Jahmyr Gibbs took the pitch 7 yards in the backfield and ran to his right as a wall of New York Jets defenders closed in.
Darrell Jackson was the first Jet to greet Gibbs in the backfield, arms flailing before he took a face full of turf. He knifed past two Detroit Lions linemen, was behind the line scrimmage while the pitch was in the air and still overran Gibbs the instant the NFL’s most electrifying playmaker’s left foot hit the ground.
Gibbs chopped his feet, squared his shoulders to the end zone, then cut back to his left, where he bedeviled another Jets defender, Joseph Ossai, grasping at air.
A few steps later, Gibbs was back to full speed, and after Jameson Williams and Jared Goff got just enough of a block on the only two Jets between
him and the end zone, Gibbs hurdled the goal line, dropped the football by his side and broke into an Aaron Glenn celebration dance.
Gibbs’ first of three touchdowns in the game, fourth of the year and 53rd of his short career – he has 55 now in 52 career games – was Barry Sanders-esque to a generation of Lions fans and a mix of marvelous and mundane to those who see him do it every day.
“For me it’s like normal, starting to get normal because the bar is so high for him,” Lions running backs coach Tashard Choice said.
“[He’s] an eraser,” running back Jacob Saylors said. “There’s so many examples of it, of him just making the play that the average wouldn’t have much to a damn touchdown.”
The Lions (2-1) enter this week’s Sunday Night Football showdown with the Carolina Panthers (1-2) third in the NFL in scoring at 31 points per game and top 10 in total, rushing and passing offense.
Gibbs leads the league in receptions (18) and receiving yards (156) by a running back through three games, ranks fourth in rushing yards (307) and is tied for the NFL lead in touchdowns (six) with Derrick Henry, Josh Allen and Jaxon Smith-Njigba.
He’s the undisputed catalyst of the Lions’ high-powered offense, touching the ball on a whopping 47.2% of the plays on their touchdown drives (51 of 108 snaps, not including runs called back by penalty or incomplete passes).
And he’s bashful but appreciative of the growing comparisons to Sanders, the Hall of Fame running back who many consider the best back to ever play the game.
“Every time he’s here I got to step up my game, shine a little bit,” Gibbs said last week. “So to be in the same conversation as him is humbling, I’m blessed to be in it. Somebody I’ve looked up to for a long time.”
Sanders said on radio row at the Super Bowl this year he’s a fan of Gibbs, too.
“He’s an exciting player, electric and just dangerous with the ball in his hands,” Sanders said.
And this week, as several Lions shared their recollections of the most amazing thing they’ve seen Gibbs do on a field, it evoked more memories of the elusive Sanders, who stopped and started and squirted away from crowds of defenders he had no business escaping and did it with a power and grace that wowed everyone around him.
High Tech
Before he was Gibbs’ position coach with the Lions, Choice coached Gibbs in his first two seasons at Georgia Tech. He said his favorite memory of Gibbs came during Gibbs' final intrasquad scrimmage at school – and it was something Choice didn’t notice in real time.
“It’s a scrimmage and he had about eight to 10 carries, 12 touches and he didn’t even touch the ground. They couldn’t tackle him,” Choice said. “If it was a run, he stayed on his feet. If it was a pass, he didn’t get tackled. He got hit out of bounds, he never went to the ground. And I didn’t see it until the end of practice till one of the coaches said something once we was watching film and I think it was just so impressive cause he was still young and still learning. But you could just see his athletic ability. The kid is just gifted, man.”
Gibbs has improved his contact balance in the NFL and has seven broken tackles through three weeks, according to Pro Football Reference. He’s eighth in the league at 30.9 rushing yards over expected this season. Even when plays appear dead, like his touchdown run against the Jets, he has a way of bringing them back to life.
“The biggest thing about Jahmyr, he’s not down,” Lions assistant head coach/receivers coach Scottie Montgomery said this spring. “When you think he’s going down, he’s not down, he’s going to come out of the back of there. … Our biggest detail in our room and up front is just making sure that we protect his opportunities because we know he’ll do the rest with the football.”
The Vikings game
Montgomery was Gibbs’ position coach as a rookie in 2023, but it’s a run in a midseason game in 2024 against the Minnesota Vikings that stands out as one of his favorite plays.
“We were kind of struggling to get going and he made a safety miss out in the open field, goes down the right boundary and then we kind of took off after that,” Montgomery said. “There’s a couple of runs in there. The New York runs, plural, but he’s definitely running the ball at a high level. We can use him like we’ve always talked about in the passing game and then now with other people coming into play, it’s very hard to get a bead on where we’re going with the football, especially in the passing game right now.”
The Lions sputtered out of the gate in that 2024 game against the Vikings. They took a holding penalty and sack and failed to convert a fake punt on their opening drive and trailed 10-0 before they had a first down.
On their fourth offensive possession of the game, the Lions got the ball in Gibbs’ hands three times in the first four plays, then watched him bust a 45-yard touchdown run to turn momentum. Gibbs bounced an off-tackle run outside and streaked down the numbers, planted his right foot in the ground at the 35-yard line to cut back on a Vikings safety and picked up a late Williams block on his way to the end zone.
“That was a good one,” Gibbs said.
Defense rests
Trevor Nowaske grew up a Lions fan in Michigan, and even though he was a baby when Sanders retired, can attest to the Gibbs-Sanders comparisons firsthand.
“Oh my God, insane,” Nowaske said. “One of one, dude. He’s one of one.”
Nowaske said he has whiffed on tackling Gibbs (to the extent the Lions go live) in training camp and practices too many times to count over the years, but he does remember the one time he kind of beat Gibbs on a play.
“I still remember this to this day,” Nowaske said. “We did one-on-ones and he went out like No. 1 receiver and he just ran a go ball and I was in stride with him and I don’t know if I broke up the pass, maybe he caught it, I don’t remember. But I was like, ‘OK, all right, I can do this thing.’ And it was early in OTAs or something. I think that’s the only one I’ve ever won against him.”
Jack Campbell, who typically draws the one-on-one matchups with Gibbs in practice, said he has had about the same success rate being burned by Gibbs in open space.
“It’s happened a lot, I’ll be the first to admit it,” Campbell said. “But he’s so talented it’s unbelievable. I’m just so happy for him. He’s just a hard worker, he’s a true professional, he goes about his business in a great way and he’s a guy as a linebacker I love to have on my team so I don’t have to go against him.”
Hands off
More than a single play, Sione Vaki, who has served as Gibbs’ primary backup this season, said the thing he marvels at most is Gibbs’ unbelievable stamina. When outsiders were wondering how Gibbs would hold up to the workload he shouldered in Week 1 – 29 carries, five catches and another four runs negated by penalty – Vaki and Saylors didn’t see Gibbs flinch.
“He don’t ever get tired,” Vaki said. “He could run for days. I feel like there’s no – when he’s tired, he’s still got that gas. To like my full speed. Me, when I be getting tired, you can tell the difference.”
The backs joked that Gibbs has been light on providing snacks for the running back room since he signed his record-setting contract this summer, but Saylors said more remarkable than the big plays Gibbs breaks are the little gains he gets to keep the offense going.
“We’re about the same size and man he breaks tackles,” Saylors said. “Great balance, contact balance. Like literally just breaking tackles and his size, that’s not the name of his game, that’s not what people know him by, but you turn on the tape, [shoot], the first guy’s never making the play, the second guy, he ain’t never making the play. Third guy be lucky to get a hand on him sometimes.”
The Jets game
Gibbs had 20 carries for 99 yards against the Jets – he was at 100 until he lost a yard on his final run – seven catches for 65 yards and three touchdowns. He scored on a 1-yard run on the first play of the fourth quarter and caught what turned out to be the game-winning score on an 11-yard pass with 2:25 to play.
For as fast as Gibbs is – he had three of the four fastest times generated by ball carries last year at just over 22 mph – Amon-Ra St. Brown said echoed Saylors in saying it’s more impressive that “he breaks tackles at a crazy rate.”
“He had that one catch against the Jets, it was in the fourth quarter,” St. Brown said. “He had like a little choice route, he broke out. It was kind of toward the red zone before he caught his touchdown, and the dude was right on him. And I'm like, ‘Damn, it's like a 1-yard gain.’ And I'm just staring at him. And he like somehow gets out of the tackle and gets like 4 or 5 yards.
“I think little things like that, that are so underrated where he makes normal 1-yard gains turn into 4- or 5-yard gains. To me, it's his ability to break tackles, not make guys miss, but when guys do touch him, he gets out of so many tackles.”
Ultimately, Gibbs’ 17-yard touchdown run against the Jets could go down as one of the iconic plays of his career, like Sanders’ 47-yard touchdown against the Dallas Cowboys in the 1991 playoffs, when he bounced off one tackle and sprinted by another flat-footed defender who thought he was down, or the time he juked Hall of Famer John Lynch in the backfield and outraced another Tampa Bay Buccaneers defender to the end zone.
“It's like one of those, ‘Well, if it's a loss of 5, I don't like it. But if it's a touchdown. I love it,” Lions coach Dan Campbell said after the game. “It's awesome. He's just electric. He can make something happen and you feel that way about him. You got to give him a little leeway because he's got this rare explosiveness and acceleration and speed and he does have vision. That’s what I don't know if everybody understands. He's got vision, he can feel things and that's what makes him very dangerous. So he just felt it, man, and made his cut. And the rest is, as they say, history. So, it was something else.”
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: Panthers
Matchup: Lions (2-1) at Carolina (1-2).
Kickoff: 8:20 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 4; Bank of America Stadium, Charlotte, North Carolina.
TV/radio: NBC; WXYT-FM (97.1).
Line: Lions by 3½.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Jahmyr Gibbs as this generation's Barry Sanders? 'He's 1 of 1'
