Jared Goff’s advanced stats on NFL ‘perfect game’ are mind-blowing

Eamon Horwedel-Imagn Images

Jared Goff isn’t overrated or underrated; he’s just the perfect QB for Lions,

If you can’t win quarterback of the week after making history on Monday Night Football, there’s literally nothing left to do to get recognition. And Jared Goff knows a lot about what it’s like to not get credit for wins, something that’s usually very hard to do as a quarterback, let alone one who was the No. 1 pick in the draft.

Goff could be the first No. 1 pick quarterback in history who has avoided being overrated.

Completion Percentage Over Expectation, of CPOE for short, is a stat that measures how much higher or lower than an expected completion percentage that a quarterback manages to complete based on the expected difficulty of each pass. So if the NFL’s analytics department at Next Gen Stats thinks that the expected completion percentage of a game is 60% and the quarterback ends up completing 70%, he has a CPOE of +10%.

Well, in going 18-of-18 against the Seattle Seahawks on Monday night, Goff has set the 2024 season-best mark at a CPOE of +21.9%, the first game this season over 21%. Not totally surprising for a player who completed 100% of his passes, not all of which were gimmes when you look at Goff’s pass chart from Next Gen Stats:

In fact, according to Next Gen Stats, the chances that a quarterback would go 18-of-18 on these throws is 0.69%, or 1-in-145.

In other words, if you ran this game 144 times (a quarterback would need to start for eight and a half years to make that many starts!) there’s no guarantee that he’d go 18-of-18.

Not only did Goff complete all 18 attempts, the Lions gained 292 yards on those passes—Goff’s 16.2 yards per attempt is also the highest mark in the NFL for any game by a QB this season—with two touchdowns, and Amon-Ra St. Brown capped off the perfect night with a sweet little touchdown pass of his own to Goff.

Goff gained 0.88 EPA per dropback, the highest mark for any QB in any game this season. And the Lions ran play action 62% of the time, which again, is the most that any team has done that in any game this season.

And the history of the NFL’s games with a 100% completion rate is basically over once you talk about Jared Goff.

Kurt Warner, about six predecessors to Jared Goff in the Rams organization, once went 10-of-10 for 115 yards with the Cardinals in 2005. There isn’t a modern day example that makes sense to compete to Goff as far as 100% completion games go, because it’s just that rare.

But if you set the mark down to one incompletion, Jared Goff doesn’t really even come that close to the best game in history.

In 2019, Drew Brees went 29-of-30 for 307 yards and four touchdowns in a win over the Colts. In 2018, Philip Rivers went 28-of-29 for 259 yards and three touchdowns in a win over the Cardinals. Marcus Mariota once went 22-of-23; Brock Purdy once went 20-of-21; and Gardner Minshew once went 19-of-20.

Perhaps the only real difference is that Jared Goff did throw an incompletion in the game, but it was called off due to offsetting penalties. That’s why Goff’s completion percentage is perfect. It didn’t hurt that the Lions ran so much play action, or that Goff went 8-of-8 against the blitz for 203 yards and 12-of-12 on play action for 229 yards. When he had at least 2.5 seconds to throw (Goff had the 10th-best single-game time to throw of any QB this season), Goff went 15-of-15 for 250 yards and both of his passing touchdowns.

So was it the most accurate game in history? In a way, maybe. But what’s really impressive about Goff’s night is that facing Seahawks head coach and defensive coordinator Mike Macdonald, arguably the best in the business as of the last two years, he had an answer for everything that Seattle tried to use to stop him and nothing worked. Spinning him in the wrong direction didn’t even work:

It helped that Goff has an elite offensive line, play caller, and weapons around him.

It helped that the Seahawks were shorthanded, sitting five starters out of their front seven, and then losing Pro Bowl safety Julian Love in the first half of the game.

It helped that DK Metcalf fumbled the ball back to the Lions in the first quarter and set Goff up with a drive at Seattle’s 14, allowing for a quick and easy 14-0 lead at home.

But no quarterback has success without help, luck, and opportunity. Goff had seemingly started to lose a grip on opportunity around the time he was traded to Detroit in 2021, and then it slipped further out of his hands when the Lions won three games in his first season there, but through perseverance—and yes, help—Goff’s doing so well this season that he might finally start to get…Overrated.

Finally!

As the managing editor at Turf Show Times, I saw the fan reaction to trading Goff for Matthew Stafford in 2021, and without discrediting the small contingent of people left at the time who still loved Goff, the majority of folks were expecting the Lions to simply cut him and absorb the cap hit. That’s how low Jared Goff’s stock was three years ago: Even the fans who knew him the best and watched him play for the Rams in the Super Bowl thought he had become a camp body.

So much so, that the popular narrative than and now was that the Rams had to give the Lions an extra first-round pick just so that they’d take Jared Goff off of their hands.

It’s nothing short of miraculous that the Rams won a Super Bowl with Stafford so that they never have to re-visit that question. But there will still always be people, including that small contingent of fans who never wanted Goff to be replaced in the first place, who will say that L.A.’s biggest mistake was putting the blame on the quarterback.

Three years later, Goff is richer than he’s ever been, having signed a new extension that pays $53 million per season, and he’s starting for the team that most people now call the best in the NFC. It’s about as far away from the Rams as you could be, and I’m guessing Goff wouldn’t have it any other way.

He’s been overrated. He’s been underrated. If Jared Goff can just consistently be called a really good starting quarterback, the player who just completed every pass will have finally COMPLETED the cycle.