How Detroit Lions 'JARED GOFF' chant got its start at Ford Field

The most popular chant in Detroit got its start in the last row at Ford Field

Jared Kilpatrick wanted to do something special for his family, and when he surprised them with tickets to last year’s playoff game at Ford Field between the Detroit Lions and the Los Angeles Rams, he had no idea how memorable it would become.

A year ago Tuesday, the Lions beat the Rams for their first postseason victory in 32 years. It was an electric atmosphere, with many of the 66,367 fans in attendance cramming into Ford Field more than an hour before the game.

In the 12 months since, the chant has become ubiquitous, showing up at random times in random places. Airports. Grocery stores. Hockey games across the state. NFL games in other states. Soccer games in other countries.

This is the story of how the chant came to be, or one family’s version of it, at least.

Tyler Kilpatrick, Jared’s younger brother, admits “there’s probably a hundred or so guys in Detroit that” can make a similar claim, and everyone in the Kilpatrick family acknowledges there’s no real way to prove they first put rhythm to yelling out Goff’s name.

But high atop the rafters that night, in Row 21, Seats 6-11, at the very top of Section 322, Tyler and another Kilpatrick brother, Collin, saw Goff’s image appear on the video board as the Lions quarterback stood in the tunnel waiting to run out for pregame warmups. He started chanting Goff’s name.

“Every family I think has a little family lore and this gets to be ours,” Jared said.

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The Lions were well on their way to winning 12 games and their first division title in two decades last fall when Jared decided he was going to splurge on tickets for the Lions’ first ever playoff game at Ford Field.

Jared is an emergency room doctor at Ascension Borgess Hospital in Kalamazoo and assistant professor at Western Michigan’s Stryker School of Medicine. The hospital pays overtime every six months, and knowing he had that bonus check coming in January, he earmarked it for tickets.

The oldest of four brothers in a sports-crazed family, some of Jared’s fondest memories come from ballfields. He played basketball, soccer and ran track growing up, and played soccer and ran track in college at Alma. Tyler played football at Rochester Adams and lacrosse at Albion, and currently coaches lacrosse at Stoney Creek. Collin plays lacrosse at DePauw University in Indiana. Their other brother, Austin, swam and played soccer in high school.

When they were young, they’d go to Pistons games or Lions training camp practices. And always, they’d watch the Lions on TV.

“That’s kind of what we always did growing up was a bunch of sports, especially with my dad,” Jared said. “He’s been a big Lions fan and Detroit sports fan his whole life and definitely brought that on me and all three of my brothers.”

Austin lives in New York and couldn’t make the game on short notice, so Jared bought six tickets: One for him and his fiancée, Jess Harris, one for each of his parents, Jan and Mike, and one for Tyler and Collin. He called Tyler the day after Michigan’s national championship game win over Washington to surprise him with the news, and told Collin a couple days after he returned to school at DePauw.

With no car on campus, Collin took a bus back to Michigan that weekend for what became a 14-hour odyssey. A 30-minute bus stop in Dayton, Ohio, turned into a seven-hour layover for reasons Collin still can’t explain, and he got to his parents’ home in Rochester Hills somewhere around 2 a.m.

On the day of the game, the family went for an early lunch at Renshaw Lounge in Clawson, then for drinks at McShane’s Irish Pub in Detroit. They cheered for the hated Packers to beat the Cowboys in the day’s afternoon game, so the Lions would have another home playoff game in the divisional round, then hopped the bar’s first shuttle to Ford Field.

Tyler and Collin went for drinks. The rest of the group got in line to have their faces painted. The brothers opted for the Aidan Hutchinson eye black look. And by the time they reconvened at their seats, it was still 90 or so minutes until gametime and the stadium felt two-thirds full.

“There’s so many people in the stadium already that Tyler and Collin are already starting to start chants and start yelling and booing and cheering as people came out,” Jared recalled. “They were trying to start chanting everything.”

Mother knows best: ‘Say something positive’

Tyler’s devotion to the Lions runs deep.

He doesn’t have season tickets, but he and his friends travel to a road game or two every year. He wears a Joey Harrington jersey to games and a fur Lions hat on his head.

Jess, his soon-to-be sister-in-law, describes him as a “super passionate Lions fan who looks like a Bills fan that goes through flaming tables.”

“And if you ever met Tyler and Collin in person, they’re like 10 years apart and share a brain,” Jan said.

When the Lions traded Matthew Stafford to the Rams in January 2021 at the start of their rebuild, Jan said the move nearly brought Collin to tears. A few months later, Tyler bought his brother a new Lions jersey as a high school graduation present, one with Goff’s name and No. 16 on back.

Last year’s playoff game marked Stafford’s first trip to Ford Field since the trade. The Lions acquired Goff and three draft picks in the deal, used those picks to build the nucleus of their roster, and the theatre of two quarterbacks competing against their old teams for the right to advance in the playoffs added to the drama of the night.

Tyler and Collin felt the energy as soon as they got to their seats. They started chanting about Stafford — “STAF-FORD SUCKS!” and “GO HOME, STAF-FORD!” — and things devolved from there.

“There was probably a list of 10 of them. I don’t remember all them and probably some of them you shouldn’t write,” Tyler said. “I think there was a debate that week of like, ‘Are they going to welcome Stafford?’ And again, it was nothing against Stafford, but it was, ‘Welcome him? No, it was a playoff game.’ It was the first home playoff game in my life, so it was, ‘No, you’re not welcome here wearing other colors.'”

A group of fans a row or two in front of the Kilpatricks joined in the chants, but none took off.

Until Jan slugged Tyler on his arm and told him to be more positive.

“They were taunting Matthew Stafford. And I’m like, ‘You guys be nice,’ ” she said. “I’m a social worker. I think everybody should be nice. I’m like, ‘We need good karma. Say something positive.’”

When Goff’s image flashed across the video board, they did.

“Initially it took off in our section and you could hear it everywhere,” Tyler said. “Maybe this is just me being a dumb sports fan, right? But anytime you can start a chant anywhere like that, you’re like, ‘Oh, I started that. That’s cool’. Which at that point is what we thought it was.”

‘A new meaning’

One chant became two, and two became a hundred, and by the end of the night, the chant was incessant.

Tyler said some fans in Section 322 bought him beers as a thank-you for starting the chant, and Jan said at one point Collin stopped to listen to the rest of the crowd chanting and said in amazement, “Everybody’s doing it.”

“It’s honestly kind of cool that the Jared Goff chant was the one that took off,” Collin said. “It’s kind of like a respectful way to tell Stafford that we got a new guy now. In a way, it’s a bit of a diss, but it’s also very cool for Jared Goff for him to hear that, ‘Hey, we’re on your side. We’re not with this guy who was here for 12 years. We’re with you.’ ”

Goff completed 22 of 27 passes for 277 yards and one touchdown, and said after the game the chant “made me feel pretty good” and “I don’t think I’ve ever experienced anything like that.”

“It was pretty unbelievable,” he said. “The people here are special, man. I’m grateful and I’m grateful for their support and today with the circumstances that were there, it meant a lot and it was special.”

While some fans have tired of it in the past 12 months, the chant is still going strong at Lions games and elsewhere as the Lions wait to learn who they’ll host in the divisional round of this year’s playoffs next week.

Fans serenaded Goff with more chants of his name during last week’s division-clinching win over the Minnesota Vikings, and the Kilpatricks have heard it at various other stops around the state. Jared was at a Grand Rapids Griffins game when the chant broke out. Jess heard it at a Red Wings game.

“I joke with my family all the time that we should have found a way to get royalties on this thing,” Tyler said.

All of the Kilpatricks have told at least someone about the origins of the chant. Most of their friends believe them; it sounds just like Tyler, they say. And for those who don’t, the Kilpatricks are fine with that, too.

The chant, after all, has come to be about more than Goff and Stafford and even the Lions. It’s come to represent Detroit in some ways.

“I definitely think it’s taken on a new meaning,” Jared said. “I watch a bunch of sports shows and everything, and so I was watching (Pat) McAfee a few days ago and he said how it’s been kind of an emblematic resurgence of Jared Goff getting cast off just like Detroit getting cast off. I wouldn’t say that’s ever been the intention of it. We definitely weren’t thinking of that when they were starting it, but I do think it’s kind of embodied a little bit of that.

“And then I think the bigger thing is just embodying how unifying Detroit will get of like, I remember when the Red Wings were really good, the Pistons were really good, of just how much the city has something to cheer for and hope for, they kind of lose their mind. And so I think that’s kind of been what has been most emblematic of how good of a sports town Detroit is. And once you’re one of our guys, you’re kind of one of our guys for forever.”