Pride of Detroit
After a much-needed bye in Week 8, the Detroit Lions came out flat in all three phases against the Minnesota Vikings in Week 9, leading to a disappointing 27-24 loss at home. Detroit had their issues in all three phases of the game, but particularly struggled on the offensive side of the ball, where consistent pressure on quarterback Jared Goff had them out of rhythm for the majority of the afternoon.
Per Next Gen Stats, Minnesota’s defense generated 15 quick pressures against the Lions, while logging a 35.7% quick pressure rate for the game—the highest rate allowed by Detroit’s offensive line since Week 12 of the 2022 season. Vikings’ defensive coordinator Brian Flores had a plan to slow down a Detroit offense that has given him a lot of issues over the last few years, and his players executed to near-perfection.
In this week’s film study, we will be diving into the All-22 to see how the Vikings’ defense was able to slow the Lions’ offense down before it could ever really get rolling.
Tough day in pass protection for Gibbs
Coming into Week 9, most teams had not experienced a ton of success when blitzing Goff in 2025. At this point in his career, the veteran quarterback has seen pretty much everything and understands where the ball needs to go when he is facing extra rushers. With that said, the aforementioned plan from Flores and the Vikings was a simple one, but when executed well, has the potential to disrupt even the most explosive offense.
Over and over again, Flores had his linebackers walking down near the line of scrimmage, oftentimes standing in both A-gaps prior to the ball being snapped. Doing this accomplished two things against the Lions—it had the interior offensive line mixed up pre-snap, and kept Lions running back Jahmyr Gibbs in to block instead of allowing him to release into the flat or middle of the field.
“There are things that we can do better and that we can get to,” said Campbell of the issues in pass protection against the Vikings. “We don’t want to have Gibby do a full game of it. Now he’s better than that, too. I’ve seen him, we all know him, he can protect. He had a little bit of an off day in some of that, too. But no, we don’t want him to have to go hammerhead for 12 plays. That’s not – I don’t want either of those backs having to do that. But that was the plan to keep him in, that was kudos to them to keep him in, not let him release on some of that stuff. We turned the protection a couple of times, but they forced our hand. You either go there, or you’re going to put him on a big. Yeah, we’ve got to adjust a little quicker.”
In our first clip below, Minnesota has three down linemen pre-snap, with linebackers standing in a wide alignment outside of either tackle....
