Blogging The Boys
The Dallas Cowboys travel to play the Detroit Lions on Thursday Night Football. We asked five questions about the Lions and got five answers from our friends over at Pride of Detroit.
Blogging The Boys: With the Lions struggling over the last few weeks, what are the main things that have been going wrong? Is it a serious issue, or just a bad run of games?
Pride of Detroit: In an effort to respect the time of your readers, let me keep this brief: a lot has gone wrong this season for this football team.
On offense, the Lions hired John Morton to be the team’s offensive coordinator. It was a rocky start to the season, but there were signs of growth through the first half of the season. Detroit had big offensive performances against Chicago (52 points), Baltimore (38), Cleveland (34), and Cincinnati (37). But after that, the Lions offense really struggled with getting drives off the ground, there were a lot of three-and-outs. When Detroit’s defense forced a turnover or put the offense into good field position, the offense failed to be opportunistic, sometimes failing to turn plus-field position into any sort of points.
Dan Campbell took over play-calling duties in Week 10 and the Lions put up 44 points against the Washington Commander. But then they managed just nine points against the Philadelphia Eagles the week after, failing to convert on all five of their fourth-down attempts. Then it happened again against the Green Bay Packers last week, 0-for on fourth down attempts.
For the defense, the disconnect between the pass rush and the coverage on the backend has created a disjointed and susceptible group. Despite holding up well in run defense over the course of the season (7th in rush defense DVOA), a team that runs as much man coverage as the Lions has not been able to hold up long enough in coverage with the pass rush providing the slowest time to pressure (2.92) in the NFL.
BTB: Jahmyr Gibbs is the truth. Tell us about him and how the Lions like to use him.
POD: Weeks ago, I described Jahmyr Gibbs as “Barry-esque” and it isn’t hyperbole. The beginning of my Lions fandom started in 1997, albeit at the tail-end of Barry Sanders’ career, but even to a seven-year-old kid, the magic of what Sanders did with the ball in his hands was evident. Even those plays of negative yardage from Barry were appointment television, and funnily enough, Gibbs had a few of those plays on Thanksgiving against the Packers–trying to make defenders miss in the backfield and turn something out of nothing.
But Gibbs’ elite trait is that he has the chance to turn any run into six. He doesn’t need to get to the edge, he doesn’t need perfect blocking, he just needs a sliver of daylight and it could be a touchdown before you know it. It’s become commonplace to see...
