Pride of Detroit
The Detroit Lions coordinators met with the media on Friday to discuss last week’s game against the Chicago Bears and the upcoming Monday night bout with the Baltimore Ravens. Here are my six biggest takeaways from those sessions.
In Week 1 in Green Bay, the Lions’ offensive line communication—or lack thereof—proved to be costly. There were missed assignments galore, and it resulted in one of the worst offensive performances in the Dan Campbell era.
While Week 2 was a get-right game, it also took place in the comforts of Ford Field. This week, the Lions will face another tough road environment in Baltimore on Monday night. Morton expects a very loud stadium, but believes they’re better prepared for communicating properly this week.
“You practice in the noise. You make it hard, you make it loud. I think that helps,” Morton said. “The communication, we’ve got to do it in practice, so we feel good about it. And if there’s anything that’s a problem, we just take it out. But that’s the main thing, we’ve been doing that. That’s what you have to do. And these guys, listen, they’ve been on the road. We’ve all been on the road. We’re going to be smart in the things that we do, so we don’t have miscommunication. I think that’s important.”
In their 52-point effort against the Bears, the Lions offense did just about everything right. For Morton, in just his second ever season as an NFL offensive coordinator, he admitted he savored the film a little more than during a typical week.
“I watched the tape twice. It was impressive, just all phases, man. The line coming off the surge, the guys running routes, Jared (Goff) throwing the ball,” Morton said. “I mean, he’s been over 80 percent the last two weeks. You don’t see that. […] I watched it twice because I was like, ‘Man, is this real?’”
While that Bears game is closer to the Lions’ weekly expectation than Week 1 was, it was still nice to see Morton admit that this unit can leave him in awe, too.
Sheppard opened his presser talking about how they need to be better on third down. He pointed to a trio of examples from the Bears game that could have easily been cleaned up to turn Chicago’s 7-of-13 third-down efficiency into 4-of-13. Given that this was a problem early in the Packers game, I asked Sheppard if this was a case where they are still trying to figure out what this team does well on third down. He strongly disagreed.
“No, it’s doing your job,” Sheppard said. “I know what these guys do well, and they know what they do well. It’s all about execution; it has nothing to do with anything else. We need to execute within the...
