The Lions Found A Way To Win, But The Time To Clean Things Up Is Overdue

What happened at Ford Field on Sunday felt far too messy for a team with the kind of expectations they have for themselves.

After a first half where the Detroit Lions scored just seven points and punted the ball four times, they found themselves up three scores in a hurry. A strip-sack fumble forced by a blitzing Roger McCreary and recovered by DJ Wonnum felt like a fever dream only Brad Holmes could have conjured. Things were suddenly, and finally, clicking into place for a Lions team that was a full-touchdown favorite over the New Orleans Saints. Everything felt back on track.

And then, somehow, the Lions nearly gave it all back. Maybe that’s the most fitting way to describe Sunday: Detroit found a way to win, but it also found a whole lot of reasons to wonder how much it actually learned from last season.

As soon as it felt like everything was coming together, things started to unravel. 47 yards to Chris Olave, and the Saints flip the field. A few plays later, they score their first points of the afternoon. No worries, the Lions offense is up and off the ground, they’ll… promptly go three-and-out for the third time. Jack Fox’s punt and the Lions punt coverage leaves something to be desired, and the Saints are already near midfield. But you know what, that Lions defense, it had pitched a shutout in the first half. They recorded a sack, an interception, and held the Saints to fewer than 115 total net yards—the first time Detroit had done that since December of 2015—so put ‘em out there and… watch New Orleans score seven plays later—eight if you remember the 21-yard defensive pass interference penalty on Rock Ya-Sin.

Alright, turd quarter flushed, the Lions offense is their bread and butter, time to… fail to convert their second third-and-short on the day, this time after Kool-Aid McKinstry broke up a pass to Amon-Ra St. Brown. Fox, from the Lions’ 45-yard line, punts the ball 31 yards to the 24-yard line of New Orleans. A methodical 11-play, 66-yard drive turns into a field goal and the Saints find themselves down just four points, 21-17, with a lot of football still to be played.

The Lions were not playing complementary football. Offense, defense, special teams, it was all bad—like nothing good—for nearly 16 minutes of football on Sunday. That’s all it took for the game to get flipped on its head. Seeing things break down the way they did over that stretch is interesting when you hear Dan Campbell’s post-game speech from the locker room:

“We did not play our cleanest, but when we had to have it, all three phases—it’s what we talked about last night, man—when we needed somebody to pull us back out of the water—our head’s underwater—we did that. In all three phases, and your teammates, one by one. That was the difference, men.”

Campbell is right that the Lions found a way to win, but “finding a way to win” and “playing complementary football” aren’t necessarily the same thing—and over the course of 16 minutes Sunday, the Lions almost let it slip away. According to Campbell’s summarization, the Lions “had” to have it to start the second half, and when they forced an interception, only up 7-0, and the offense turned it into a touchdown. When the defense forced a fumble on the Saints’ very next drive, the Lions’ offense puts them up by 21. All of that only lasted for about six minutes of actual game time, but in that moment of football harmony, you couldn’t have imagined New Orleans felt anything other than completely demoralized.

But they weren’t. Tyler Shough looked poised beyond his starts, and Kellen Moore proceeded to dial up explosive play after explosive play. We had seen this movie before last year in Detroit, but talked ourselves into a more aggressive defense, one more committed to the pass rush, would cover up for a secondary under repair. Detroit finished Week 1 as the fourth-fastest team to pressure—2.40 seconds—across 61 pass plays, a marked improvement from finishing last year 30th at 2.86 seconds, so where does that leave us? Brian Branch is still at least a month away from returning, who knows what the future holds for Kerby Joseph, and Ennis Rakestraw was presumably a healthy inactive.

“The biggest thing right now, guys, is you find a way to get the win,” Campbell continued to say in the locker room after the game. “It’s Week 1 and then you clean [expletive] up, because it feels a hell of a lot better than the loss to have to clean it up. That’s the thing: we found a way to win, we will clean this up, and there’s a lot to clean up.”

That’s where Campbell’s postgame message could be misconstrued. Most people will hear “a lot to clean up” and immediately think that’s commentary about the defense, but it’s not contained to just that side of the ball. Outside of the Lions’ two short-field touchdown drives to begin the third quarter, their offense was largely unable to sustain itself. They were an abysmal 5-of-13 on third down, even worse than their 38.7% conversion rate a year ago that had them finish 19th in the NFL. Nine of the Lions’ 14 drives lasted five plays or fewer—one of those was a three-play touchdown drive—but that is just not part of the formula for complementary football.

Where Campbell was spot on in his assessment of Sunday’s game was the work the Lions have ahead of them, the messes on both sides of the ball they’ll need to clean up in hurry. They can’t afford to bring the baggage of this game against the Saints with them on the plane to Buffalo before their Thursday night showdown with the Bills.

This iteration of the Lions once again proved they know how to handle adversity, but they only need a mirror to see who put themselves in that position, coaches and players included. Navigating adversity is a strength and a skill this team has honed over the years. Needing to “find a way” because all three phases stopped functioning is a problem. Detroit has just four days to figure out which one Sunday was.