The Los Angeles Rams traded Jared Goff to the Detroit Lions in January 2021, packaged with a third-round pick and first-rounders in 2022 and 2023, in exchange for Matthew Stafford.
The bold move resulted in a Super Bowl title for the Rams within a year, but it also left Sean McVay haunted by how he broke the news to the quarterback who helped lay the foundation for his tenure in Los Angeles. On the “Bussin’ with the Boys” podcast, McVay criticized himself and called his handling of the Goff trade a failure.
Sean McVay Still Regrets Handling of Jared Goff Trade
Goff, who is currently on a four-year, $212 million contract with Detroit, has emerged as one of the league’s most reliable quarterbacks since the deal. Stafford, meanwhile, won NFL MVP last season. Both sides won on the football side, but McVay regrets how he communicated with Goff.
“I’m super sensitive to what an amateur I was with the Goff situation, you know, trading him,” McVay said. “You want to talk about lack of courage, lack of clarity, lack of ability to be able to look somebody in the eye that you’ve had a lot of really cool experiences with and tell them, ‘Hey, you know, not easy to say, but we might explore an opportunity to to acquire Matthew Stafford and you’ll be a part of a trade there.'”
“But instead, it’s like, you know, you kind of get frustrated, and it was more really about me than it was ever him [in] terms of like I had a lot of things that I needed to be able to work through, and I didn’t handle that the right way,” he continued. “And I’m not saying that we wouldn’t have made the decision, but the handling of it was exactly the antithesis of how I would hope to handle things moving forward.”
He went further, admitting that he never gave Goff a heads-up that a quarterback change was even being considered after the 2020 season, during which the Rams went 10-6 but looked limited offensively.
“Well, I was frustrated,” McVay added. “Did I ever have the courage to really sit him down after that season in 2020 and really tell him, ‘Hey, you know, there’s a possibility that we’ll explore, you know, some avenues that might lead to you not being our quarterback moving forward,’ No. Would I do it differently now? Absolutely.”
“I think the biggest thing that I learned [was] that he was able to share, and I appreciate his honesty on all of that, and there is nobody to blame but myself, but it was really like, what did he not like the most about it? He was caught off guard,” McVay said. “You know, you’re like, ‘Where did this come from?’ Because I didn’t have the courage to really be able to communicate in the middle or in the midst of it.”
As mentioned earlier, the deal ultimately worked for both franchises. Stafford led the Rams to a victory in Super Bowl 56 after the 2021 season and followed it up with arguably the best individual campaign of his career in 2025, throwing for a league-best 4,707 yards and 46 touchdowns.
Detroit turned the three draft picks into core pieces like Jahmyr Gibbs, Sam LaPorta, and Jameson Williams, while the Rams, on the other hand, won the Super Bowl, for which they made multiple aggressive moves and have continued to build a perennial contender around Stafford.
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According to PFSN’s QB Impact Metric, since the trade to the Rams, Stafford has finished each season ranked as follows:
- 2021: 88.3 Impact Score, ranked #2 among QBs.
- 2022: 67.3 Impact Score, ranked #27 among QBs.
- 2023: 78.5 Impact Score, ranked #11 among QBs.
- 2024: 74.7 Impact Score, ranked #19 among QBs.
- 2025: 84.2 Impact Score, ranked #6 among QBs.
In comparison, here’s how Goff’s performances look since his move to Detroit:
- 2021: 67.0 Impact Score, ranked #29 among QBs.
- 2022: 82.1 Impact Score, ranked #8 among QBs.
- 2023: 80.9 Impact Score, ranked #7 among QBs.
- 2024: 89.9 Impact Score, ranked #3 among QBs.
- 2025: 81.5 Impact Score, ranked #8 among QBs.
McVay proved that the Goff experience genuinely changed him when the Rams selected Alabama quarterback Ty Simpson with the 13th overall pick in the 2026 NFL Draft. McVay made it a point to keep Stafford informed throughout the pre-draft process, a direct lesson from the mistakes he made five years earlier.
Both the Lions and Rams are Super Bowl contenders in 2026, with Los Angeles still built around the reigning MVP and Detroit looking to bounce back under Goff with a new offensive coordinator.
It will be interesting to see whether they will cross paths again in the postseason, where the stakes of the Goff-Stafford trade would once again take center stage.
