What We Learned About the Lions: The Lions have learned nothing from themselves and this felt like rock bottom
Detroit had four weeks of evidence showing exactly what was going wrong on defense. Against a depleted Carolina offense, the Lions somehow repeated nearly every mistake.
Welcome to rock bottom for the Detroit Lions and their defense. Yeah, it’s in Week 4. That’s where Rock bottom hit. The Lions got absolutely embarrassed by a team that was missing just about everyone due to injury, and they couldn’t stop it from happening. They lost 32-26 despite having a shot to maybe win the game late.
The Lions have seemingly learned nothing from themselves in the last four weeks
It’s the same thing over and over again. This list of things keeps happening over and over again.
- Defensive pass interference on third down instead of killing a drive
- Bringing the house and getting taken advantage of
- Backing up and getting beat with short passes
- Killing their own offensive drives with penalties
- D.J. Reed gets beat unmercifully and stays on the field
- A player has a career night on the Lions’ defense
- Opposing quarterback has the most accurate game of their season
- The Lions fail to adjust
You can’t help but feel hopeless about this defense
At this point, the Lions don’t have the personnel to do the thing they want to do, and I’m not sure they ever have, but they just keep trying to do it as if on try 358, it’ll finally click and start working.
Converting on third down is just super easy for every team because they know the Lions are going to bring the house and leave their corners on an island, and those guys can’t cover man-to-man. They just can’t do it. Then the Panthers stayed on the field on a 4th-and-4 early in the game, and that was the ultimate smack in the face by a thing called reality.
They knew they’d have no problem converting there, and they did. Because the Lions again brought the house down and left guys on an island, the Panthers converted a 10-yard pass for a first down. Tetaroia McMillan had nine catches for 147 yards and a touchdown at the end of the first half. That’s insane.
What do you do? The easy thing to say is to trade for someone, and that someone should have been Porter, but they got outbid, and that’s that. The problem now is, will any team even entertain trading one of their starters right now? Or do they want to wait until the trade deadline in November? Can the Lions make it that long?
First quarter woes continue
Coming into this game, the Lions had scored one touchdown in the first quarter all season. That problem continued into this game as Detroit struggled to overcome penalties on both of their first two drives. At the end of the day, it’s the one quarter you can usually get by without scoring in, but the Lions can make their lives so much easier if they just started hot. They struggle to do that.
Mark my words, Skyler Gill-Howard will score a touchdown in 2026
For the second straight week, the Lions put defensive lineman Skyler Gill-Howard on the field on offense. If there’s one thing I know about Lions head coach Dan Campbell, he loves threads. The idea there is that he shows something a few times a game or maybe even just once a week, and teams latch onto it after a while. The idea is that you also have to have something successful that works off it. So teams keep watching that successful play, and they want to learn how to stop that, and that is when you hand the ball off to Gill-Howard or hit him in the back of the end zone.
Some good stuff
Ok, Let’s see.. Jake Bates had a hell of a game. Beyond that, Jameson Williams finally broke through with a nice 100-yard game, and Jared Goff hit 50 career 300-yard passing games. Only Patrick Mahomes has more since 2016. Nobody has more since 2022.
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