Kelvin Sheppard spent seven minutes at the start of his news conference last week lamenting the big plays his defense allowed in the first two games of the season, so I figure that’s a good place to start my day-after look at the Detroit Lions’ 31-24 win over the New York Jets.
The Lions had a mixed day defensively overall.
They allowed 321 yards passing to Geno Smith, struggled to cover tight ends for the third straight week and blew a 14-point fourth-quarter lead before rallying for the victory. But they also had their highest quarterback pressure rate of the season (40.9%) on their lowest blitz percentage (22.7%), shut down the Jets' rushing attack and came up with a big takeaway late when Chuck Clark had a sack-fumble on Smith that Jack Campbell
recovered to clinch the game.
Takeaways and pressure weren’t the biggest issue in the Lions’ 1-1 start, though. Big plays were, with several coming as a result of blown coverages and communication errors, with Sheppard saying his defense was responsible for 75% of the 23 explosive plays it allowed the first two weeks.
Using Sheppard’s definition of a 17-plus-yard pass and 12-plus-yard run, the Lions did a better job preventing big plays against the Jets, though their big-play rate allowed (seven on 61 defensive snaps, 11.5%) was almost identical to what it was in their Week 1 win over the New Orleans Saints (10 on 86 plays, 11.6%).
Seven big plays allowed is too many for a Jets team that has a relatively middling group of offensive skill players outside of wide receiver Garrett Wilson, and several Lions defenders acknowledged their performance could have been a whole lot better after the game.
“I think that we shouldn’t give up 24 points to that outfit over there,” safety Christian Izien said. “I mean, they’re a good team, but I just don’t think we should give up 24 points to them. But we’ll clean it up, for sure. Yeah, we’ll clean it up.”
“Obviously we have some things to clean up because it shouldn’t have been that close at the end,” defensive tackle Skyler Gill-Howard said. “But I feel like we’re getting back to the basics and becoming more dominant.”
The Lions were dominant against the run, holding the Jets to a season-low 58 yards rushing on 3.1 yards per carry. They allowed just one explosive run, a 12-yard gain by Breece Hall, and one 11-yard scramble to Smith.
Izien, making his first start of the season in place of the injured Avonte Maddox, had a big hand in plugging holes in the run defense. He made a team-high 11 tackles, including three for loss.
“Huge impact,” Lions coach Dan Campbell said. “And that's what he looked like in practice. He took it serious. There were a number of things that got on him in that last game [against the Buffalo Bills] and, boy, he wasn't going to let that happen again. And he was locked in all week. He got full-speed reps at it, padded work, and it looked like that today. And he played that way, and he was not going to give up a gap today. And then inside of the coverage and the hit and the run, that stuff just comes natural to him. He's a football player in that regard.”
Of the Jets’ seven explosive plays, just one appeared to come via the type of coverage breakdown that killed the Lions the first two weeks, and even that wasn’t as egregious as some of the communication breakdowns against the Saints and Bills.
Rookie tight end Kenyon Sadiq caught a 43-yard pass early in the fourth quarter when Izien bit hard on a run fake. Sadiq was wide open in the secondary on the play, behind Izien and Jack Campbell.
I would pin three more of the Jets’ big plays on the Lions and give Sadiq and Wilson credit for simply winning on the other three big plays. Sadiq made a diving 24-yard touchdown catch on a great throw by Smith, but Roger McCreary had tight coverage on the play, and Wilson beat D.J. Reed for two explosive gains downfield with his route running and ball skills.
McCreary appeared to have coverage errors on two other big plays when he didn’t get deep enough in his drop and/or was late reacting to a route combination, and Hall bounced his 12-yard run outside after he got bottled up at the line of scrimmage and either Reed or Malcolm Rodriguez lost outside contain.
Any way you cut it, that’s better than the Lions being at fault for 75% of the big plays they gave up in the first two games, though it highlights the talent gap between the Lions defense and the good players the team will have to stop if it has any hope of making a long playoff run.
“Garrett Wilson did a hell of a job, man,” Dan Campbell said. “He made a ton of contested catches, and he's got sticky hands and he can snag that ball. And yeah, we got to make some of those plays, but I'll tell you what, I'll take that. I'll take the fact we're in phase and we're battling and the guy's having to earn everything he gets, because he earned it. But I'll take those and we'll get better from there.”
The Lions have another potential get-right game for their defense this week when they visit the Carolina Panthers on "Sunday Night Football." The Panthers are 1-2, have four turnovers in three games (tied for ninth most in the league) and sit alongside the Lions in the NFL’s expansive middle class.
But they also have the type of explosive passing game that could give the Lions fits.
Carolina is tied with the Los Angeles Rams for the league lead with 13 pass plays of 20-plus yards. If the Lions don’t do a better job of eliminating those this week, that could be their downfall again.
Three more thoughts on Sunday’s win over the Jets and what lies ahead:
Lucky number
The Lions have scored exactly 31 points in every game this season.
“It's our lucky number,” Goff said.
Combing through the archives on Pro Football Reference, the last time the Lions scored the same number of points in three straight games was 1998, when they put up 27 points in consecutive games against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (a win), Chicago Bears (loss) and Green Bay Packers (win), with a bye week separating the final two games.
They’ve never hit the same point total in four straight games in the Super Bowl era but might need to keep up that pace this year given the state of their defense.
“Let me tell you what, you're coming to our games, you're loving this now,” Campbell said. “I mean, these are exciting games. These are exciting. Come down to the wire. Nobody's leaving early. And that was the point. We're not going to let anybody leave early this year.”
Big loss
The Lions' chances of scoring 31 this week got easier with an injury to Panthers cornerback Jaycee Horn.
Horn is out indefinitely and likely bound for a stint on injured reserve, according to multiple reports, after he injured his quad in last week’s loss to the Cleveland Browns. He was a Pro Bowl player each of the past two seasons, and his absence means the Panthers will use some combination of rookie Will Lee, Akayleb Evans and ex-Lion (in 2019) Mike Jackson at cornerback.
The Lions are tied for third in the NFL in scoring and rank top-10 in total, rushing and passing offense through three weeks.
Sky’s the limit
Gill-Howard, a sixth-round pick at defensive tackle who’s given the Lions’ pass rush a boost this fall, played one goal-line snap as a blocking tight end Sunday – he motioned across the formation to block an edge defender, and Jahmyr Gibbs scored on a 1-yard run up the middle − in a role that could expand before the season’s over.
Gill-Howard said he played a Deebo Samuel-type role on offense in high school, first as a running back, then a fullback/tight end “where you line up anywhere and they just give you the ball,” and he was in multiple offensive packages in his college days at Northern Illinois and Texas Tech.
“At NIU, we had a bunch of plays where I was going to run the ball, and then at Texas Tech we actually had a play where I was lined up in [shotgun] and actually was just a running back and I was going to run it in from like the 2-, 3-yard line,” Gill-Howard said.
Gill-Howard never got a carry in college, but he said he’s been repping the blocking role he played against the Jets since training camp and watched “a ton of film on his play “just so I block the right guy and not mess up Jah’s touchdown.”
“Just going in motion, kicking out the corner,” Gill-Howard said. “Something simple for now until we get later in that season. We’re going to need it. We haven’t repped anything else, but I’m sure he will. You know how coach Campbell is, he loves those type of plays, so we’ll see what happens”
Gill-Howard also had the first half-sack of his career Sunday, a sack he split with Aidan Hutchinson.
“Hutch congratulated me,” Gill-Howard said. “I don’t think he’s going to submit it like he usually does [to try and get credit for the full sack], he’s going to let me keep that one. At least that’s what he was saying, so we’ll see.”
Dave Birkett covers the Lions for the Detroit Free Press. Contact him at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Bluesky, X and Instagram at @davebirkett.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Lions defense still has holes, but the big-play sieve was mostly fixed against Jets
