Lions quarterback Jared Goff will miss Sunday’s game at Cleveland due to an oblique injury. He’s also likely to miss the Thanksgiving game against the Bears.
Via Adam Schefter of ESPN.com, it’s “considered unlikely” that Goff will be able to face the Bears for Detroit’s annual home game on the fourth Thursday in November.
It’s Tim Boyle at Cleveland today for the 0-8-1 Lions. And it could be Boyle on Thursday, too.
Presumably, Boyle has the ability to wrest the job from Goff, given that Goff has not been overly impressive this season. In nine starts, he has eight touchdown passes, six interceptions, and zero wins.
He’s 0-15-1 without Sean McVay as his head coach. It’s possible that he won’t get a chance to change that again this year. Then, the question becomes whether he’ll start for the Lions or anyone else in 2022.
Goff has a fully-guaranteed roster bonus of $15.5 million for 2022, and a non-guaranteed base salary of $10.65 million. Cutting him with a post-June 1 designation would result in a $20.5 million charge in 2022, with another $10 million in 2023. Trading or cutting him before June 1 (specifically, cutting him without a post-June 1 designation) will result in $30.5 million in dead money next year.
That’s one of the reasons why the Lions got two first-round picks and a third-round pick from the Rams in the Matthew Stafford trade. Although L.A. surely hoped to conceal the fact that the Goff contract became a Brock Osweiler-style hot potato for which they had to surrender draft capital in order to unload it, the truth is that the Rams gave more to the Lions in order to take on Goff’s horrible contract.
Then the Lions decided, instead of just eating the money and moving on, to give Goff a go. Frankly, they shouldn’t be surprised with what they got.