If you were looking for a silver lining in the Detroit Lions’ defensive performance against the Buffalo Bills in their 41-31 loss on Thursday night, you’d have to squint pretty hard to see it. You may have to hallucinate, to be honest. The Bills racked up 446 yards of offense for an average of 6.5 yards per play. For reference, the best offense in the NFL last year averaged 6.2 yards. Josh Allen finished with a 121.4 passer rating, the Bills ran for 203 yards at 5.6 yards per carry, and they punted
only twice—once after a dropped third-down conversion and another time after a second-down drop.
In the end, the Bills posted an astronomical 0.44 EPA/play (highest of any game so far in 2026) and 59 percent success rate (second). Whatever the Bills wanted to do on Thursday night, they did.
“We’ve got to clean up a lot of things on defense right now, particularly on the backend,” coach Dan Campbell said after the game.
The understatement of the night.
So where does Detroit go from here? Where is there any semblance of hope on defense after following up a disastrous second half against the Saints with an even more futile performance against the Bills?
Lions coach Dan Campbell was asked what gives him optimism this can get turned around this early in the season.
“I think this front—we’ve got some juice up front, man,” Campbell said. “I think we’ve got a mix of guys that can apply pressure that can stop the run and that relieves a lot of stress on your backend.”
The Lions did apply a fair amount of pressure to Allen on Thursday night. They sacked Allen twice, tallied eight quarterback hits, and finished with a pressure percentage 34.2%—comfortably above the league average. But that hardly seemed to take any pressure off the back end, which was plagued by missed assignment, failed communications, and blown coverages.
“We had a couple of busts—we had more than a couple of busts on the backend for touchdowns in the pass game that really hurt us,” Campbell said. “We had a couple of busts in the run game, too, our fits. We’re fitting the wrong gaps or not where we’re supposed to be. We’ve got two guys in one gap, and (James) Cook is busting these runs.”
Campbell remains hopeful that time on task will help them play cleaner football.
“The more those guys play together, the better they’ll get,” Campbell said. “The more that we really digest what we’re trying to do to opponents or what we feel like we need to do any given week, I think will help those guys, and their confidence will grow and we’ll get better.”
Another reason Campbell has hope is that they can finally dig into correcting the film. Prior to Thursday, Campbell admitted the short week really prevented them from correcting their errors made against the Saints in Week 1. With another set of data points and a long weekend to digest and self-diagnose, they can really start the big adjustments.
“Now we can really digest—okay, this is our two-game snapshot, this is what you are, this says what you are,” Campbell said. “And we can really deep-dive these players, what they do best, what they don’t do or need help in, and we’ll move on from that.”
While there is undoubtedly some truth to the Lions’ defensive mistakes being internal and correctable, it is a eerily familiar refrain from the defensive meltdown at the end of last season. It may be early in the season with plenty of time to improve, but Detroit will need to be much more effective at fixing their mistakes than they were in 2025.
