Four games into the season, the Detroit Lions defense was at an inflection point.
The Lions were allowing 31.8 points per game, their secondary was in shambles, and they looked like strangers playing next to each other on the field. They didn’t celebrate many of the few good plays they had, and they played like they didn’t trust the help that was built into their defense.
When players came to the facility one day in the middle of the week to prepare for their Week 5 game against the Arizona Cardinals, they were summoned to the defensive meeting room for an impromptu defensive players-only meeting by Aidan Hutchinson.
Hutchinson texted the defensive line chat and some of the team’s other veteran leaders, who rounded up everyone from their position
groups, and the entire unit spent 15 or so minutes reminding each other of a few simple tenets.
Have fun on the field. Trust your teammates. Communication is key. Respect the game plan. Do your one of 11.
The tone wasn’t angry. There was no finger pointing.
And after Hutchinson and some of the team’s other leaders spoke, including Alim McNeill, Derrick Barnes, Jack Campbell and D.J. Reed, six players in attendance told the Free Press it felt like a weight was lifted off the defense’s collective shoulders.
“I feel like everybody’s ass was tight,” Barnes said. “Players, everybody. Coaches. I just feel like it was one of those things that we just had to remind ourselves as a defense, as players, like, ‘Man, we have to play loose, we got to have fun.’ The most important thing about that meeting was we had to just remind ourselves, at the end of the day, this is a kid’s sport that we get to play and that we love.”
The Lions played their best defensive game of the season a few days later against the Cardinals.
They sacked Jacoby Brissett five times, forced one first-half turnover, held Arizona to a season-low 56 yards rushing and had five straight three-and-outs in a commanding 45-21 victory.
“I feel like it made a huge impact,” defensive lineman Tyler Lacy said of the meeting. “The guys, you could tell the energy on the field, everybody doing the dancing, celebrating on the field. I feel like that’s what we needed and that’s what we talked about in that meeting, just coming together and playing for us.”
It wasn’t, players insist, that they felt like the season was teetering on the brink of disaster after a Week 4 loss to the Carolina Panthers dropped them to 2-2.
It was that they wanted to keep it from getting there.
“It’s not like we were 0-4 at the time, it’s just we’re trying to nip it in the bud now and get it right before it’s too late, because once it starts getting a little late like that, [it] starts going downhill, it’s a little tough sometimes,” McNeill said. “That’s what makes us a good team, the chemistry we have as a defense. We went and nipped it in the bud because we knew. Let’s go ahead and try to get it straight, make sure we’re all on the same page, just relax a little bit and play defense.”
The Lions still rank at or near the bottom of the NFL in most defensive categories, including scoring (30th), passing (32nd), total (32nd), red zone (31st) and third down (30th) defense. And beating the lowly Cardinals, who’ve had one winning season in the past 10 years, is hardly a guarantee of future success.
But players said they believe the real Lions defense is closer to the one that stymied the Cardinals than the one that struggled through the first month, and they’re anxious to prove it in this week’s NFC North showdown with the Green Bay Packers.
“This is the perfect opportunity right here to showcase what we are,” McNeill said.
The Packers rank in the bottom 10 of the NFL in scoring, but they’ve won three straight and at 4-2 sit a half-game ahead of the Lions (3-2) in the competitive NFC North standings. The Minnesota Vikings (5-0) and Chicago Bears (5-2) lead the division.
Green Bay appears to have solved some of its offensive line woes from early in the season thanks to the addition of guards (and ex-Lions) Laken Tomlinson and Kevin Zeitler. The Packers will have top running back Josh Jacobs in the lineup this week for the first time this season after he served a pseudo six-game suspension on the commissioner’s exempt list. And their big-play offense is likely to challenge the Lions defense where it struggles the most – with explosive plays down the field.
The Packers lead the NFL with eight pass plays of 40-plus yards and have drawn seven defensive pass interference penalties this season. Wide receivers Christian Watson and Matthew Golden entered the week top six in the NFL in receiving yards. And Lions coach Dan Campbell called quarterback Jordan Love “the secret sauce” to the Packers offense.
“He makes it go,” Campbell said.
The Lions should have one of the spark plugs of their defense back in the lineup with Brian Branch set to play for the first time since tearing his Achilles tendon last December.
One of the NFL’s best safeties when healthy, Branch is expected to have a full complement of snaps against the Packers, and his presence adds to the belief in the locker room that the defense turned a corner with its performance against the Cardinals and is set up for even better days ahead.
“I think we kind of lost sight of what it means to play football,” Barnes said. “When you’re out there, you’re trying to do your best, it’s a lot of pressure on you. [Sometimes] you don’t play your best. It was just a reminder to everybody, man, go out and forget the mistakes, man, you get yelled at, you get yelled at. That just comes with it, but, man, at least have fun and go out there and if you’re going to make a mistake, go out there and do it at 110 mph.
“I think that’s what we showed in Arizona after we had that meeting, and I think it was just a reminder how much we love each other, how much we got each other’s back and once you feel that, once you feel the love from your teammates and the people out there on the field for you, there’s no better feeling than that.”
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.
Next up: Packers
Matchup: Lions (3-2) vs. Green Bay (4-2).
Kickoff: 4:25 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 25; Ford Field, Detroit.
TV/radio: Fox; WXYT-FM (97.1).
Line: Lions by 3½.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: How a players-only meeting sparked Detroit Lions' defensive turnaround
