Following a defensive meltdown in Week 5’s 31-28 loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars, few gave the Kansas City Chiefs’ defenders much of a chance against the Detroit Lions’ dangerous offense in Week 6. But while the effort wasn’t always pretty, the defense played a major role in the Chiefs’ 30-17 victory on “Sunday Night Football.”
“It feels great,” Kansas City linebacker Nick Bolton said of the two-score win. “Obviously, I thought we could have played the run a little bit better — especially in the first
half. I think they averaged somewhere close to five yards per carry. So as we keep going, we’ll be a little bit better at that, but I thought we played great today.”
Bolton also credited Kansas City’s offense for playing well and scoring often, which helped make Detroit’s attack more predictable.
But it didn’t start that way. Detroit’s opening possession appeared to foreshadow a long night for the Kansas City defense. Calling 15 plays, the Lions took almost ten minutes off the clock. Running back Jahmyr Gibbs ran wherever he wanted as Detroit marched to the Kansas City one-yard line. There, Lions’ quarterback Jared Goff caught a touchdown on a trick play called on fourth down — only to see it nullified by a penalty. The Lions settled for a short field goal.
After that, the defense did better. After Gibbs and fellow running back David Montgomery totaled 54 rushing yards on the first two Detroit drives, the Lions’ vaunted two-back combo ended the night with only 89 combined rushing yards.
Bolton’s study had prepared him for Detroit’s difficult opening offensive script.
“We talked about it during the week,” he explained. “They’re pretty good in this league, and they’re one or two [on] the first 15 plays and scoring drives — the first drive of the first half and second half — at putting points on the board. So, we understood that they’ve got a good first 15. [At that point,] I’m just kind of riding the wave — and then after that, we’ve kind of seen what they’ve got.”
Discipline was the most obvious change the Chiefs made. After the team saw 13 yellow flags thrown in Jacksonville, Kansas City had no accepted penalties on Sunday (Detroit declined an offsides call against defensive tackle Chris Jones).
Bolton noted that while not every issue can be addressed during a short week, head coach Andy Reid made certain penalties would be at the top of the players’ minds.
“That’s just details,” the linebacker observed. “Coach Reid harped on it as soon as we got done with the game last week. On a short week, [we were] kind of keeping things familiar, but we could change the penalties. That’s kind of the big thing we harped on early in the week. We just decided to come out there, execute and play good clean football.”
The Lions are one of the NFL’s most aggressive teams on fourth down, but the Chiefs twice got the ball back on downs. On other drives, the Lions could not find advantageous yardage and settled for punts.
“We kind of mixed up looks on them a little bit,“ he recalled. ”[We] played some man [and] played some zone. The rush [was] kind of working together with the coverage. I think obviously we had them in fourth down and two — or longer ones.
“[That] helps us out a lot. We’ve just got to make sure we can continue to do that.“
