Jared Goff, Dan Campbell Were Pure Class After Lions' Controversial Loss to Steelers

They took the high road instead of blaming the officiating.

Lions coach Dan Campbell and quarterback Jared Goff blamed themselves for the loss vs. the Steelers. / David Reginek-Imagn Images

The final 30 seconds of Sunday’s Lions–Steelers game were pure chaos. Two offensive pass interference calls on Detroit negated two touchdown scores that could’ve won the Lions the game.

The first call was made on Isaac TeSlaa, calling back a one-yard touchdown pass caught by Amon-Ra St. Brown. The receiver then was the cause for the second touchdown being negated. With eight seconds remaining, quarterback Jared Goff threw a pass to St. Brown, who didn’t make it across the goal line, so then he lateraled the ball back to Goff, who did score a touchdown. However, referees called offensive pass interference on St. Brown, negating Goff’s score. The Steelers won 29–24 in a nail-biting victory.

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The Lions could’ve easily jumped into their post-game press conferences and criticized these calls by the officials. However, coach Dan Campbell and Goff chose to take the high road and blamed themselves for the loss, not the refs.

“We weren’t able to close it out. And at the end of the day, that’s on us,” Campbell said. “We did that. We’re the ones who put ourselves in that position to where we had to try to score on the last play.

“You can’t feel sorry for yourself. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t sting, it doesn’t feel bad. But we have nobody to blame but ourselves. It’s on us. And it’s also on us to finish. We’ve got two to go.”

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Goff thought the first OPI call on TeSlaa was “bad,” but chose to not blame the refs overall for the loss, similarly to his coach.

“[The officials] have a hard job, and I don’t want to make any excuses or anything like that,” Goff said. “We’ve been on the right side of a lot of these, and we’ve been on the wrong side on a lot of these. I think a few plays prior, the one on TeSlaa was a little bit more in my head up for interpretation, but listen, man, they’re going to make the calls, and I promise you if I was sitting on the other side of that right now, we’d be saying, ‘Great job,’ but those sting for sure and you wish they weren’t called, but so be it.”

The loss likely ended Detroit’s hope of making the playoffs this season in a highly-contested NFC bracket. The Lions sit in eighth in the conference right outside of the playoff picture, and NFL’s Next Gen Stats gives the team an 8% chance to making the postseason.

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