First I want to say it takes a very good team to play like shit for 57 minutes then drop 17 points to win in the last 3. I am so happy to be a lions fan right now.
With that said I wanted to post this yesterday but I didn’t want to deal with the wrath of all the amped up fans. So here we go……
Our defense is ass, we have good players, and we have played well. Yesterday was not necessarily on the defense but hear me out. AG’s defense is consistently out of position, we are terrible at keeping contain, we keep running Hutchinson into double and triple teams with little fluctuations as to where we set him up. Move him inside and outside, use a stunt, have a corner blitz behind him to put the o line in bad spots. Corners giving 10 yard cushions on 3rd and 5. He seems to be super aggressive at the worst times.
Crossing routes, mobile qbs dumb penalties are killing us. Winning covers up the stink of bad play. But keep in mind we gave up multiple 3rd and 15+. We had some very rough untimely penalties. And if Justin Fields was a better qb we would have lost. He missed a wide open receiver that had 2 steps on our defense late in the game on 3rd down.
Our defense has a lot of talent. And we’ve had injuries that have put young guys into starting spots. I’m not saying fire AG and overhaul the D right now. But I am saying AG is pretty rough at in game adjustments and it’s easy to see the teams with good offenses just do what they want to us.
It is what it is this year. And we have a real shot to do some damage in the playoffs. But I am in the camp that thinks AG and his defense put us in a lot of bad spots. Maybe the players aren’t listening to him. Or his system is suspect but whatever it is this defense commits to many mistakes and gives up to many easy yards for AG to be the guy next year.
This is our window, we’re in it now. I really hope we get a new coordinator before next season. To be clear I am rooting for him to succeed. I’m just saying after seeing this team over last few years it’s easy to see we have the talent on D to be good. But for whatever reason we are anywhere from good to absolute dog ass depending on the week. I think we need a more stable defense personally. What do you all think?
I feel like the real answer is yes but also no.
I mean I think we have a good team and our defense is clearly our weakness, particularly the pass defense.
Let’s look at the last 2 games as they are a clear example of what our defense is. Chargers put on a clinic against our defense and threw on us with ease. We happene to our gun their offense which is why we won. Then look at the Bears game. As many issues as we had, and yards they put up the defense won that game. We gave up 4 turn overs and held them to 26 points?! That is a win by the defense against any NFL offense.
When we look at the last 2 weeks I see the same thing. Lack of consistency. You said this team is consistently out of place on defense, and frankly that is where I disagree. I see us in the right placement a good amount of the time but also blowing assignments too frequently. The best teams are on their assignments almost always and occasionally give up on one. In our case the missed assignments aren’t enough to tell me that we are always out of place but that we need to clean up things because of consistent mistakes. The frustrating part is that it seems like there isn’t any single thing to work on in the defense to hone in as it’s an issue everywhere on the D.
Any time we play a good pass offense, particularly a good QB we get roasted because our secondary doesn’t have enough talent to keep on enough of these WRs and then the mistakes that they do make get exploited by a good QB.
Some of this isn’t really a surprise though. Our pass D was garbage last year and we don’t have any upgrades this year besides Branch (who is phenomenal). We lost both CB free agents we signed to fix this and help out the secondary. Hopefully we get CJGJ back soon. If we do that will make a big impact on who we can cover and give us more options in pass defense.
Way I see it is that the defense doesn’t have nearly as many prieces as the offense. We need improvements on D-line for more pass rush and we help in the secondary. Secondary is clearly where we have the least talent and least amount of depth. So it makes sense it’s not as good and I think the take that we are garbage defense is a bit excessive. Especially when we are a top 3 run defense in the league and really only can’t stop the run against extremely fast mobile QBs.
As far as cleaning up the bad plays. I think we really need to look more at position coach upgrades. The issues in the secondary mostly are due to bad technique that leads to penalties getting called and the D-line coach needs to drill D-line on their gap assignments better. I think we could see some position coach changes here soon if play there doesn’t improve. I think some of the D-line play can be put on the Defensive coordinator. To me though the biggest issues are not scheme but usually guys not doing assignments right which I see as a position coach issue. Possibly AG has some blame there as he is the head of the defense, but how much is hard to pin down when we don’t have details inside the org.