When Lions General Manager Brad Holmes got the job in Detroit, he quickly got to work on one of the biggest trades in NFL history: Sending Matthew Stafford to Los Angeles for Jared Goff and two first-round draft picks. A year later, when Stafford won the Super Bowl with the Rams, it looked like the Rams won the trade. Three years later, with the Lions coming off back-to-back NFC North titles, it looks like a trade that both teams won.
Holmes, who worked for the Rams before he got the Lions job, said on PFT Live at the league meeting that while some people thought Goff’s contract was just a throw-in on the trade to make it work for salary cap purposes, Holmes himself always believed in Goff.
“I’ve always said, I had more optimism than probably the outside world did, just because I knew him so intimately well,” Holmes said of Goff. “All the work that we did with him coming out in the draft and all the early success, I was right there with that early success and, I always said when I was with the Rams, when we lost that Super Bowl people ready to really just write them off. 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.”
Holmes acknowledged that in his first year as Lions GM, trading a quarterback to his old team and promptly seeing his old team win the Super Bowl while his new team went 3-13-1, that was tough. But he was happy for his old bosses with the Rams, Les Snead, Sean McVay and Kevin Demoff, and said all of them have given him credit for helping them get there, while also congratulating him for what he’s done with the Lions.
“When we did the big trade, the Goff-Stafford trade, I had a pretty good idea that they…
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