We’ve officially reached the “player rankings” portion of the offseason, and it was kicked off this week by a particularly offensive quarterback ranking by friends-of-the-show, ESPN’s Mina Kimes and Ben Solak.
This week, they did a NFL quarterback draft. To be clear, this isn’t a standard ranking of the NFL passers, it’s a draft where they each take turns in picking the next most talented quarterback. Their process was guided by three principles for the exercise:
- They are drafting these quarterbacks based on their expectations for the next three seasons
- Each players’ contract does not figure into their rankigns
- These players are taken based on overall talent, not taking into account what scheme or cast of teammates they currently play under
Given all of those parameters, Jared
Goff was taken 14th overall (by Solak). That’s behind NFC North quarterbacks Caleb Williams (#8) and Jordan Love (#9). Their reasoning for having Goff so low? Mainly, his inability to handle pressure.
“When Goff was pressured [last season], he died,” Solak said. “When he was unpressured, he was pretty solid relative to what I thought he’d be post-Ben Johnson. Second-highest delta in terms of EPA per dropback from pressure to non-pressure.”
On this week’s Midweek Mailbag, Erik Schlitt and I talk about why Jared Goff continues to get disrespected, overlooked, and undervalued in rankings like this. As much as we both respect Kimes and Solak, we do feel like they missed the mark here, and a lot of it is based on results over what makes a quarterback actually good. Of course, even if you were to just go by results, Goff has produced arguably top-five numbers in most basic passing stats.
Erik and I begin that discussion around the 53:10-mark of the audio podcast, and the 1:44:43 mark of the YouTube live stream. Other topics on this week’s podcast, in order of discussion:
- What unit needs to stay healthy for the Lions to win 12+ games?
- Are the Lions no longer a “stop the run first” defense?
- Why did the run defense struggle down the stretch?
- How will the running back snaps be distributed in 2026?
- What does getting Sam LaPorta back mean for the Lions offense?
- Is Detroit done adding to their OL and DL?
- What is the latest on the Rod Wood replacement search?
- What’s it like to deal with an antagonistic coach or player in the media/
- Does the history of DBs returning from Achilles injuries bode poorly for Brian Branch.
Check out the latest episode using the Spotify embed below or by searching “Pride of Detroit” on your favorite podcasting platform.
As always, get some bonus content from each week’s episode by checking out the replay of our live stream over at our YouTube channel and Twitch page.
As a reminder, we’re trying to hit 20,000 subscribers on YouTube before the start of the season, so help us out and give our channel a follow!
