They are there, but they aren’t always noticed. They do valuable work, yet it isn’t always recognized. On a team of stars, they rarely grab the limelight. Dan Campbell refers to them as glue guys.
“Those role players are big,” he said earlier this month. “I think it’s what makes teams and it gives you that little edge.”
Those comments made during the leadup to the season opener reverberated Sunday, Sept. 27, after the Detroit Lions applied the finishing touches to a 31-24 conquest of the New York Jets on Sunday, Sept. 27. The victory, in many ways, resembled a mosaic pieced together with contributions from a variety of sources.
The stars, of course, did their part. Jared Goff completed 78.1% of his throws, netted 269 yards and delivered a pair
of touchdown passes. Jahmyr Gibbs, Detroit’s pacesetter of a running back, led the Lions in both rushing and receiving, racking up 164 yards on 27 touches while scoring three times. Alim McNeill, their best interior defensive lineman, produced one sack and a team-high seven pressures.
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But all their good work could have been squandered had their unsung teammates not made their presence felt over the course of the game. They were the binding agents who kept this winning effort intact from start to finish.
There was Christian Izien, the versatile defensive back who started at safety for the first time this season and then topped all Lions with 11 tackles – including three for loss.
There was Jacob Saylors who helped launch two touchdown drives with a pair of long kickoff returns that gave Detroit favorable field position.
There was reserve running back Sione Vaki extending the first of those productive marches by picking up 4 yards on a critical third-and-3 situation on the edge of the red zone.
There was edge rusher DJ Wonnum, who galvanized the Lions’ attack by sacking Geno Smith twice.
There was wideout Isaac TeSlaa who made a pivotal 49-yard catch to set up the winning touchdown scored by Gibbs with 2:30 left.
And there was safety Chuck Clark, charging across the line of scrimmage to blast Smith and force a fumble that sealed the victory in the final minute.
“This was definitely a team win,” Wonnum told the Free Press. “Everybody’s got a role. … When it’s your time to help the team, you’ve got to be there to help it.”
Campbell must have been pleased to see so many different fingerprints on this victory. After the Lions stumbled to a 9-8 record and missed the playoffs last season, he wanted to create more competition with their ranks, with the goal of keeping his most valuable starters sharp and raising the floor of a roster that needed more output from its cast of depth pieces. The Lions then went out and signed players such as Izien, Wonnum and Clark – veterans capable of handling assignments both big and small.
“It goes back to everybody doing their job,” Izien said. "We trust the guys that are out there.”
But that wasn’t totally evident until Sunday.
The Lions’ top players, after all, dominated the box scores in the first two games. Gibbs handled 84.9% of the carries. Amon-Ra St. Brown was targeted on 35.1% of Goff’s pass attempts. Aidan Hutchinson supplied three of the team’s seven sacks and 16 of the 53 pressures.
But against the Jets, the Lions extracted greater production from a variety of players who previously were buried at the bottom of the stat sheet. That was intentional, particularly on offense, where play-caller Drew Petzing aimed to spread the ball around.
“I thought he got our guys going, got them in a rhythm and really everybody got involved,” Campbell said. “And yeah, we wanted to be able to do that.”
Gibbs ran 20 times. But Vaki also had six carries – double his workload from the first two weeks. And while Goff still targeted St. Brown more than any other receiver or tight end, he also tried to connect with TeSlaa, Brock Wright and Jackson Meeks.
Together, they chipped in six catches that yielded 81 yards.
“At the end of the day, our ultimate goal is to win the game and [we’ll do] whatever it takes to do that,” TeSlaa said. “But yeah, just to be able to spread the love a little bit feels good.”
It was also essential to the Lions’ pursuit of victory on this particular afternoon.
They needed contributions from not just their stars but also the players that orbit them.
Campbell knew they would at some point. Back when he made those prescient comments about the importance of Detroit’s so-called glue guys in early September, he foreshadowed what happened Sunday against the Jets.
Sure enough, they gave the Lions that extra edge. In fact, a convincing argument can be made that they were the difference between winning and losing.
Contact Rainer Sabin at rsabin@freepress.com. Follow him @RainerSabin on X.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit Lions know relying on stars isn't always enough to win in NFL
