A Moment Like Never Before
The Detroit Lions are 5-1 and we have to ask the Big Question
After the Lions signed a spate of free agents in March, I asked my brother the following question: what if the Lions are legitimately really good?
Last season the team finished 9-8. They had overcome a disastrous start to the season and a catastrophically bad defense through seven weeks to turn the season around and embark on a wild winning streak to close the season. Optimism was high but the BPONE nature of Lions fandom mostly kept everyone’s expectations in check. Yes they were improving in the secondary, yes they were adding more weapons on offense, yes the defense would be a year older, but how much could that be worth really? A game or two?
The most games the Detroit Lions have won in my lifetime in a single season is 11. In my father’s near-60 years, it is 12. Add in one playoff game to that one season and you can bump it to 13. The thing about the Detroit Lions is they lose. A lot. I grew up in Michigan and have a number of childhood friends who are not described as sports fans. Those people can still tell you one thing about the Detroit Lions: that they lose. It’s the one constant in a dynamic world. If they have a winning season, it’s usually mostly mediocrity with close game luck tipping the scales. And you can’t expect them to win more than 11 games.
All of these factors led those expectations to be tempered. We all agreed the Lions would be better but the ceiling of how much better they could be was 11-6… maybe 12-5. Beyond that is impossible. Predicting the Detroit Lions to go 13-4 or 14-3 is grounds for immediate institutionalization in a psychiatry ward. I abided by these rules of life and predicted 11-6 on this very blog just over a month and a half ago.
But in the back of my mind was the sentiment expressed in the question I led off this piece with. I read about how Football Outsiders’ DVOA ranked the Lions as the 9th best team by the end of last season but in weighted DVOA- which puts more value on games later in the season- the Lions were the 6th best team in the NFL. I remembered how they finished last season 8-2 in the final 10. And then I thought “all those young guys on defense will have another year under their belt, the Lions will be adding a number of free agent pickups at key positions, and will add four high draft picks to the lineup + Jameson Williams (at some point)”. All of those factors should mean the Lions are significantly better. And what sort of record is significantly better than 6th in the NFL and 8-2 in a 10 game stretch?
Here we are through six weeks of NFL football. The Detroit Lions are 5-1, tied for the best record in the NFL. They have won four of five games by double digits, the lone single digit win being a road victory over the defending Super Bowl champions. Their lone loss was in OT where you can argue that losing a coin toss was the decider. They have won four straight games by 14+ points, the first time the franchise has achieved that since 1969-70. The Lions have the 5th best point differential in the NFL and this week’s DVOA ratings now rank the Lions the 2nd best team in the league.
Dating back to last season, the Lions are 13-3 in their last 16 football games, with two of the three losses being overtime defeats. Eight of those thirteen wins are by double digits, rather hard to do in the National Parity League. They’ve won in Lambeau Field two straight times over that span and have now taken over opposition stadiums with a sea of Honolulu blue in consecutive road games. The Lions’ 5-1 start is only the fourth for the franchise in the Super Bowl era, matching 1970, 1980, 1991, and 2011. Their current DVOA ranking of 2nd is the highest they have ever clocked in at at any point of any season after the month of September in the history of the metric (which has been retroactively calculated for all seasons dating back to 1981).
We are in uncharted waters. This sort of start to a season has happened once before in my lifetime, the aforementioned 2011 team, but there are a couple major differences. First of all, this start to the season feels much more sustainable, with the four 14+ point wins all being convincing beatdowns. Contrast that to 2011, where only one of the wins was by double digits and two were improbable comebacks pulled out of the Lions’ ass (20-0 and 27-3).
The other difference is the state of the division and the schedule. In 2011, the Lions’ division had the reigning Super Bowl Champions in it, who were 6-0 and had a 27-year-old QB named Aaron Rodgers on his way to an MVP. The 2011 Lions had that team twice on the remaining schedule, plus a road game at a great New Orleans team, plus tricky road games at Chicago and Oakland. The division was probably out of reach and the remaining schedule was not easy.
2023 is a reversal of that. The Lions’ division is weak, with Green Bay at 2-3 breaking in a new QB who does not look particularly good, Minnesota at 2-4 and without their best player for four more weeks, and Chicago at 1-5 looking ready for another year of tanking. Detroit is six games into the season and has a 2.5 game lead in the division. The Lions are now -490 or better to win the division to every betting site out there. It’s theirs to take.
And the schedule? Per Tankathon, the Lions have the second-easiest remaining schedule in the NFL, with the opponents having a combined winning percentage of .387. Looking at the DVOA ratings, the Lions have four games remaining against cellar dwellers (ranks 25-32 in league ratings) and seven against teams ranking from 16th to 32nd. Just four games are against teams in the top 15 and just one is against teams in the top 10. The hardest part of Detroit’s schedule is already probably past them (it will certainly be after next week) and yet they’re 5-1. DVOA is now projecting 12.8 wins. Which means 13-4. Yeah.
The latest decisive win, over Tampa Bay on Sunday, was an example of how the Lions have grown under Dan Campbell. They’ve typically won higher scoring, higher event games over the last decade+ dating back to the Stafford era, and that was the case in the second half of last season when the Lions got hot. They won a couple lower scoring games, the Jets game most notably, but that was a skin-of-your-teeth sort of game and Detroit didn’t look comfortable doing it. On Sunday against the Buccaneers, they were extremely comfortable.
There are key moments I want to talk about in that game, the Jameson Williams catch and the Craig Reynolds block, but the first point is that fourth quarter, a textbook example of playing with the lead. They had the ball up 17-6 when the quarter started and drove into Bucs territory, with Goff’s precision passing moving them down the field. A nice (and rare) Marvin Jones Jr. catch picked up a first down and got the Lions into the red zone. The drive stalled out after that, but they had done enough to make the field goal easy for Riley Patterson and took a 20-6 lead.
From that point forward, it was beautiful. The defense slammed the door right away with a three-and-out (a bit of an assist on the Baker Mayfield overthrow of Trey Palmer) and then the offense went on a picture perfect drive. If you were trying to imagine the best possible drive in that situation (up two touchdowns, 10:37 left) that didn’t result in points, that would probably be it: 11 plays, 40 yards, 6:52 time of possession(!), the Bucs burning a timeout along the way, and ending with a snipe of a punt by Jack Fox. The Lions burned about 2/3rds of the remaining time in the game, robbed Tampa of a timeout, and gave the Bucs the ball back on their own 2 yard line. Perfection.
From there, they kept everything in front of them, kept Tampa in bounds, munched the clock some more, and made it so that even if the Buccaneers had found the end zone on that drive, there was going to be so little time remaining that it was going to require a successful onside recovery to keep the game going. After years of mostly falling behind before a furious comeback in the Stafford era, Matt Patricia reversed it with great starts and titanic collapses. Dan Campbell’s team is starting on time and finishing games, as good teams do. It got a tad hairy for a few minutes against Green Bay but otherwise the last four games have seen the Lions take a double digit lead into halftime and never let the game get truly competitive again after that.
And yeah, players are making plays. Each week a new guy makes a PLAY. The Craig Reynolds block will live forever in Lions lore. Jameson Williams’ catch was the turning point of the game and is an example of everything the Lions need him for. Devine Ozigbo had to get into the game and touch the ball because the running backs are so injured. The Lions have been down arguably their second-best defensive player the last two weeks, one or two starting RBs, a starting G, and multiple more useful pieces on defense and yet they’ve thoroughly whipped two opponents in a row.
The Lions aren’t getting ultra-lucky with turnovers (+2 through 6 games) and they aren’t getting any injury luck at all, yet are 5-1 with convincing underlying metrics to back it up. They can win a higher scoring game, or a gritty, defensive game like Sunday. They can win when their rushing game smashes you in the face and they can win when you shut the run game down and instead Jared Goff picks you apart, like Sunday. This is a good football team.
The experience of watching the last few Lions games is something almost out-of-body. A bathtub of euphoria, heated to the perfect temperature on the island of eternal love, surrounded by angels drinking from the fountain of youth. Scrolling through Twitter after the game and reading all the tweets of people, many of them independent NFL folks, discussing how good the Lions are is the new cocaine. It’s that feeling that made Lions fans travel to take over Lambeau Field and Raymond James Stadium. Infectious, addictive, we just can’t get enough.
To a fan of a different team, it may seem rather peculiar. After all, the Lions were favored each of the past three weeks and most expected them to beat Green Bay and Tampa Bay, even on the road, and obviously to topple woeful Carolina at home. Why am I feeling this way about beating a middling Bucs team on the road? The answer is pretty simple: all of us Lions fans have only ever wanted one thing. To win the Super Bowl sure, but honestly, what we wanted is something more reductive than that, a team that feels like a legitimate contender.
The most amazing part of the ineptitude of the past 65 years of the Detroit Lions is not that they haven’t won a Super Bowl, or that they have a lot of losing seasons, it’s that “one playoff win in 65 years” thing. It’s the fact that you can be a person getting ready to retire who has never once seen this team have a season where they were very close to making the Super Bowl (or made the Super Bowl). The Lions’ one appearance in the NFC Championship Game was a 31 point loss to a team who beat them by 45 earlier in the season and is widely considered one of the best NFL teams of all time. You can’t really convince me that was a season where if one or two things go differently, the Lions win (or are even in) the Super Bowl. Also to double down on the point, that 1991 season was bookended by 6-10 and 5-11 seasons.
Even the St. Louis/Arizona Cardinals franchise, which has had loads of misery, made a Super Bowl and was one or two plays from winning it. The Lions have never had a team like that, not once in 65 years. We just want a team that can make us believe the Lions could play for a Super Bowl, whether or not they do. A team with a good coach, a good GM, a sustainable vision for the future and quality player development. That can get into the playoffs as more than a 9-7 sacrificial lamb to an actually good team. A winning season that produces a playoff victory and then goes out and does it again the next year to convince us it’s not a fluke. A team that makes the letters “S. O. L.” fade into the distance.
That’s all I’ve ever wanted and I think I speak for most Lions fans. The euphoria of the past three weeks is that each game we watch of this team, and of the teams they’re competing against, is another indicator that maybe, at long last, this could be that team. Like the best and most unrealistic thing you ever dreamt while you were asleep suddenly coming true in real life. That’s all it really is. If the Lions are actually an elite team, they should pound the Panthers into a pulp and dispatch the Packers and Bucs without too much trouble, even on the road. Ticking all three of those boxes is a statement that the Lions may be legitimately elite. The messiah may be here in the flesh; the Lions might be a Super Bowl contender. Only 65 years of waiting.
The Takes: Offense
Jared Goff is playing like a top 5 QB in the NFL right now. I’m not saying Jared Goff has supplanted say, Joe Burrow, on a QB ranking that is based off of several seasons’ worth of data. I’m saying that right now, based on the football being played this season, Jared Goff is a top 5 QB. He’s not attempting enough passes to have a real argument over Tua Tagovailoa for MVP (at least not until Tua comes down to earth), but Goff is everything the Lions need right now. I was admittedly not a Goff fan during his first season in Detroit and was still a skeptic even as late as the end of last season. But man, Goff is an assassin right now.
Over the past two weeks Goff played his best game as a Lion against Carolina (20/28, 236 yds, 8.4 Y/A, 3 TD, 0 INT) and then his arguable best game (in context) vs. Tampa. On a day when the Lions had zero rushing game, which football gurus always told us was essential for Goff to succeed, Goff sliced and diced a high-end NFL defense. He faced plenty of pressure, which has been his biggest weakness over his NFL career, and succeeded in the face of it. Goff was 30/44 for 353 yards, 8.0 Y/A, 2 TD, 0 INT, with at least a couple of the incompletions being drops. After being a Checkdown Charlie in 2021, Goff has been excellent throwing down the field this season, reading defenses, using the whole field, and limiting mistakes.
Goff will always have his limitations (mostly his total immobility), but it’s time to change how we think about him: Goff is not a game manager. Game managers can be decently good and lead a winning team given support. Ryan Tannehill for a few years there in Tennessee was a game manager. Goff, when in the right situation, can play at an All-Pro level and be a guy who drives the offense himself, as he did on Sunday. The Lions have a lot of good pieces on offense, but we shouldn’t act like they’re loaded with game-breaking talents... Goff is using the guys they have and leading a top 5 offense. There are pieces that help Goff succeed for sure, but Goff is unequivocally the best thing about this offense right now.
Sam LaPorta: Rookie TE legend? Six games into Sam LaPorta’s NFL career and he continues to be on pace for a historically great rookie TE season. If he were to play all 17 games at this pace, he would end up with 82 catches for 921 yards and 9 TD. That would be an elite season for a TE of any age, but for a rookie TE, it is historic. Just two rookie TEs in history have touched 900 yards (only seven have ever crossed 700!) while the only rookie TEs with more TDs than that are two fellas named Mike Ditka and Rob Gronkowski. Pretty good! Oh and the 82 catches would be the most by a rookie TD in history (narrowly edging Keith Jackson’s 81). Rookie TEs typically struggle, which was a reason to doubt the Lion offense coming into the year. LaPorta has completely bucked the usual trend and has emerged as one of the NFL’s best tight ends this season (PFF ranks him 5th). That the Lions traded TJ Hockenson and instead drafted his replacement who is cheaper and better + banked a 2nd (Brian Branch!) and 3rd in the deal may turn out to be one of the best moves of the Brad Holmes era.
The Lions will use their weapons when convenient. One of my least favorite things in pro sports is this line of thinking that the acquisition cost must be considered when deciding usage of a given player. The idea that if you draft a guy in the first round or you pay him a high salary, you need to play that player a lot so you can “justify” that “asset management”. This sounds great to a certain genre of Spreadsheet Guys who have a model about how to efficiently run an NFL team, but it’s really stupid in real life. You should use the best players you have for the right situation and the Lions are in agreement with me on this. They aren’t going to use Jahmyr Gibbs over David Montgomery if they need to grind the game out. They won’t throw deep for Jameson Williams just for the sake of doing so.
Each of these young Alabama products are electric and talented players and I do believe their usage will grow as their careers continue (look up Alvin Kamara and Christian McCaffrey’s rookie years for reference on Gibbs) but the Lions will never stop using their best players for the right situations. They don’t care if that player was acquired from the waiver wire or a first round pick and that’s the way it should be.
Would be nice to see the fully healthy offensive line. Preseason I said that a tackle injury was one of my biggest worries for the season and it took two weeks for the Lions to see that happen, as Taylor Decker missed Week 2 and 3. Meanwhile both starting guards Halapoulivaati Vaitai and Jonah Jackson have missed games, so in totality we’ve had one fully healthy starting OL game, which was against the Chiefs. And even in that one Decker played through pain for a large stretch. Yet the Lions have been pretty alright, surviving in spite of the creaky OL depth being put on display. It’s made life harder, but Jared Goff’s strong play, the ability of Amon-Ra St. Brown and LaPorta to consistently get open underneath, and David Montgomery grinding out extra yards has carried the offense. It would be nice to add a healthy and awesome OL to that… especially in the playoffs.
The Takes: Defense
At this point, the run defense is plainly elite. I’ve been waiting all season to see some indicator that the stout run defense that closed last season isn’t that good, but we’re six weeks into the season now. The Lions are allowing 64.7 rush yards per game, best in the NFL and only the Eagles are close. Every single week it’s the same story, the opponent tries to run the ball and it’s immediately shut off. The defensive line wins its battles in the run game pretty consistently and on the off-chance they don’t, the linebackers are always right there to make the stop. Derrick Barnes’ growth has been remarkable, from struggling to get on the field through two seasons to being a rock solid starter thanks to his exceptional run defense this season. Jack Campbell looked his best in run defense on Sunday too and I assume he’ll only get better. Maybe someone will eventually run on the Lions, but right now it is “I’ll believe it when I see it”.
Cornerback depth feels like the biggest trade deadline need. The NFL trade deadline is not a big event like it is in other sports but it does exist and deals do happen. San Francisco and Miami both added pieces recently and the Lions are a good enough team that I think it makes sense to at least add depth. If they do, corner is the spot to target. Cam Sutton and Brian Branch have been either good or awesome, while Jerry Jacobs is still a bit weaker of a starter than you’d like, though he’s been much better the past couple weeks. Those three are acceptable, but the depth is brutal with Emmanuel Moseley’s injury. Will Harris cannot be playing if you want to win the Super Bowl, so trading for someone a bit better than that to be your 4th corner makes a lot of sense (I’d also consider moving Ifeatu Melifonwu to corner if needed).
Alex Anzalone has had the most astounding arc on this team. I gotta give it to Brad Holmes and Dan Campbell on this one- I never saw anything from Anzalone through 1.5 years in Detroit. I conceded that he was playing better late last season but still wanted the team to move on in the offseason. When the Lions signed Anzalone to an extension this spring, I feared that this was a culture move and didn’t have enough on-field rationale. Boy, was I wrong! Anzalone has taken his game to another level this season, really good in the run game and Detroit’s best coverage linebacker to this point, justifying heavy usage week-in and week-out. The player development of this Lions regime has been completely remarkable, not just of young players/draft picks like Alim McNeill and Derrick Barnes, but turning a seven year NFL vet into a whole new player in Anzalone. Kudos.
Pass coverage still feels iffy. The Lions have had a number of snaps over the season to date where the coverage busts downfield but the opposing offense doesn’t convert because someone up front makes a play and the QB can’t get a clean throw off. That was the case against Tampa, when Isaiah Buggs’ tipped ball led to Will Harris’ interception, on a play where Mike Evans was wide open deep. There were a few in the Bucs game and a few against KC as well in Week 1.
It still feels like the team hasn’t quite gotten comfortable with zone coverage, safeties are a little late to pick up receivers entering their zone, linebackers not totally surehanded in coverage either. Some of it is personnel, some seems to be continued schematic rustiness. The big fear right now is that this’ll be exploited when the Lions face a great offense again, but thankfully it’s the only big issue on D right now. In this league if you take completely shut off the opposition run game and are able to cause havoc on the QB either through pressure, tipping balls, or constricting escapability, you can still have a good defense even if your coverage is somewhat leaky. Lions are doing that in 2023.
We need VENGEANCE for last time
The Road Ahead
There’s a pretty convincing case that this upcoming week is the Lions’ toughest remaining game on the schedule. Baltimore has an elite defense, a high level QB, and are exceptionally well-coached, plus it’s on the road. I assume quite a few Lions fans will be traveling to Baltimore for the game, but it is not going to be easy. Mobile QBs have given Aaron Glenn’s defense quite a bit of trouble over the years too. Not as much this season, as the Lions have seemingly preferred keeping the pocket closed to prevent the scramble rather than get tons of pass rush against the mobile QBs this year (Seattle, Carolina, and Tampa games all stood out in this regard), but it’s another threat you have to account for. The Ravens are a very good team and will be a stiff test. After that, it’s pretty downhill.
The remaining games that stick out to me are the Chargers, Cowboys, Vikings, and Saints, all of which are road games. Do I think any of those teams are particularly great? No. But the other six games (Chicago x2, vs. Green Bay, vs. Denver, vs. Vegas, vs. Minnesota) should all be considered must wins. It’s those other four games that stand out as notable swing matchups, as I thought the contest with Tampa was. Doing a bit of math, if the Lions were to win the must wins, lose to Baltimore, and split those swing games, you get 13-4. Or, exactly what DVOA is projecting at this point in time. That is perhaps the current median outcome.
Getting to 13-4 is the ballpark you want to be in to get a top two seed. The #1 seed is the humongous prize, as a bye + home field throughout the NFC playoffs would be a massive edge, but even the #2 seed is a big one for the context of this season. You’d likely get a wildcard round game at home against a team that is not particularly good and then the ability to host the next round. It makes the path of getting to the Super Bowl a bit tougher but still creates a clear path to the NFC Championship Game, which, for this franchise, is a massive deal in a season like this.
The other 5-1 teams, the Eagles and 49ers, both have pretty difficult schedules the rest of the way, with Philly getting KC/BUF/@SEA, not to mention the two divisional games with Dallas, and San Fran getting CIN/@JAX/BAL and the two divisional games with Seattle. And oh yeah, those two play each other. There is definitely a world where the two teams’ difficult schedules leave one at 12-5 and the other at 13-4 and the Lions’ easy schedule puts them at 13-4 and it’s up to the tiebreaker to decide the #1 seed. Or, you know, the Lions finish 14-3. I know it sounds insane, but the Lions are 13-3 in their last 16 dating back to last year and the most respected fancystats projections envisions them at 13-4. To ponder 14-3 at this point is not insane, as unusual as it sounds. If you beat Baltimore this week, it absolutely becomes a legitimate possibility.
For the Lions, the task now is taking it one week at a time. They’ve got a tough challenge this week, then an easier one, and then the bye. We’re in uncharted waters for this franchise, but it is justified discussion. At some point, when you keep winning week after week, it’s time to have the big conversation. If the schedule offers a clear path to 13-4 and a possible #1 overall seed, you’re a Super Bowl contender. Even if your entire lived experience says you should not be. The best thing to do is embrace it.
Go Lions!! Such a fun season so far!!
Great article Alex.
Really enjoyed it.