Lions’ OC John Morton seems to have a Matt Patricia like tendency that you have to hope he gets rid of soon
Don’t freak out, but this seems like Morton’s thing. Everyone has one
The Detroit Lions won the game against the Cleveland Browns on Sunday. That’s the most important thing, obviously. Still, while watching this game, I couldn’t help but go back to Week 1 and then even further back, and start to get a little concerned about Lions OC John Morton having a tendency that Matt Patricia broke my brain and spirit with during his time as the Lions’ head coach.
John Morton appears to have a hard time moving off of things that aren’t working
I’m speculating here. Nobody on the team has voiced this, and nobody on the staff has voiced this, but you go back and watch the game on Sunday, and you see the Lions’ offense over and over again trying to make the deep ball to Jameson Williams work. It never did on this day.
They tried to do it eight times, and it failed eight times. There were drops, an interception, and just bad throws by Jared Goff. No matter how much it didn’t work, the Lions just kept going back to it.
It goes back to Patricia running 53-year-old Adrian Peterson up the middle over and over again, despite it never working. It just felt like Patricia kept doing it with the feeling like “eventually this is just going to work and we’ll start winning.” It never did. That’s just an example.
The Lions did stuff like that all the time back then. Patricia was the king of doing things over and over again and expecting a different result. They were predictable in that era, and that is not what they are now under Morton. Still, you get the feeling that they get a little locked onto the idea of getting something done, and get distracted by it, and go away from the things that work.
Detroit Lions Deep Passing Facts
- Jared Goff is 4-15 on passes with 20-plus air yards or more in 2025
- That number is somewhat skewed. He was 4-7 going into Sunday’s game
- Goff has thrown two touchdowns on deep passes
- Goff has thrown one interception on deep passes
This isn’t exclusive to Morton or Patricia. Ben Johnson did this stuff, too, in his own way. His big thing always seemed to be the reluctance to stray from the game plan and adapt to something else until it was too late. It makes sense that you game plan all week for a team, and you want to do what you’ve spent the week working on. But at the same time, you have to walk away from things when they aren’t working.
There shouldn’t be a big concern here. Every coordinator has their thing, and this appears to be Morton’s. It’s also entirely possible that I’m reading way too much into it. What I do know is that this particular thing seemed to be done too much, and it killed a few drives.
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