Pride of Detroit
In Week 1 against the Green Bay Packers, the Detroit Lions rushed for just 2.1 yards per carry on 22 rushes. Out of the 61 games under coach Dan Campbell in which they rushed at least 20 times in a game, that was the Lions’ second-worst output by yards per carry. The only performance worse was in 2023 against the Buccaneers (22 carries, 40 yards), when the Lions were without Jahmyr Gibbs and lost David Montgomery to injury around halftime.
Needless to say, the Lions are committed to turning things around when it comes to running the football. The ground game has been essential to the offense’s success, and the struggles from the newly patched offensive line were obvious against the Packers. But coach Dan Campbell is confident they will turn things around, and quickly.
“We’re going to address it head-on,” Campbell said. “We talked about it in walkthrough. The focus, the footwork, the little things. And we’re going to make sure we establish that today, day one, in practice and that we’re on point with our footwork, head placement, all the little things. We’re ID’d correctly, we’re coming off the ball. Or if not, we’ll do it again and we’ll get it right, we’ll get it right, we’ll get it right. And we are going to be much better. We will be much better.”
The problem last week was two-fold: the Lions struggled to communicate effectively on the offensive line (more on that here), and there were also fundamental breakdowns. Left tackle Taylor Decker provided a little more insight into the communication issues.
“It was miscommunication or guys not getting the communication, and then based on that, the execution wasn’t there, because there were times where guys were running different plays,” Decker said. “There were times where guys didn’t hear calls that they need to that were changed on the fly. There’s really no excuse for that. All of the stadiums are going to be loud, we’ve got to play on the road, and we can just work on improving from there.”
Some were quick to blame Detroit’s two young guards: second-year left guard Christian Mahogany and rookie right guard Tate Ratledge. Decker wasn’t buying it, noting that everyone on the offensive line had lapses in communication errors. He pointed to the highly criticized play in which rookie guard Tate Ratledge left Packers defensive tackle Colby Wooden unblocked, forcing running back David Montgomery to beat him one-on-one to avoid a safety.
Turns out, Ratledge wasn’t the only one who was running the wrong play.
“I ran the same play that Tate was running,” Decker said. “Everybody else, the other three, ran a different play.”
Quarterback Jared Goff took culpability, too. And while the noise at Lambeau Field made it more difficult, Goff believes the issues went beyond that—and they’re already confident those issues will be fixed by Sunday.
“I’ve got to communicate better and take a little bit of stress off of those guys from a communication aspect […]...
