Given that the Rams’ 2021 trade for Matthew Stafford was so immediately successful, it would be easy for fans to forget that many experts in the media were quick to deride Les Snead and Sean McVay for the deal when it happened. Five seasons later, Stafford has won a Super Bowl and an MVP award, stayed relatively healthy and available, and led the Rams to the playoffs four times.
On the flip side of the deal, the Detroit Lions, who were generally considered to be the “winners” of the trade by acquiring
two first round picks and Jared Goff, just missed the playoffs for the third time in the last five years.
It would be fair to say that both franchises got what they wanted out of the deal, but at the time of the trade, it was the Rams who were criticized for overrating the difference between Stafford and Goff, while underrating the value of first round picks.
Who wins now?
The Athletic’s Sheil Kapadia gave the Rams a “C” for the trade back in 2021, but said the Lions deserved an “A”. He thought the ceiling for the Stafford-McVay pairing was high, but that the defense would have a hard time replicating their success from the past season:
Having said that, the move comes with plenty of risk. Defensive performance doesn’t always carry over year to year. The Rams’ defense is built on the talents of Donald and Ramsey. Those two players combined to miss just one regular-season game in 2020. But in the NFC divisional round, we caught a glimpse of what the Rams look like when one of them (in this case, Donald) is less than 100 percent. It wasn’t pretty.
Los Angeles also lost defensive coordinator Brandon Staley to the Chargers. And it could lose key free agents like safety John Johnson and edge rusher Leonard Floyd. The defense could be good in 2021, but there are no guarantees that it will be as good as it was in 2020.
The Lions understandably got a near-perfect grade because they got two first round picks for a quarterback who didn’t want to be there anymore.
The point is Detroit has optionality. Having Goff’s contract on their books is not going to kill them. And they were able to pocket a pair of first-round picks. They did well in this trade by any objective measure.
It’s not hard to see why the Lions got an ‘A’ back in 2021 or how they’ve been able to turn the trade into a franchise turnaround since then. Under the leadership of head coach Dan Campbell and general manager Brad Holmes — a disciple of Snead over about two decades in the Rams front office — the Lions have done a phenomenal job of drafting and using their first round picks. That includes RB Jahmyr Gibbs and WR Jameson Williams, the two players that Detroit was able to get after maneuvering with the first rounders they got for Stafford.
To their credit, Detroit improved from 3 wins to 9 wins to 12 wins to 15 wins in the four seasons after trading Stafford to the Rams.
However, the loss of key members of the coaching staff in 2025 — ironic, given the points Kapadia made about Staley in 2021 — hurt the Lions last season, and they dropped to 9-8, missing the playoffs for the first time since 2022.
And Goff, who has managed to revive his career in Detroit and made the Pro Bowl in three of the last four years, has done exactly what the Lions wanted from him when the trade happened. He’s basically the same player that he was when the Rams went to the Super Bowl in 2018, which is both a positive and a negative:
Goff is a game manager who can help a talented team reach the playoffs. But Stafford is a game changer, the type who can win MVP and put a team on his back during a playoff run. In Detroit’s best season, going 15-2 in 2024, Goff choked and threw three interceptions in an ugly divisional round playoff loss to the Commanders.
The trade grade didn’t adequately reflect the probability that Jared Goff will never be good enough to lead a team to a Super Bowl championship, whereas Matthew Stafford never had the chance to play with a team as good as the Rams.
Other trade grades
Over at NFL.com, the Lions won the trade according to Marc Sessler, giving the Lions an A and the Rams a B+, calling them “reckless”.
PFF’s Brad Spielberger also felt the Lions won the trade:
It’s hard to look at this deal and think that the Detroit Lions have not come out ahead. The Rams’ supporting cast, excellent early in the McVay/Goff marriage, has atrophied some over the past few years, which has led to Goff’s decline. The defense, the league’s best in 2020, lost its coordinator this offseason when Brandon Staley moved across town to be with the Chargers. The situation that Stafford falls into, while better than the one he had in Detroit, might not yield the results that this trade implies it will. The betting markets appear to be betting into Los Angeles as a result of this move, but we would be inclined to take the other side if offered.
It’s amazing to look back on how the trade was discussed, almost as if many analysts were rooting for the Rams to regress because it validated the idea that Detroit had ‘won’ the deal.
Too much NFL analysis today is centered around salary cap spreadsheets and draft capital instead of the actual objective: winning championships. The Rams understood that an elite quarterback could raise their ceiling more than two future first-round picks ever could.
The Sporting News also gave the Lions an A and the Rams a B-, arguing that Stafford was not much better than Goff:
Stafford gives the Rams a higher floor and keeps them as a strong playoff contender, but in the big picture of trying to get back to the Super Bowl, has an overrated ceiling. The Rams, who don’t have a first-round pick again in 2021, gave up two more over the next two years.
Stats have also played a huge part in misleading so many “experts” and fans into believing that one quarterback is as good as another quarterback because of their production. Goff’s stats in the past four years are legitimately insane, throwing 130 touchdowns and only 39 interceptions with a passer rating of 103.4, genuinely some of the best stats in history.
And yet anybody who has watched him play knows that he’s not as talented as Stafford, doesn’t have the deep ball accuracy or talent, doesn’t have the arm angles or improvisational skills as Stafford, and would have never helped receivers like Cooper Kupp and Puka Nacua put up Hall of Fame-caliber seasons like Stafford. The comparison shows how stats alone can sometimes obscure the difference between a productive quarterback and a transformational one.
Even RamsWire gave the Lions a better grade than the Rams.
It’s hard to argue against the Lions doing what was right for their team because Stafford asked to be traded and then Holmes was able to turn him into a foundation that would put Detroit on a Super Bowl path for the first time in franchise history.
However, the angle that the Rams had to get an upgrade at quarterback or risk wasting McVay and Aaron Donald’s value to a team at the time was overlooked too many times. Five years later, the Rams are still a Super Bowl contender. That’s value that teams almost never get from two first round picks, including the Lions.
