The Detroit Lions have been a top-five scoring offense for four consecutive seasons, but after taking a step back in 2025, some appear to have some doubts about the direction of their offense. A very interested debate emerged this week on The Athletic Football Show podcast.
The two hosts of the show—Robert Mays and Derrik Klassen—ranked the NFC teams by their supporting casts on offense. Essentially what that means is ranking the NFC teams by offense, but not including quarterback in the equation.
The two went team by team and didn’t have any huge differences until they got to the Lions. Mays had the Lions ninth out of the 16 NFC teams, while Klassen had Detroit third. At the very crux of their disagreement seemed to be their opinions on new offensive coordinator Drew Petzing.
Here’s a snippet of their arguments:
Klassen: “I think we are significantly overcorrecting on how ‘bad’ last year was. Think about all the negative air we spent talking about the Lions, they were still a top-10 offense by any metric. I think this team is still really good.”
Mays: “Part of this the fact that I have them clumped in this group of teams where you’re swapping out their play-caller.”
Klassen: “I don’t know if (Drew) Petzing is great. I don’t know if he’s as good as we wanted him to be after what we saw with the Cardinals in 2024. But I think the big thing with the Lions last year was they could still get explosives. They were as explosive as anybody as an offense. The problem was the down-to-down efficiency. A lot of that, to me, was some of the new play-calling—and we had questions about that going into the season—and just health with the offensive line, changing new pieces. That’s obviously going to be true as well this year—like changing new pieces on the offensive line, it’s obviously a young unit—but I do think that Petzing can raise the floor of the offense and raise the play-calling.
“So if we take that and think about what we know of the ceiling of the offense with Jahmyr Gibbs being as explosive as anybody, Amon-Ra St. Brown being a really good wide receiver, Sam LaPorta being one of the most explosive tight ends in the league, Jameson Williams being about as good as an ancillary pieces you can get in terms of explosive plays, to me, it’s not that hard for me to envision a world where they’re like the fifth-best offense again.”
To be fair to Mays, he offered a follow-up on Twitter on Wednesday, saying that he’s since started to slide closer to Klassen’s point of view.
You can watch the entire show here.
- The Feed post of the day: Xlgrev expanded the discussion from Tuesday’s Question of the Day. Jump over there to join the conversation about why you’re a Lions fan:
- Lions UDFA defensive tackle Aidan Keanaaina has a chance to make a crack at the roster, so Justin Rogers of Detroit Football Network caught up with him to talk about his journey to the NFL.
- More Isaac TeSlaa hype for your offseason pleasure:
- Not entirely sure what this means, but Kerby Joseph is listed as an “Honorary Celebrity Host” for the World Cup match between Haiti and Scotland. Both of Joseph’s parents are from Haiti.
- Colton Pouncy of The Athletic has a nice breakdown of Penei Sewell’s critical upcoming season. It’s not just about moving to left tackle, but becoming the leader of a young, completely overhauled line.
