Dan Campbell admits he’s kind of wrong about something Lions fans were begging for
Something Detroit Lions fans were asking for coming out of the bad loss to the Green Bay Packers was for the team to start playing starters in the preseason to get over early-season woes. This isn’t something new. The Lions have come out flat in the first couple of games of the last two seasons. […]
Something Detroit Lions fans were asking for coming out of the bad loss to the Green Bay Packers was for the team to start playing starters in the preseason to get over early-season woes. This isn’t something new. The Lions have come out flat in the first couple of games of the last two seasons. So it makes sense — maybe one of the variables for that is that starters essentially have no tune-up time in the preseason.
The Lions do like joint practices, and what they get out of those is two-plus hours of live work with another team’s starters in which they can put their guys into situations that they can control. That seems like more than enough, right? It should be for the veterans.
But one thing the Lions usually do is put the young players in these games to have them be in situations you can’t control. The Lions didn’t do that with Tate Ratledge or Christian Mahagany. Tuesday morning, Dan Campbell addressed that on Costa and Jansen on 97.1 The Ticket.
Dan Campbell admits he was wrong to not play rookie offensive linemen in the preseason
“With those two guys, yeah, we could have played them a little bit more, but there again, you’re not playing against their starters,” Campbell said. “That’s why I like the joint practices.”
Again, I’m with Campbell that joint practices are the way to go, but they are a controlled scenario. Whereas playing in real games is controlled to a point, but they’re also live, and anything can happen. It would have been better to see what those guys could do in these situations, at least for communication. That was largely the brunt of the issue on Saturday.
Communication wasn’t coming through well enough, and guys were going the wrong way on multiple plays. Only playing Ratledge in one preseason game and Mahagany in none could have had something to do with that.
The good news is you might see Campbell make sure his young guys, whom he intends to start, are getting all the experience they can handle. The medium to bad news is that the Lions will have to go trial by fire and just figure it out while the bullets are flying overhead.
At least we know there will be some intentional pulling back this week, so that the Lions can just get their bread and butter down before they try to get exotic. We’ll see how it goes.
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