John Niyo: Lions, Goff proving a point with prolific offense

ALLEN PARK, Mich. — It ain’t easy being perfect. Or anything close to it, for that matter.

So forgive Jared Goff for bristling at the suggestion it might be. Just because the Lions’ high-powered offense is making things look easy this season — running up scores and racking up records — doesn’t make it so.

“No, none of this is easy,” Goff said Wednesday, as he and his teammates got back to work after rolling up their eighth consecutive win Sunday with a 52-6 rout of Jacksonville. “I keep getting that question, and it makes me a little bit upset. I got it on the radio the other day. I got it after the game. I know we scored 52, but it's freakin’ hard in this league.

“We've been playing well. We've been doing a lot of good things on offense. But by no means would I ever characterize anything we're doing as easy or without effort. It's a lot of hard work, and a lot of time. … It’s never easy.”

He’s right, of course. But it’s only going to get harder to convince everyone else of that if they keep putting up pinball scores the way they have through 10 games this season.

The Lions aren’t just leading the NFL in scoring at 33.6 points per game. They’re drawing comparisons to some of the most prolific offenses in NFL history, both statistically and anecdotally. At their current clip, they’d finish as the highest-scoring team since the 2018 Kansas City Chiefs, who averaged 35.3 points that season and rank No. 4 on the league’s all-time list.

Not coincidentally, that Chiefs squad is the one Colts defensive coordinator Gus Bradley brought up this week, too, as he talked about preparing to face Goff & Co. on Sunday in Indianapolis.

“I mean, if they don’t score every series, they’re upset,” said Bradley, who was coaching the Chargers’ defense in the AFC West against the Chiefs from 2017-20. “I don’t know how else to say it: Their quarterback is playing very efficient, they’re protecting well, they’re getting explosive plays in the run and the pass game, and they can put points up in a hurry.”

Overmatched Jaguars

On Sunday, against an overmatched Jacksonville team, that meant scoring touchdowns on their first seven possessions, with the shortest of those scoring drives covering 64 yards. Goff finished his day early in the fourth quarter, having completed 24-of-29 passes for 412 yards, four touchdowns and a perfect 158.3 passer rating. Afterward, the Lions’ quarterback was asked about the possibility this offense could be one of the NFL’s best ever.

“Yeah, we’ve got some work to do still, but we’ve certainly got that capability,” he said. “That’s something we’ve talked about in the offseason is history and how great we can be. And we know the group we have, we know what our capabilities are, and today was a good example of that.”

It was also another example of something Campbell was talking about even before training camp. He spoke about the Lions’ rare continuity — all three of his coordinators have been with him since Day 1 in Detroit — and how that raised expectations for this team “playing and thinking in Level 401” thanks to a graduate-level grasp of the systems, particularly on offense.

You can see it in a diverse and dynamic run game, where the Lions’ dominant offensive line plays largely error-free from down to down, paving the way for the NFL’s best backfield duo. Jahmyr Gibbs and David Montgomery are the first tandem in history to each have over 800 scrimmage yards and nine or more touchdowns through the first 10 games in a season.

You can see it in the passing attack, too, as Goff’s career-best efficiency numbers — including a 73.0-percent completion rate and a 112.1 passer rating — are a function of time to throw and talented targets, but also of time on task. And whether it’s Goff’s comfort level in Johnson’s scheme or his confidence in and connection with players like Amon-Ra St. Brown, who has caught 51 of the last 54 passes thrown his way, the end result is the same.

As Goff put it after Sunday’s game, “It felt as if Ben could kind of call anything, and we were going to make it work.”

Midseason workload

But all work and no play isn’t how this goes, either. So you can even see that “Level 401” in the way Campbell structures his team’s schedule here in mid-November. For the third straight week, the Lions’ head coach held a walkthrough instead of a practice on Wednesday, easing his players’ midseason workload — they’re about to play four games in a span of 18 days — without any worries over stunting their growth or preparing for Sunday’s game.

“The core of this team is older now, more mature — we’re not old, but we’ve played a lot of football together — and so they kind of know what to expect,” Campbell explained. “So I feel like it’s something we can handle. And if you can handle it, it does help.”

It helped last week, he says, because his team came back Thursday and “we were smokin’ — I mean, smokin’ — at practice. It was intense, it was violent without having pads on, (and then) we played the way we practiced” in routing the Jaguars.

They practiced what they’d preached, too. Johnson asked one of the players in an offensive team meeting Saturday what happened the last time the Lions played the Jaguars, a 40-14 blowout in December 2022. And according to St. Brown, when that player correctly replied the Lions hadn't punted once in that game, "Ben goes, ‘All right, let’s do that again.’”

They did do it again, of course. But not without a little nudge from Campbell, who opted against a short field-goal attempt with his team up 35-6 late in the third quarter. Instead, Campbell had the offense go for it on fourth-and-2 from the 14. Goff converted with a pass to Tim Patrick, then tossed a touchdown pass to Brock Wright on the very next play, and the word "ruthless" came to mind.

“We wanted to come out and stay on the gas the whole game, no matter what happened,” Goff said. “We talked about it all week — holding our standard, and exceeding it, and trying to push ourselves.”

That’s not what the good teams do. It’s what the great teams do. And as these Lions keep pushing themselves “to see what limits we can reach,” Goff said, well, it is pretty easy to see the possibilities here.

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