It's increasingly clear that the Lions do not see their defense the way the rest of the world does, and they're right for it

Detroit Lions fans really want an edge rusher so badly. They're clammoring for it non stop and Lions GM Brad Holmes is constanly being asked about it and it;s easy to see why to a point.  The way the season ended was bad, and then the world watched the Eagles go out and sack the […]

Mike Payton — Detroit Lions Beat Writer
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Detroit Lions fans really want an edge rusher so badly. They're clammoring for it non stop and Lions GM Brad Holmes is constanly being asked about it and it;s easy to see why to a point. 

The way the season ended was bad, and then the world watched the Eagles go out and sack the hell out of Patrick Mahomes in the Super Bowl. It got Lions fans and media to a boiling point where anything other than an edge rusher is just a failure. 

After day two, Lions GM Brad Holmes took to the podium to talk about new draft picks Tate Ratledge and Isaac TeSlaa, and he got more questions about edge rushers than he did about those two players. 

Holmes flat-out said that they just don't have it that high on their board and implied there was a chance the Lions may not take one at all when he said, "If we don't, we don't." 

He also reiterated over and over again that the Lions are just not going to reach on a player just because he plays the position everyone thinks they need to have. That says a lot. 

It's really time to come to terms that the Lions just don't see their defense the way that the rest of the world seems to, and they have a lot of reason to be right about that. 

Yeah, they struggled at the end of the year when they had a ton of injuries, and you can play the old hit about how injuries are a part of the game, but the Lions dealt with injuries on a whole other level. Everyone got hurt, and then the guys backing them up got hurt too.

The fact is, the Lions were a really good defensive team up until that happened, and I'm not talking about the Aidan Hutchinson injury. I'm talking about the chaos that happened in the back half of the season. Previous to that, they were the second-best defense in the NFL going into Week 11 according to DVOA.

That's with just one game with Za'Darius Smith. What happened after that game? Anzlaone broke his arm, McNeill tore his ACL, Davis broke his jaw, Reader missed a few games, Rodriguez tore his ACL, Melifonwu was due to come back and got hurt again, and Rakestraw struggled with a hamstring injury.

Few teams could have just gotten over this, and you saw that in the playoffs. It finally got to be too much. But now Detroit comes back with all these guys healthy, and you can complain about Marcus Davenport all you want, but he was a non-factor after Week 3, and the Lions defense was still just good without him. He's a bonus if he works out. 

Maybe the Lions go out and draft a guy late in the draft. Maybe they come to terms with Zmith and get him back. Maybe they do nothing. It's easy to get upset about that, but the Lions see their defense as being really good, and they have a lot more data that proves their right than we do. 

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