Pride of Detroit
The Detroit Lions’ commanding win over the Dallas Cowboys was one of the hallmark victories of the Dan Campbell era. With their playoff lives on the ropes, they gut-checked themselves and responded with an uppercut to the Cowboys—and another to the media narratives of their demise that lingered all week.
Campbell’s unit took down one of the hottest teams in football, pouring points on the board without their two-deep at left guard, two-deep at tight end, Kalif Raymond, Terrion Arnold, and Kerby Joseph—and with both Thomas Harper and Brian Branch going down in-game—and still won by two touchdowns.
Slowly, the Lions regained control of their postseason destiny with an emphatic triumph at Ford Field. It was a fitting game for the regime, and a testament to the success stories they’ve built–with game balls going to a quarterback another team didn’t want anymore, a Day 3 wide receiver, a defensive end cut by the Cowboys last August and now on his fifth team, and a seven-year mostly practice-squad player who’s only been active for 26 career games. It was an all-out team effort, and plenty of players earned “stock up” distinction.
Stock up: Al-Quadin Muhammad, DE
Muhammad went from a player whose improbably hot start had cooled—held without a sack in five straight games since Week 9—to recording three huge sacks of Dak Prescott. His five total pressures tied for his third-most in a game this season and the fifth-most of his Lions tenure.
Muhammad embraced the role of closer, aggressively winning his one-on-one matchups with two fourth-quarter sacks, a third-down sack in the red zone, and a red-zone pressure that helped force an incompletion. The Lions recalibrated their use of him as a pure edge rusher: Muhammad played 92.1% of his snaps on passing downs, didn’t take a single rep inside at defensive tackle, and logged just two snaps at 5-technique—with 36 of his 38 snaps coming at 7-technique or wider.
It allowed him to hunt. And the 30-year-old journeyman, in the midst of a career year, had a career day—a tweaked role that could pay dividends for Detroit’s pass rush down the stretch.
Stock up: Amon-Ra St. Brown, WR
St. Brown’s performance, while battling through an ankle injury, was grittiness personified. It’s not often you see a wide receiver refuse to bow out when many would sit for a week or two. I assumed he’d be on a pitch count after being listed as a game-time decision, but instead he played 57 of the Lions’ 62 snaps—the same as Jameson Williams—including all 40 pass plays.
He shredded the Cowboys secondary for six catches and 92 yards, his fifth-highest total of the season, and even drew his second defensive pass interference of the year. St. Brown started the game with a first-play catch—a pointed, calculated decision by Dan Campbell to send a message—and fittingly caught Goff’s final pass for 37 yards to set up Jahmyr Gibbs’ third touchdown.
That gutsy, selfless performance also etched his name into the record books,...
