12 minutes to go. Need to run clock. Normally a team goes to their running game, but it had become obvious that Craig Reynolds and the OL weren’t going to be able to just exert their will on the Bucs.
Lo and behold, a team that needed to burn clock would time and time again let Jared Goff drop back and throw the ball. At first I thought “this is dangerous, why not just run for as much ground and time as you can, and punt it when you have to?”
But Goff (and ARSB) just kept coming up with 1st down after 1st down through the air. It seemed for a while as if Tampa Bay could do nothing to stop them. Eventually they did, but by then the clock damage had been done.
With only 4 minutes now left, TB just wasn’t going to get two TD’s. Or any.
I was very impressed with Goff’s cool accuracy when he knew he didn’t have a run game. And just as impressed with how much confidence BJ and the staff had in letting him close it out through the air that way.
The old saying is “when you throw the ball 3 things can happen, and 2 of them are bad”. Not today.
“Completed 30 of his 44 pass attempts for 352 yards and two touchdowns. Four of the incompletions were dropped and three others were deliberately thrown away. Goff has mastered the balance of being aggressive and careful at the same time.”
If this board knew that the Lions were going to run for 40 yards against the Bucs, the vast majority would have called it a loss. I’ve heard that you can win with Goff but not because of Goff. I’ve also heard that there are a lot of people who can probably eat a bag of dicks.
There were multiple times this game where I was thinking after an early wobbler “here we go, this is why I have trouble trusting Goff, he can’t handle the blitzes, he cracks under the pressure”…but he found his sea legs and he just kept plugging away. That is exactly the Goff we’ll need in the playoffs and he played one hell of a game.