Lions injured secondary shouldn’t be shouldering the blame for tough loss to Chiefs, here’s who should
The Detroit Lions didn’t have the worst game you’ve seen them play on Sunday night. You might feel like it was right now, but that’s just good old-fashioned recency bias. The big concern here is how they lost. You might think that the Lions’ struggles on defense might come from the secondary dealing with not […]
The Detroit Lions didn’t have the worst game you’ve seen them play on Sunday night. You might feel like it was right now, but that’s just good old-fashioned recency bias. The big concern here is how they lost.
You might think that the Lions’ struggles on defense might come from the secondary dealing with not having both Terrion Arnold and D.J. Reed and both Kerby Joseph and Brian Branch playing through injuries. To a small degree, you’d be right. But that was mostly for missed-tackling purposes.
The Lions’ linebackers were the real culprits for Detroit’s poor defensive performance
The Chiefs had a plan coming into this game, and it was a pretty simple one: attack the linebackers. They pulled off that plan, and they pulled it off well.
The Chiefs’ targets and receptions against the Lions’ linebackers
- Jack Campbell: 8 targets and 5 catches for 77 yards
- Alex Anzalone: 6 targets for 6 catches and 56 yards
- Derrick Barnes: 2 targets for 2 catches and 18 yards
That’s 151 of Patrick Mahomes’ 257 yards on Sunday Night. The Chiefs attacked over the middle or built off of short throws and solid blocking for those short throws. The Chiefs didn’t really have any explosive plays in this game. Actually, they had just one play where Mahomes threw from 20-plus air yards, and that was in the first quarter. Everything else was short. Take a look at Mahomes’ chart.
The concern here is that other teams might take this knowledge and put it into action, but those teams don’t have Patrick Mahomes, who was able to go on the move and extend plays long enough for some of this stuff to work, and then be accurate fast for the other stuff. On top of that, the Chiefs are just built to move the ball this way.
The other big thing is that the Lions essentially had to change their defensive scheme for this game, and instead of their usual man coverage, they went with a base defense that tried to keep everything in front of them, but wound up biting them hard. That’s not likely to be an every-week thing for Detroit.
The Lions definitely need their starting corners back, too. The group they went in with wasn’t so bad, but they’ll be tested with Baker Mayfield, who has been all about the explosive plays this year. Even without Mike Evans.
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