Normally during a game week, I like to provide takeaways from all three Detroit Lions coordinator media sessions on Thursday. But with the pressure mounting on Kelvin Sheppard, I thought it made sense to focus solely on his press conference from Week 5—and to be honest, Sheppard offers more interesting answers anyways.
So here are five takeaways from Sheppard’s Thursday media session head of the Arizona Cardinals game.
He knows lip service is worthless
Normally, Kelvin Sheppard opens his press conference recapping the previous games,
highlights strenghths and pinpoints the mistakes, vowing to clean everything up. This week, after another disappointing performance, Sheppard said he knows the promises to fix the problem don’t carry any weight until there are actual results on the field.
“Until it starts to show on Sunday, until the evidence starts to show up at the game, it’s lip service,” Sheppard said. “What we do here, bridging it to the game, it sounds good, but it’s lip service. So, what I will say is we did not play well enough defensively to help this team win that football game Sunday night at Carolina. There were a lot of things in there that we absolutely didn’t like. That we turned on the tape as a unit on Monday, hashed out, talked about, and the same thing I told them, it’s lip service. So there has to be real change. It has to be real evidence of change.”
They’re letting the defensive line down
The only silver lining in Detroit’s defensive performance this year has been the play of the defensive line. The Lions rank in the top-10 of just about every pass rushing metric you can think of, and Sheppard believes they are playing very stout run defense up the middle of the line, as well.
“The way that Tyleik Williams and Alim McNeill is playing B-to-B gap, teams rarely run the ball there and we have identified that now,” Sheppard said. “And then having a disruptive edge in Aidan Hutchinson and now complementary pieces opposite him with (Derrick Moore) DMo and (DJ) Wonnum. We have to feed off of them.”
Unfortunately, they haven’t as of yet. Despite the pressure and decent interior run defense, the Lions back seven has had too many mental errors and lackluster play.
“I told them and I told the D-line, ‘It’s a disservice what we’ve been doing to you all,’” Sheppard said. “I truly feel like this is the best D-line we’ve had in my six-year tenure here since I got here in 2021. And we haven’t been complementing it well enough on the back end to see the benefits of it and be outright beneficiaries is what they should be with what the D-line is doing, especially Sunday night. They assaulted the pocket all night.”
Sheppard is standing by his scheme, his blitzes
Despite the early game struggles, Sheppard made it clear he is standing by the core beliefs of the current defensive system. More over, he is sure that things will only get worse if they abandon their beliefs and start back at square one.
“We have a certain way we say we’re going to play,” Sheppard said. “Now, do you tweak things here and there? Alright, you’re seeing different concepts. They’re attacking you differently. They’re doing—yeah, that’s football. But to just outright bring in a new playbook every week because the last one didn’t go right. That, to me, leads to ultimate dysfunction and the dam completely breaking.”
Sheppard was also asked about the team’s ineffective blitzes. Last Sunday, Carolina quarterback Bryce Young completed 9-of-11 passes for 95 yards and a touchdown (per NFL Pro) against the blitz. However, Sheppard maintains they were the right calls in the right situations.
“Those calls were the right calls. Those calls were the right calls, and I’ll leave it at that.”
When asked a follow up about the disconnect between the right call and the lack of execution, Sheppard denied providing details.
“Those are private conversations that we have that I’m going to keep in-house. Those calls were the right calls.”
Fixing the trust issues
As coach Dan Campbell has talked about in recent weeks, the Lions suffer from a problem of not being in the right place at the right time, and that has led to teammates overcompensating for each other and a lack of trust. So how do you fix that?
“I told the guys this, ‘We’ve got to make sure the guys you don’t trust aren’t out there or you guys get it corrected and you get it corrected in a hurry,’” Sheppard said. “Because we don’t want to start doing that and guys feeling like they have got to carry the weight for another guy out there.”
He’s insulted by the suggestion the offense needs to carry the defense
This week, coach Dan Campbell has several times talked about how the offense needs to be better, and some have taken that as a suggestion that he holds them to a higher standard than the defense. Despite averaging 29.8 points per game (fifth-most), Campbell expects even more out of the unit. Is that because he knows the team needs to carry the 32nd-ranked defense?
Behind the scenes, that may be true, but Sheppard was insulted by the insinuation.
“We have a three-phase team here and I firmly believe that. And I’m going to stand strong in that belief,” Sheppard said. “I think that’s ultra disrespectful to my unit to say somebody has to carry us. We’re going to do our one-third here. Hell or high water. Point blank period.”
