Dan Campbell’s comments after Lions’ win don’t show a lot of faith in Giovanni Manu right now
The Lions might be going back to formula with Manu if Decker can’t play
The Detroit Lions walked out of Cincinnati with a 37-24 win over the Bengals, and Giovanni Manu survived his first NFL start. On paper, it didn’t seem that bad.
He allowed two pressures and two sacks. One of those sacks did lead to a fumble and loss of possession. With Taylor Decker now potentially missing more than just the Bengals game, we asked Dan Campbell about the possibility of Manu getting the start against the Kansas City Chiefs.
Dan Campbell did not seem to have a ton of faith in Manu getting another start
“We’ll see. We’re going to look at everything here,” Campbell said. “Certainly, Skips (Dan Skipper) back, you know. So we’ll look at Skip. We brought Devin Cochran today. He’s a candidate, and then we’ll see where Decker’s at. Obviously, that’s always going to be our first choice, is see where Decker is, but I don’t want to put Decker out there if it means that we get a couple of games, and we don’t have him for the rest of the year, makes no sense. So we’ll play this smart. We’ll do what’s right and then next man up. If it’s not him, it’s next man up. Whether that is Manu again, we’ll see. Or is it one of those other two guys I just mentioned?”
The answer to the question was almost to name every single offensive lineman on the team and commit to nothing. Not what you want to hear coming out of the game if you’re Manu. It would seem that the Lions are already leaning a little towards Skipper as their starting left tackle in Kansas City if Decker doesn’t play.
Look, the comments weren’t all that bad. Campbell did have some good things to say about Manu after the game, and he did seem to chalk a lot of it up to it being his first start.
“Up and down. I thought that he did some good things in the run game,” Campbell said. “I thought there were some pass plays; he did a good job. And then there were some that. Man, they weren’t good, and he’ll learn from them. He’s got to learn from them. And that’s what you look forward to. You don’t want to have a couple of plays where your quarterback gets hit, but at the same token, that’s probably the best way to learn, too, because you don’t want that to happen again.
“And it’s like, ‘What do I need to hone up? What can I do better? How do I handle this?’ But it’s, look, that’s his first real taste of real football, NFL, you know, not preseason. It’s real, so you just grow from it. It’s good experience.”
Like Campbell said, we’ll see where the week goes. But right now, it’s not looking too good for Manu starting against the Chiefs.