Pride of Detroit
The Detroit Lions are coming off a tough Week 1 loss to the Green Bay Packers, and it has some national analysts questioning the team’s future.
In this week’s power rankings, a handful of national analysts believe the Lions’ rough start was an anomaly and something they can rebound from, while other writers can’t get off the bandwagon quick enough, citing—and stop me if you heard this one before—the change of coordinators being a primary problem.
Following the game, Lions coach Dan Campbell said there was plenty of blame to be shared among players, coaches, and himself, included. Then, on Monday morning, after rewatching the game, Campbell doubled down on his post-game assessment, citing miscommunication and mental mistakes, but also reaffirming that these issues are correctable.
“We just weren’t good enough, third down, really on either side of the ball, and we kind of dug ourselves in a hole early in that game that we couldn’t quite get out of,” Campbell explained. “We had some miscommunications, some MAs (missed assignments), that really cost us at the worst times, a couple of penalties that bit us. It just wasn’t clean. We didn’t play well. But as I mentioned, it’s all stuff we can clean up. We’ve got to score seven when we get in the red zone, that’s going to be big for us. We’ve got to be able to run the ball. We’ve got a lot of things where just fundamentally we were off. We’ve got to get our fundamentals back. We’ve got to go back to work because it really is that simple.”
Let’s take a look at where the Lions land in the NFL’s Week 2 Power Rankings.
The biggest concern for the Lions is the way their offensive line played. Center Frank Ragnow’s retirement might be a big problem. The Lions couldn’t block anyone. That seems unlikely to repeat, but if anything completely derails Detroit this season, it would be the O-line.
After former coordinators Ben Johnson and Aaron Glenn left Detroit to take head coaching gigs this offseason, the Lions brought back John Morton (a former Lions assistant) and promoted Kelvin Sheppard to try to maintain some stability.
While the Week 1 performance in a loss to the Packers probably won’t be totally representative of how Detroit will play all season, I think it’s appropriate to keep on eye on whether this staff is adaptable and can move on from the things that aren’t working. Detroit’s secondary struggled in tight coverage against Green Bay’s receivers, and the offense couldn’t find any rhythm in the run game—two things that almost never happened in the last two seasons.
The Lions’ place near the top of the NFC over the past couple years wasn’t just because of talent, it was because they were better prepared than their opponents—and that wasn’t the case on...
