Jared Goff wasn’t drawn to the situations so much as he was plopped in them, but it’s no coincidence what happened to each program three years after he arrived.

A decorated high school quarterback who lost four games in his prep career, Goff signed with Cal, one of the worst teams in the Pac-12 in 2013, not because he wanted to be a savior but because it was one of three scholarship offers he had, because his parents were alums of the university and because, he beamed Friday, “it’s the No. 1 public school in the world.”

The Bears went 1-11 with Goff as their quarterback that first season, won five games the next year then eight in 2015 to make a bowl game before Goff left for the NFL.

When the Los Angeles Rams traded up to take him with the No. 1 pick in the 2016 draft, Goff was back on the bottom looking up again. He went winless in seven starts as a rookie, led the Rams to 11 surprising victories in Year 2 and by 2018 had the team in the Super Bowl.

Things, of course, didn’t work out in L.A., and when the Rams moved on in January of 2021 they sent Goff to the rebuilding Detroit Lions, a salary dump that turned out to be so much more.

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The Lions started 0-10-1 with Goff as their quarterback, narrowly missed the playoffs in Year 2 and will play in the NFC championship game Sunday against the San Francisco 49ers for just the second time in franchise history.

For Goff, the game marks a return to the Bay Area, where he starred at Cal and Marin Catholic High, about an hour north of Levi’s Stadium, and another cosmic moment in what’s been a magical playoff run.

The Lions beat Goff’s old team, the Rams, in the wild-card round for their first postseason victory in 32 years. Goff’s name has become a war chant for legions of Lions fans across the state. And three days shy of three years from the trade that sent him to Detroit, Goff has the Lions on the brink of reaching their first ever Super Bowl.

“I don’t think you could have written a much better script,” said Tony Franklin, Goff’s former position coach and offensive coordinator at Cal. “I always told our players that the biggest lesson I can give you in life is that you’re the writer, creator, producer and director of a movie and the movie’s life, and whatever you don’t like just change the script. So he’s a great example of changing the script.”

Bay area roots

For Goff, the script has always included football, and until his trade to the Lions, was always set in the California sun.

Goff wears No. 16 as a tribute of sorts to legendary 49ers quarterback Joe Montana. Goff said his father, Jerry, a former major league catcher who also hails from the Bay, suggested he wear the number when he first started playing football as a 7-year-old.

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A three-sport star in high school, Goff went 39-4 in three seasons as Marin’s starting quarterback, where he led his team to three league titles and the state championship game as a senior.

“He was a great teammate, very humble,” Marin coach Mazi Moayed said. “Great leader. Ultra competitive. I mean, he’s very competitive. You know that now since he’s out of Detroit, but very competitive guy.”

As a sophomore, after Marin was bounced from the playoffs earlier than expected during his first season as starter, Goff had T-shirts made for his team emblazoned with the slogan, “Back With A Vengeance.”

Malek Banoun, a teammate of Goff’s at Marin and now the school’s strength and conditioning coach, said players wore those shirts all summer during two-a-days and the slogan fueled the team’s deep playoff run the next year.

“He saw how much it meant to the seniors,” Banoun said. “He just gave those shirts to the team and that moment was probably one of the best offseasons, maybe to date, but that I’ve seen in a long time. So that type of leadership was pretty cool to see at that age.”

Goff led Marin to league and section championships as a junior and a Northern California title as a senior, though neither Wildcats’ run was a cakewalk.

In one memorable playoff game, Moayed said Goff threw three first-half interceptions in a game against Cardinal Newman. Marin trailed by 17 at one point, when Moayed approached Goff on the sideline.

“I said, ‘Hey, you OK?’ and he just looks at me,” Moayed said. “And I said, ‘Listen, we’re just going to keep doing what we’re doing, don’t change, it’s early in the game.’ I said, ‘Are you OK? Are you going to be good?’ He said, ‘I’m good,’ and the rest was history.”

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Moayed said Goff led the Wildcats to 42 points the rest of the game and threw the winning touchdown pass on a bootleg throwback play called “Cowboy.”

“Not too many guys could stomach that, and I think that’s what makes him special,” Moayed said. “Just having to fight through that game after throwing three first-half interceptions and to come back and win is just a little bit of a microcosm of sort of how his college career has went and how his pro career has went, and he ends up on top.”

'Stone-cold killer'

Truth be told, there was no guarantee Goff would end up on top when the Rams dealt him and three draft picks to the Lions for Matthew Stafford in a trade that changed the fortunes of both franchises.

From afar, Goff seemed broken at the time, cast aside by one of football’s great offensive minds, and that feeling only intensified when Stafford led the Rams to a Super Bowl in 2021.

But after a rough start, Goff found his footing in the second half of his first season in Detroit, following a change in play callers, and he’s blossomed the past two years to capture the hearts of his teammates, coaches and fans while spearheading the Lions’ revival.

Goff finished second in the NFL in passing this season and has thrown for 563 yards and three touchdowns with no interceptions in the Lions’ two playoff wins.

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He’s been serenaded by chants of “Jar-ed Goff, Jar-ed Goff,” at both playoff games and other venues across the state. And if he’s successful in leading the Lions to a win Sunday, he’ll join Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Kurt Warner and Craig Morton as the only quarterbacks to lead two different franchises to the Super Bowl.

“I think the country’s starting to appreciate how good a player he is, but the coolest thing is that the city of Detroit appreciates it,” Franklin said. “And I told this to him when he got traded to Detroit, I said, ‘I know you don’t realize it this second but it’s going to be the greatest thing ever because those people care.’ In L.A., my wife and I went to a playoff game when they played the Cowboys and it was 60% Cowboys fans in a home playoff game. I said, ‘Look, when it’s bad, you may have 70,000 people booing you but when it’s good, they’re all in.’ And so it’s been so cool to watch that whole thing, especially when they played the Rams to know that they had his back that way. And not that they didn’t love Stafford, they did. They appreciated Stafford, but that was their man and, God, what a beautiful night that was.”

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Goff staked the Lions to an early 21-10 lead against the Rams with precision passing and smart decision making, and closed the game with three kneel-down snaps for the win.

Typically laser focused during games, he gathered his teammates in the huddle before one of the final snaps and told them he loved them and thanked them for being part of the journey with him.

“When we get that win at the end and we do get the opportunity to go in victory he takes a moment to show his appreciation and kind of get us all to take a second to pause and take it in and I think that’s cool,” Lions center Frank Ragnow said. “I think him as a guy who’s been to the Super Bowl, he’s been through this, he knows — he’s locked in, don’t get me wrong, but he knows when there’s time to take a moment and appreciate everything.”

Goff has had other quiet moments like that this year and throughout his Lions tenure.

When Dan Skipper signed days before the Atlanta Falcons game earlier this season and was thrust into the lineup at right tackle to replace an injured Matt Nelson, Goff calmly told him, “No one I’d rather have next to me here. You’re good, buddy.”

On Skipper’s first snap, Goff dropped back to pass and threw a 45-yard touchdown to Sam LaPorta.

“Just having someone you trust and know come up to you and settle you down, I think that goes a long way with guys and he’s got a knack of knowing what to say and when,” Skipper said.

As Lions coach Dan Campbell ticked off Goff’s superpowers Friday — his ability to read defenses, his resilience, his calm and poise in the pocket — he unwittingly explained why Goff has elevated every team he’s played on since his high school days.

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Campbell said he saw Goff’s competitive drive in his first spring as a Lion, when Goff was peppering throws in a steady rain against the Lions defense in seven-on-seven drills.

“He was not going to lose that day and he just got better and better and better,” Campbell said.

Franklin saw the same this spring when he stopped by a Lions practice and went out to dinner with Goff later that night.

“It was just the most gratifying, soulful experience because I got to see this young man that I knew at Cal that had this beaming of confidence and all the people believing in him and I could see that he was back,” Franklin said. “He was back to that person that I knew that the parts that they tore down were no longer torn down, and he was confident and he knew that people had his back. And let me tell you something, the guy is a stone-cold killer when you got a game in the fourth quarter. He was like that at Cal, he was like that in high school and now he’s like that with the Lions.”

The Lions may need another stone-cold performance from Goff on Sunday to advance to the Super Bowl.

The 49ers have been the best team in the NFC all season, with a defense that finished third in the league in points allowed, and Goff will be back home playing in front of family and friends not far from his childhood home.

Not that any of that matters to the quarterback who's changed his own script before.

“I’ve always had a lot of pride in trying to be the same guy every day,” Goff said. “And whether it’s hard, whether it’s great, whether it’s fun, whether it’s not, how do you show up every day and be that same guy? And I think that, certainly, helped me get through it and maybe it’s rubbed off on some other guys along the way. But yeah, that and optimism. Eternal optimism, just always knowing, thinking the best situation.”

Contact Dave Birkett at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett.

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Next up: 49ers

Matchup: Lions (14-5) at San Francisco (13-5), NFC championship game.

Kickoff: 6:30 p.m. Sunday; Levi’s Stadium, Santa Clara, California.

TV/radio: Fox; WXYT-FM (97.1).

Line: 49ers by 7½.

At stake: Sunday’s winner will advance to Super Bowl 58 in Las Vegas, where they’ll face the winner of Sunday’s AFC title game between the Baltimore Ravens and the Kansas City Chiefs.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit Lions QB Jared Goff doubters have learned: 'He ends up on top'