Pride of Detroit
It’s obvious one of the major problems of the 2025 Detroit Lions was their defense. On a weekly basis, the Lions were giving up explosive play after explosive play, and in key moments, Detroit’s defense just couldn’t get off the field. It only seemed to get worse, as even the Lions’ normally-steady run defense collapsed down the stretch.
The conversation is a little more nuanced around the Lions’ 2025 offense. Without former Lions offensive coordinator Ben Johnson and All-Pro center Frank Ragnow, it’s clear that unit took a step back, too. But how much of a step back?
On the surface, the Lions went from the highest-scoring offense (33.2 points per game) the third-highest scoring offense (28.9), which doesn’t seem all that bad. We’re still talking about a top-five offense in scoring, which you’d think would be good enough to make a playoff run. However, things were bad enough to warrant a change in play-caller midseason, and some stats may be a bit misleading.
So I’m going to take a deeper dive into the Lions’ offensive statistics to see just how much regression there was on offense, and how close the Lions can get to jumping right back to an elite offense.
When you look at some of the most commonly-used statistics, the difference between 2024 and 2025 doesn’t seem all that much.
2024:
2025:
Obviously, scoring more than four points fewer per game is not insignificant, but by most standard metrics, we’re talking about a top-three offense dropping to a top-six offense. There doesn’t appear to be much drop off in rushing, but in both yards per attempt and passer rating, there was a smal decline.
Unfortunately, I don’t believe the above metrics do a very good job of painting an accurate picture. There are a few reasons for that—I’ll get to them as we go—but advanced stats like Expected Points Added (EPA) and success rate were created to give a little more context to performances and more accurately capture efficiency. The easiest example is a 15-yard draw on a third-and-20 play. By overall yards and yards per carry, that is going to look like a very successful play. By EPA and success rate, that’s an obvious failure.
So when we look at those stats on the overall offense, we do see a more significant drop:
2024:
2025:
Now we’re not just talking about a drop from a top-tier offense to a top-10 one....
