Detroit Lions Make $204.5million Move for Surprising Quarterback to replace Goff.

 

The Detroit Lions wrapped up their final preseason game of the 2024-25 season by beating the Pittsburgh Steelers on Saturday, August 24, in a 24-17 victory. Now, the powers at be will have to decide on their 53-man roster, and that roster is already tight. Ahead of the final preseason game, head coach Dan Campbell said there were only “five or six” spots still available on the team’s final roster, so there’s stiff competition to snag those final placements. Now, NFL experts and analysts are coming out with their predictions for the 53-man roster, and one writer has a wild projection for what Campbell and Brad Holmes will do to fill their final backup quarterback slots.

NFL Expert Thinks the Detroit Lions May Bring on a New Backup Quarterback
In his final Detroit Lions 53-man roster projection heading into 2024 regular season, published August 24, Brad Berreman of SideLionReport.com discusses who he thinks will, and won’t, make the cut. For the three quarterback spots, Berreman picked Jared Goff, Hendon Hooker and a quarterback “to be named.”

While some analysts and experts took Nate Sudfeld not playing in the final preseason game as a sign that he would be the main backup quarterback to Goff, Berreman has a different take. Instead, he thinks Detroit is going to look elsewhere for their third quarterback.

 

“Campbell has said Nate Sudfeld has a leg up on Hooker in the battle for the No. 2 spot on the depth chart here, which isn’t an ideal scenario the Lions should be embracing under any circumstance,” Berreman said. “Sudfeld also didn’t play against the Steelers, prompting Golden Tate, the former Lions’ wide receiver working the Detroit telecast as an analyst, to assume he must be the No. 2 quarterback.”

 

Berremen added that he’s being “bold” and going “outside the box” by suggesting “a more credible, experienced backup will be brought in. Then, Sudfeld can officially start looking at whatever his next job will be (it shouldn’t be taking up a spot anywhere on an NFL roster anymore). We’ve seen the Lions make late changes to their depth chart behind Goff before, and they should be open to doing it again if they don’t have full faith in Hooker yet.”

 

Some NFL Analysts Think Nate Sudfeld Will Stay in Detroit
While Berreman thinks Sundeld’s time in Detroit may be over, other NFL analysis and writers think he’s going to be the guy right behind Goff.

“Nate Sudfeld not appearing against the Steelers all but solidified his spot on the roster as the team’s backup quarterback behind veteran Jared Goff,” John Maakaron of Sports Illustrated wrote in an August 24th feature.

Jeremy Reisman of Pride of Detroit doesn’t totally commit to Sudfeld making the roster, but he does state that, “Not only did Sudfeld rest during the preseason finale, he also got a pretty significant endorsement from coach Dan Campbell earlier in the week.”

Reisman is referring to a statement Campbell made about Sudfeld after the Lions’ August 17 preseason victory over the Kansas City Chiefs.

“Ultimately you need to know, you have to have conviction that whoever that guy is going to be able to keep this ship afloat,” Campbell said via Pride of Detroit. “And what we know about Hooker is: Hooker is a young developing quarterback and he needs reps and he needs time. I do know that. And Nate, right now, has the upper hand because he’s played more. He’s been in it more, he’s seen it more. And so with that, that would tell you there’s a good chance you could keep three (quarterbacks on the 53-man roster). Am I going to say that’s 100 percent certain right now? No. But that’s kind of what you look at.”

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Pedal to the Medal: Lions Franchise Speeding Toward First Super Bowl Appearance..

Like the city they call home, the Lions know what it’s like to struggle—and how satisfying a self-engineered renaissance can be.

 

In the beginning, the bishop’s altar was covered with a pile of discarded sofa cushions, shoeboxes, plastic decorative flowers, lighting fixtures and other bagged trash. Squatters were sleeping in the choir loft and the wood that comprised the white, ornate archways was stripped and chewed away, resembling the outer layer of a diseased oak tree. In the basement, an ankle-high river of brown sludge expanded with each rainfall and snowstorm that seeped into the building through the holes in the collapsed roof.

 

The place on Buena Vista Avenue smelled of wet clothes, dead animals and mold. Bishop Michael Martin purchased the property with the blessing of the Gospel Tabernacle deacons and trustees for $4,900 at a Detroit city auction 20 months ago, unaware that he’d eventually need to remove more than 70 dumpsters full of crumbling brick, warped boards, shorted wire, animal feces and cracked plaster.

Martin’s children now proudly walk the city’s revitalized waterfront and FaceTime him from its promenade. The narrative that Detroit has been saved, touched by the hands of billionaires who own roughly 70% of downtown office space and have renovated several city landmarks, resonates deeply. But no one was coming to rescue the church out here on the West Side. All Martin and his 200 parishioners knew was that the first time they heard a radio playing through the rot and debris, gospel music flowed through the building’s bones and it sounded like church.

Says Martin with a smile, “We’re used to operating on faith.”

 

 

Day after day, starting with the 2017 season, Taylor Decker discovered that it was possible to come to work as the left tackle of the Detroit Lions and function at a high level … while also being wholly absorbed by feelings of anger and mistrust.

Decker slogged through each practice, tamping down his own aches and pains in the shadow of the $500,000 hill that then head coach Matt Patricia had built on the edge of a practice field at the team’s facility in Allen Park. Meant as an ode to toughness, it looked more like a poorly hidden septic system. After practice the Lions would go, up and down the slope, a jog to nowhere. Offensive lineman Halapoulivaati Vaitai sprained his foot there. Frank Ragnow, the team’s center, referred to it as a landmark in what felt like a war story.

Decker walked into work every morning carrying frustrations over things far outside his control. “I would see things like, Why is that guy doing this? It wasn’t aligning with what I thought we should do to get to our goal,” he says. “But I was overloading myself.”

Detroit drafted Decker with the 16th pick in 2016 and made the playoffs in his rookie season. The following year, after a 9–7 campaign, executives fired coach Jim Caldwell and life as a Lions fan got much worse. The franchise’s descent-into-darkness period commenced. 2017: last place in the NFC North. Same in ’18 … and ’19 … and Patricia, Caldwell’s replacement, didn’t even last through 2020, when the team surrendered 142 more points than it scored. Of course, Detroit fans weren’t unfamiliar with a bleak football narrative. In 2008 and ’09 the Lions won twice, combined, logging two of the worst statistical seasons in history. Fans needed time capsules to find the franchise’s last postseason victory (1991), which heading into last season was the league’s longest active drought.

Decker found himself snapping at teammates for elementary mistakes—“f—, this guy false started three days in a row!” Now he understands that many of those miscues resulted from his teammates’ anxieties, fears and unhappiness. “People made a big f—in’ joke about us, saying we were this dumpster fire,” he says.

This is what Dan Campbell marched into when he got the head coaching job prior to the 2021 season, alongside new general manager Brad Holmes. A day after he was hired, Campbell unleashed a graphic, metaphor-laden introductory press conference to a Zoom screen while standing next to a few team executives in COVID-19 masks—complete with an almost immediate apology for saying the word “

 

Campbell and Holmes then set their sights on an available quarterback.

 

 

Jared Goff’s phone rang on March 18, 2021. His coach with the Rams, Sean McVay, dispensed with the usual small talk. So many things had happened in the previous four seasons. Together McVay and Goff had engineered a franchise turnaround, making a playoff run in 2017, McVay’s first season as coach and Goff’s second as QB.

 

They made a sprint to the Super Bowl the next year. Much of the public blamed Goff for the Rams’ 13–3 loss and lackluster offensive performance against the Patriots in Super Bowl LIII. One teammate from those days, Marcus Peters, recently told Sports Illustrated that he found the volume and vitriol directed at Goff to be several levels beyond unfair.

 

 

No one was looking backward in the spring of ’21. McVay told Goff, simply, that he’d been traded from the franchise that had once jumped up to draft him first overall. Thirty seconds later, Goff’s phone rang again. It was his father, Jerry. News of the deal had already broken, and Jared’s reaction to it was not kind in one specific direction—his own.

 

 

Goff decided to give himself 10 minutes to process the events of the previous five years and to understand how his life had changed. After the grace period, he picked up the first call that buzzed in. Goff knew Holmes, the Rams’ director of college scouting between 2013 and ’20, from their time together in L.A. “We’ve been trying to call for the last 10 minutes!” Holmes all but shouted into the phone.

And there it was, an early turning point for a franchise in dire need of a makeover.

 

Goff heard something he hadn’t heard in a minute: excitement. The people running the Lions were excited to have him. “I hadn’t felt that way in quite some time,” Goff says. He considered the contrast to how things had ended with the Rams, and he told himself, “We have a chance to do something special here. Is it going to be easy? No.

Going to happen? For sure? No.” But at least he, at least they, had a chance.