbell says. “And look, when you’ve got the ability (Johnson) does, the passion he does and the ability to communicate, you can’t hide it.”

Johnson was a mathematics and computer science major in college. As an offensive assistant on the Dolphins in 2012, he came up with a software innovation that helped coaches change pictures on situational breakdowns. In the past, wanting to change one image might have meant having to change 100 more. With Johnson’s idea, the pictures were linked together, and one change spiders out to many.

Not many people knew about Johnson’s innovation because another NFL coach, Andy Bischoff, had a similar idea, and he commercialized it. The software Bischoff developed is now used by football teams everywhere. But no one was using it before Johnson.

“We’ve got a lot of guys on our staff who are very appreciative of it,” Taylor says.

Johnson also was ahead of the analytics curve. Taylor remembers Johnson, as a 28-year-old assistant quarterbacks coach in 2014, trying to convince veteran Dolphins coaches Joe Philbin and Bill Lazor to go for it on fourth down more often on their side of the field. That’s a more common strategy now, but then it was football blasphemy.

The people who had worked with Johnson have not been surprised by his rapid ascension, seemingly from nowhere. Johnson, they had learned, was one of those people who knew things he didn’t know.

One weekend early in the offseason of 2022, Johnson was given the rarest of commodities for a coach — freedom.

His wife and kids were traveling to North Carolina to see family. He had an invitation from Taylor to accompany him and other friends to Las Vegas, and a visit to the city without clocks was alluring.

Then Johnson learned Goff also had some freedom that weekend. Johnson backed out of Vegas and scheduled three days with Goff, Friday through Sunday.

By then, Johnson and Campbell had established an offensive foundation of formations and terminology. The rest of the offense would be Johnson’s baby, and he handed it to Goff to cradle.

In about 24 hours over the three days, Johnson and Goff sat in a meeting room surrounded by whiteboards. They watched Rams video of Goff from 2019 and 2020, talked, took notes and drew plays with dry-erase markers. On the first day, they focused on Goff’s favorite pass and run concepts. The second day was devoted to Rams plays Johnson didn’t completely understand. And on the final day, they brainstormed new directions to take the Lions offense and ways to build on what Goff had already mastered.

They ordered Chick-fil-A. Goff took a photo of Johnson with his meal and texted it to Taylor with the message, “Just chick fil a and ball in here.” Taylor responded with a photo of him with a pile of money he had won in Las Vegas.

In different ways, both coaches hit jackpots that weekend. “It was the best thing Jared and I could have done with that time,” Johnson says. “It was special.”

Taylor sent a follow-up text — a picture of Goff from 2018 in an offensive meeting saying cadences. Goff looks as if he didn’t want to be there.

“It’s Jared’s least favorite thing to do,” Taylor says. “So I sent it to Ben and said, ‘Make sure you get Jared in front of the room to deliver the cadences.’”

Taylor was joking, but Johnson’s thrust was the opposite — to eliminate whatever Goff was uncomfortable with.

Before Johnson became an offensive coordinator, he worked with seven play callers in the NFL. Before that, as a college coach, he had two play callers in three seasons and three play callers when he was a walk-on quarterback at North Carolina. One of the lessons he learned from seeing it done so many ways — especially those that didn’t work — is players should be partners.

“That’s where I think the secret sauce is — they have to believe in it,” Johnson says. “If they don’t believe in it, it doesn’t work. But if they believe, it typically does work.”

Goff says one of Johnson’s best qualities is how he listens. “I know anything I say to him will be taken pretty seriously,” Goff says. “He really values my opinion and cares about what I’m saying. That’s huge for a quarterback.”

Johnson’s trust in Goff is evident not just in what he says in interviews but what he says on the sidelines. Goff has significant autonomy at the line of scrimmage, more than most quarterbacks and more than he ever had previously. In the Lions’ “Auto” package, Goff reads the defense and chooses from as many as five plays.

Johnson also has given Goff more responsibility for protections he never had before, though center Frank Ragnow shares the authority. It’s primarily useful for Goff when changing a play, calling a hot or flipping a protection from one side to the other. “It’s a huge piece of his game that is really beginning to excel,” Campbell says.

Johnson and Goff come from disparate backgrounds and are at different stages of life but are bound by their passion for their sport and their mathematical minds.

“I’m a math nerd, and he’s much more of a math nerd than I am,” Goff says. “We both resonate with statistics and percentages and weighing options through the lens of numbers.”

The math nerds can laugh with one another. Johnson has repeatedly challenged Goff, who ran a 4.82 40-yard dash at the combine, to a race. And he wants to do it with the media present. “He’s too scared to do it,” Johnson says.

Johnson, who calls Goff “JG,” claims to be stronger in the weight room. Goff reminds Johnson that the coach is shorter.

At 28, Goff has come to the sweet spot of his quarterback life.

“The more reps you get, the more you can do,” Goff says. “As you grow older, your capacity becomes greater. On top of that, I’m in the prime of my career. I’m as strong as I’ll be as a man. And with more on my plate, it allows me to be extremely in control of everything.”

Cultivated by time, steeled by trials and empowered by Johnson, Goff was the best version of himself yet in 2022. His play led to the Lions ranking fifth in scoring offense and Johnson becoming a head coaching candidate.

After the season, Johnson interviewed for head coaching jobs with the Colts and Texans. He was scheduled to interview with the Panthers, and Jonathan Jones of CBS reported he was the leading candidate, but Johnson backed out and announced he was staying with the Lions.

One of the first people he informed was Goff, who was on a golf trip in Palm Springs, Calif., when he received Johnson’s text. “I was fired up,” Goff says.

Johnson’s decision was influenced by many factors. Finally, he was a part — a significant part — of a team on the rise. Just a year earlier, he would have been content knowing he could be Campbell’s tight ends coach for the rest of his career, as his respect for Campbell is immense. The leadership of the Detroit organization, he thought, is so strong. Coming to Lions headquarters every day was a joy. He felt an allegiance to veterans on the team like Ragnow and Taylor Decker. And he felt loyalty to Lions fans, too.

And then there was Goff. “He’s one of the biggest reasons why I didn’t want to leave,” Johnson says. “I feel we are tied together to a degree. He’s an extension of me, and I’m an extension of him. I’ve told him multiple times his success is my success and vice versa.”

Every day after practice, as most Lions players and employees trickle into the parking lot, Goff finds his way to Johnson’s office. He sits on a brown leather couch, and the two of them watch tape from practice on Johnson’s desktop monitor for about 45 minutes. Goff takes notes on his iPad with his Apple Pencil.

Here, by themselves, as dusk falls and a hush comes over the building, the coach and his quarterback talk about the game that tethers them. And together, they create something special, something hardly anyone thought they could.