Pride of Detroit
The Detroit Lions lost their fourth game of the season on Sunday night in a hard-to-watch primetime game against the Philadelphia Eagles. On one hand, it wasn’t an entire team collapse, and Detroit hung with one of the best NFC teams in football. On the other hand, some disturbing trends are developing with a short-circuited offense.
Let’s break it all down in our Lions Week 11 report card.
Jared Goff was rattled and inaccurate all night long. At his best, Goff can navigate pressure, calmly find his open read, and deliver an accurate ball. None of that was happening on Sunday night. While most of his reads were fine, his ball delivery was not. He finished the night with just a 37.8 completion percentage—by far the worst in his career. Pressure certainly had something to do with that, but even when Goff was working with a clean pocket, his passes were just… off.
Jahmyr Gibbs took over in the second half and did everything he possibly could to turn every target into an explosive play. His five catches for 107 yards set a career high for the third-year back, and it gave Detroit plenty of opportunities to put points on the board.
But he was also responsible for a failed fourth-down conversion in which he had room to convert, but ran into the back of an offensive lineman. David Montgomery managed just 27 yards on six carries plus another 10 in the receiving game. Pass protection was also a bit of an issue for this duo again, although this wasn’t Vikings-level of a disaster. Of all the offensive players to blame for Sunday’s 9-point output, the backs deserve the least of it.
The lack of Sam LaPorta was fairly noticeable, but I can’t point to many specific plays in which Brock Wright or Ross Dwelley were directly to blame. This is an Eagles defense that ranked first against tight ends (in DVOA allowed), so it’s no surprise that this unit was not very productive on Sunday night.
A very mixed bag from the receiving corps. Jameson Williams made it seem like his season revival is actually here, and his ability to punish defenses with crossing routes should give fans some hope for the offense. His penalty was dumb and costly, but I’m not going to ding him too much for it.
Sadly, it was Amon-Ra St. Brown who looked out of sorts against the Eagles. He was targeted a whopping 12 times and turned that into just two catches for 42 yards. There were some borderline drops, there were chemistry issues with Goff (although Goff didn’t agree in his post-game comments), and against a decent Eagles secondary, St. Brown rarely found open space.
On top of that, after getting both Kalif Raymond and Isaac TeSlaa involved last week, the duo combined for zero catches on a single target.
This wasn’t quite...
