It’s already been three years since the Los Angeles Rams shipped Jared Goff and a handful of draft picks to the Detroit Lions for Matthew Stafford. It was one of the biggest trades of the last decade, given the rarity of two teams swapping their starting quarterbacks.
Here we are three years later with the Rams and Lions set to square off in the wild-card round on Sunday Night Football – the first playoff meeting between these teams since 1952. Stafford would love to beat his former team and knock them out of the playoffs, while Goff wants to show Sean McVay and the Rams that he’s still a winner.
With all the talk about this Stafford-Goff matchup, it’s only natural to compare the numbers since the trade – and boy, are they eerily similar. They each have 24 regular-season wins, a passer rating around 96 and exactly 41 total turnovers. Goff has three more passing touchdowns (78) than Stafford does (75), but that’s in seven more games.
Here’s a more complete comparison of their regular-season numbers since the trade.
| Stafford | Goff | |
| Games | 41 | 48 |
| Wins | 24 | 24 |
| Comp. rate | 65.7% | 66.5% |
| TD passes | 75 | 78 |
| INTs | 36 | 27 |
| Pick-6 | 7 | 5 |
| Passer rating | 95.8 | 96.5 |
| Sacks | 89 | 88 |
| Yards/att. | 7.7 | 7.3 |
Team success has been a very different story for these two quarterbacks, with Stafford leading the Rams to four playoff wins, including a Super Bowl, in his first season in Los Angeles.
Goff, meanwhile, is making his first postseason appearance with the Lions, who are trying to end a three-decades-long winless drought in the playoffs.
It turned out to be an even and fair trade for both teams, but the Rams wouldn’t give up their ring for anything right now.