The Detroit Lions won a rock fight in their season opener for one simple reason: The other kids ran out of rocks.
After choking away a 21-0 lead, the Lions beat the New Orleans Saints at Ford Field, 31-30, because the Saints tried to win the game in overtime with a 2-point conversion, then lost it on an incomplete pass in the back of the end zone.
So the Lions
survived a 3½-hour uglython Sunday, Sept. 13.Even though Jameson Williams dropped two passes and fumbled a handoff on a fake reverse.
Even though the defense went from coming up with three takeaways to suddenly being unable to stop an anemic Saints offense over the final 20 minutes of regulation.
Even though offensive coordinator Drew Petzing debuted with a game plan that pretty much consisted
of running Jahmyr Gibbs’ legs off the way kids in the ’80s would use Bo Jackson in Tecmo Bowl.
Even though the Lions got a massive rules break when Jared Goff’s sack-fumble that the Saints recovered for a touchdown in the second quarter was reversed on replay and ruled an incompletion because Goff’s arm was judged to be moving forward.
Even coach Dan Campbell was flummoxed by that one, which will likely by viewed and discussed this week by NFL conspiracy theorists more often than the Zapruder film.
“I'll be the first to say, man, I thought we lost that one,” Campbell said. “But the arm was going forward. It had a forward motion. That was how they saw it. We got one. We'll take that.”
Even hours later, you could see the relief on Campbell’s face. It’s OK to be lucky in sports. But sometimes that luck goes the other way.
And the Lions still deserve credit for finding a way to win. Wins are extremely hard to come by in the NFL.
Even Williams deserves credit for earning a measure of redemption in OT. His 22-yard sideline catch set up Jared Goff’s go-ahead touchdown pass to Amon-Ra St. Brown.
But the Lions also got their final stroke of luck when the Saints bailed them out by going for the win with a 2-point conversion attempt in OT. Yes, the Lions had to stop them. But if the Saints had just kicked the extra point, the game likely would have ended in a tie.
And come-from-ahead tie by the Lions in the season opener – at home – would have been as good as a loss in almost everyone’s eyes.
The real culprit in all of this is probably the most concerning. It’s the offense. And that means Petzing, Campbell’s second OC in two years.
When Campbell was asked why the Saints were able to rally from a 21-0 deficit, he quickly blamed the offense.
“We possessed the ball a little bit more in that first half, and then we fizzled on offense,” he said. “And so, if I'm going one way or another, I'm like, man, we got to be more efficient on offense. We kind of spit and sputtered there, and then they get more cracks at it.”
Complementary football isn’t a new concept, especially with the Lions, who’ve been riding their offense for years. It’s one thing to ask the offense to shoulder more of the load, but asking one player – Gibbs – to shoulder almost all the load is unsustainable. He finished with 156 yards on 29 carries and two touchdowns.
“Well, I thought it was a very promising Week 1,” Campbell said of Gibbs. “Certainly, we know what Gibbs is, what he's capable of, and he's still not there yet. And I mean that in a good way.
“I'm telling you, we were this close to breaking three or four more of these, like breaking them wide open. I mean, a shoestring away, just a little longer block at the second level. We were close. We're going to get that cleaned up, and he's going to get better. Week 1, yeah, I like where he's at. I'm glad he's here.”
This was Campbell’s explanation of the Lions’ return on investment after the organization made Gibbs the NFL’s highest-paid running back when he signed a three-year extension that could be worth as much as $75.75 million.
With 29 carries, Gibbs in on pace for 493 carries. That would blow past the NFL single-season record of 416 carries Larry Johnson set in 2006 for Kansas City. (Of course, the Lions won't be up 21-0 and playing in overtime every week.)
And don’t forget he also caught five passes. And had four more carries nullified by penalty.
But Gibbs said the workload didn’t bother him.
“I’m good,” he said. “I feel fine. So I could have took 40 [carries] today.”
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When he was asked if there was ever a play in which he felt tired, he admitted there had been.
“There’s one,” he said. “And I came out immediately, too.”
It’s understandable Campbell wants to ride Gibbs, especially when he has the hot hand. But when asked if he was concerned about Gibbs’ workload (the Lions have another game in four days at Buffalo), he defended the decision.
“You know what I like? Winning the game, man, and we were going to win this game,” he said. “That guy's our hot hand and, ultimately, do I want to set records with how many carries? No, that's not something I want to do.
“When you look at a guy, and you feel like: All right, man, he’s in good shape. I mean, he had a really good camp, and he is in phenomenal shape. He's in the best shape I've seen since he's been here. Now that doesn't mean we're not going to monitor, and we're going to keep an eye on this guy because we understand that, too, but we did what we had to do today.”
I don’t believe the Lions will run Gibbs, 24, into the ground by asking him to run the ball nearly 30 times a game. But they do need to be mindful of the workload, which could be helped by a more diverse game plan.
And in case the Lions and Gibbs don’t think there are any repercussions to using a great running back too much, they should remember what happened to Johnson. In 2007, he sustained a foot injury and played just eight games. The Chiefs finished 4-12 and Johnson never ran for 1,000 yards again.
Contact Carlos Monarrez at cmonarrez@freepress.com and follow him on X @cmonarrez.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Jahmyr Gibbs can't have that many touches again or Lions are in trouble
