One of the largest transactions in NFL history was made when Lions general manager Brad Holmes was hired in Detroit. It involved sending Matthew Stafford to Los Angeles in exchange for Jared Goff and two first-round draft picks. It appeared that the Rams had won the deal when Stafford and the team won the Super Bowl a year later. It appears to have been a win-win transaction for both sides, especially now that the Lions have won consecutive NFC North titles.
While some believed that Goff’s contract was merely a throw-in on the transaction to make it work for salary cap purposes, Holmes, who was employed by the Rams prior to joining the Lions, stated on PFT Live during the league meeting that he had always had faith in Goff.
Holmes remarked of Goff, “I’ve always said, just because I knew him so intimately, I had more optimism than probably the outside world did.” “I was right there with that early success and all the work we did with him coming out in the draft. I always maintained that when I was with the Rams, folks were ready to just write them off after we lost the Super Bowl. I was extremely optimistic that he would continue to grow, mature, and improve because, as I was thinking, he was still very young and had a lot of life left in him. You don’t have a crystal ball, once more. You never.And I was like, look, he’s so young and he still has so much left in them that, I had a lot of optimism that he was going to continue to develop and continue to mature and continue to get better. Again, you don’t have a crystal ball. You never know how far it’s going to go, but I’m so very happy for him because he’s put all the work in.”
It was difficult, Holmes admitted, to trade a quarterback to his former team in his first season as general manager of the Lions and then watch his former team win the Super Bowl while his new team finished 3-13-1. However, he expressed his happiness for his former Rams colleagues, Kevin Demoff, Sean McVay, and Les Snead, and claimed that they all credited him with helping them get there. He also congratulated him on his work with the Lions.
Holmes stated, “I had a pretty good idea that they were going to do some big things with Stafford at the helm when we did the big trade, the Goff-Stafford trade.” “It hurt a little bit, but those guys are amazing—Les, Sean, and Kevin—and they did reach out to me to express their gratitude for my efforts throughout the entire process, but they managed to finish the job.”
- The Lions have performed well over the past two seasons, and if Goff guides them to the team’s Super Bowl this season, Holmes’ trust in Goff will have been the key to their success.
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