DETROIT — There’s a prevailing thought worth bringing to light, after the Detroit Lions’ 20-16 loss to the Buccaneers on Sunday. It was another game in which a team with Super Bowl aspirations struggled to look the part and, in this one, struggled to look like itself.
Not the biggest issue in Week 2, of course, but certainly worth wondering: Is everything all right?
Over the last season and a half, the Lions (1-1) have won far more games than they’ve lost — thanks to a clear identity and knack for closing out games. They weren’t going to beat themselves. They were going to have fewer mental errors than the opposition. They were going to play sound, smart football. They were going to run the ball to set up the passing game, take care of business in the red zone and finish when it mattered most.
Some of those were issues last Sunday. They were all issues this Sunday.
First up, an ugly, uncharacteristic coaching blunder and sequence. The Lions were moving the ball down the field, hoping to add some points at the end of the half. With 18 seconds left, a completion to Amon-Ra St. Brown in bounds kept the clock running. The Lions were out of timeouts. As the offense went to spike the ball and stop the clock with a few seconds left, the field goal unit rushed onto the field as the ball was snapped, leading to a penalty for 12 men on the field. It was more like 20 men.
The Lions were caught in between decisions. It cost them three points in a game they would go on to lose by four. Campbell took the blame for the loss as a result.
“There’s nothing that is going to make any sense to anybody,” Campbell said. “There’s no way to justify this. It’s a massive error on my part, no one else’s, and it was just between hurry-up field goal and clocking it. And it was 100 percent my fault, 100 percent. And that’s why we have guys on the field who are trying to clock it. It’s just one of those things we work over and over, and we’ve been good, we do everything, and then I mess it up.”
Players didn’t necessarily agree.
“We had plenty of opportunities to overcome that and make the plays to win the game and I know he’s going to be hard on himself,” Jared Goff said. “As players, we got to be better, I got to be better. I have got to pick him up, I have got to pick up other guys, the other guys got to pick up me, that’s how we win. Unfortunately, we couldn’t overcome too many mistakes today.”
That’s a better-illustrated picture of what happened Sunday. This game was still there for the taking despite the first-half blunder. If you ran this one back nine other times, it’s a game the Lions probably win more often than not. They just didn’t take over the way we’re accustomed to seeing them.
Much of that has to do with an offensive performance that can best be described as bizarre. The Lions recorded 463 yards of offense and only came away with 16 points, a feat that’s hard to accomplish. That’s largely because the offense went an abysmal 1-for-7 in the red zone. Despite moving the ball better, the offense often felt forced or stagnant. There were too many passes short of the sticks, too many gimmicky looks and strange play calls that weren’t designed to give the offense a chance at a first down.
Even with all that happening, the Lions still had their chances in this one. They had two possessions in the final 2:22, down 20-16. That’s where Campbell’s error loomed large, trailing by four instead of one because of the first-half mistake. Even so, the offense failed to come away with points on both possessions.
It’s too early for it to be a true cause for concern, and this group deserves the benefit of the doubt given what we know about them. But there are aspects of the offense that feel off, that feel forced. Amon-Ra St. Brown returned to his usual production with 11 receptions for 119 yards, but it took an inefficient 19 targets to get him there. Sam LaPorta’s Week 1 impact was minimized with just four receptions four 45 yards, and he followed that up with two for 13 vs. the Buccaneers.
Detroit’s star running back duo combined for just 24 rushes. That meant 55 pass attempts for Goff, who had an obvious off day with two interceptions (one that could’ve been flagged for pass interference) and a couple more that could’ve been. It took those 55 attempts to get to 307 passing yards — a below-average 5.6 yards per attempt. Detroit is now 0-3 when Goff has 50 or more pass attempts in a game. His final throw of the day was short of the end zone, bouncing off the turf before it reached the intended target.
That’s not Lions football. And it’s not winning football, either.
“I think we didn’t make enough plays,” Goff said after the game. “I think we had too many mistakes, and they had less mistakes than we did and then ultimately at the end of the game we kind of had a chance to win it a couple times there, but it just wasn’t enough. They’re a good team, we’re a good team, it’s early in the season, it’ll be definitely a learning experience for sure for us to look and go, ‘OK, what went wrong and how can we fix it?’ I think if I remember correctly, we started 1-1 last year and we were able to respond from that pretty well. It’s early in the year, but it’s a good learning experience and a chance for us to dive into what went wrong and how to not let that stuff happen again.”
“Moments like these, you kind of — you only can learn from it, you know?” said Lions right tackle Penei Sewell, who said he thinks this will be a wake-up call. “You can’t let it go lower than this point, and I just hope the guys just have that great mindset coming in each and every week. It’s only the second game. We’ll get better.”
That much is true. It is only Week 2. There are 60 quarters of football left to be played in the regular season, so overreacting to eight and some change for a team — especially an offense — that’s been there and done that could prove to be foolish in a few weeks. But for the Lions to look like the contender they believe they are, their offense has to get back to the standard it set the last two seasons. That means establishing the run and not needing to re-discover it late in games. It means better decision-making from Goff. Better coaching from Campbell and Ben Johnson. All of which is both possible and expected.
Because if that happens, there’s a lot to like about how the 2024 Detroit Lions are shaping up. It’s early, but this team looks much improved defensively. Aidan Hutchinson was the star of the show on Sunday, notching a forced fumble and a career-high 4.5 sacks to give him 5.5 for the season — nearly halfway to his 2023 sack total through two weeks. Hutchinson used a combination of pass-rush moves in his repertoire, pure hustle and good timing to get there, combining with Levi Onwuzurike to sack Baker Mayfield five times. Safety Brian Branch recorded his first interception of the year. DJ Reader made his Lions’ debut on Sunday and helped the defense contain the Bucs’ rushing offense to just 70 yards on 23 attempts.
With 2:22 left in the game, Detroit’s defense faced the Buccaneers offense twice in need of stops. They held Tampa Bay to 13 yards on seven plays, getting the ball back for its offense both times. In total, the defense held the Bucs to 216 yards and 20 points — three of those coming off a turnover by the offense.
That’s two weeks in a row where the defense has given the offense a chance to figure it out. Last week, it did, this time, it didn’t. But that’s new. And now, they’re the ones keeping things in perspective when their offensive counterparts don’t have their best stuff.
“It sucks, but I was just talking to some guys and I think this is gonna be really good for us,” Hutchinson said. “We had an early loss last year, too — I remember we lost to Seattle and everybody thought we sucked again, you know? I think we’re gonna keep this one in perspective and if we’re gonna be struggling a little bit as a team, I’d rather we struggle early rather than late. Plan is to catch fire as we get through the season and we go from there.”
This was a lesson, one you can only hope the Lions learned from. Considering this group hasn’t lost two games in a row since October 2022, it’s fair to say they typically do, and it’s fair to expect them to.
We’ll see if they look more like themselves next week in Arizona.
(Top photo: Brandon Sloter / Getty Images)
