ORCHARD PARK, NY – They didn’t have any answers, on the field or in the locker room after a 41-31 loss to the Buffalo Bills.
“That’s a great question,” D.J. Reed said Saturday, Sept. 17, while shaking his head and looking at the floor at the brand-new Highmark Stadium. “I’m not sure. I can’t really answer that question.”
The Buffalo Bills torched the Detroit Lions in the first game at the new stadium, with plenty of statistical markers that could be worrying.
Josh Allen threw for 248 yards and three touchdowns (and rushed for two more), James Cook ran for 135 yards and one score, and the Bills rolled up 446 yards of offense with enough ease to amplify concerns that, two weeks into the season, the Lions defense might be worse than feared.
The Bills
scored on their first four possessions and had three touchdowns before the Lions had their second first down. They finished with 203 yards rushing.
And the Lions struggled with coverage busts and communication errors that Reed and others seemed flummoxed by after the game.
“There’s so many different guys playing,” Reed told the Free Press after the game. “We have different packages, different guys so you got to know everybody plays different, everybody thinks differently. So it’s more of a challenge but we can do it, compared to Kerby’s been in the system for years, BB’s been in the system for years. You know how they play. When you have different safeties, everyone thinks different, everyone’s been in different systems, so it’s just a little different. But we’re going to get it fixed.”
The Lions miss veteran safeties Brian Branch and Kerby Joseph. Badly.
The NFL’s best safety tandem when healthy, Branch and Joseph opened the season on the physically unable to perform list and will miss at least two more games apiece while recovering from injuries that cut short their seasons last year.
In their place, the Lions have used four different safeties – Chuck Clark, Thomas Harper, Christian Izien and Avonte Maddox – in a slew of packages, the multitude of which may or may not be holding back their defense.
On Thursday, the Lions gave up seven plays of 20 yards, including a 40-yard TD pass from Allen to Josh Palmer when Maddox and slot cornerback Roger McCreary had a miscommunication in coverage.
They also had several missed fits in the run game, failed to contain Allen on bootleg and scramble plays and hurt themselves with 10 penalties and a slow-starting offense.
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“We needed to play a – it didn’t have to be spotless but it certainly needed to be a lot cleaner than that and we did not do that,” Lions coach Dan Campbell said. “And we knew we needed to score some points. We stalled out early in that game. That got us early. You’re down three scores and really we haven’t done anything offensively, and so a lot of that help needed to come there to be able to answer back. So we fell short there. And then defensively we knew it was a tall task but we gave up too much, and there’s some things that we have to get cleaned up.”
One of those things may be the number of players or packages the Lions use.
Asked about that after the game, Reed said “that’s not my job” to decide who plays.
“Whoever plays is whoever plays, that’s fine with me,” he said. “We just all got to all be on the same page so we got to get it figured out.”
Clark, a veteran whose communication skills were lauded by second-year defensive coordinator Kelvin Sheppard this offseason, said he doesn’t consider that an issue.
“That’s the game of football now,” Clark said. “Offenses are going to roll multiple personnels and packages out there and this is not 1980s football no more, we can’t go out there in base defense, them in I-formation and, ‘Hey, let’s do this thing.’ So as a defense we have to be able to match and adjust to what they’re giving us and go out there and roll with it and I think we did a good job with that in OTAs, just having different personnels and working those different packages so I wouldn’t say that’s a thing. We got to be able to match up. It’s a matchup league.”
In a matchup league, it was clear Thursday the Lions didn't match up well with the Bills. At least not now, in mid-September.
But with 15 games to go, there’s still plenty of talent on this team and plenty of time to get things right.
The Lions made Thursday’s game somewhat competitive in the second half thanks to strong performances from Jared Goff (26 of 38 passing, 327 yards), Amon-Ra St. Brown (nine catches, 142 yards, 2 TDs) and Jahmyr Gibbs (113 total yards, 1 TD). Aidan Hutchinson had his third sack this season and a forced fumble before things got out of hand. And Campbell said after the game he’s confident his team can and will get things fixed.
“Like I told the guys, at least you know now,” he said. “At least we know what it looks like now. That’s a good team playing good football. And now we know after two games, we kind of know who are. We’re figuring some stuff out.”
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: Josh Allen, Bills torch Lions defense that might be worse than feared
