Two weeks into the 2026 season, the Detroit Lions’ defense already looks like a unit that’s been left out in the rain.
Thursday night against Buffalo was another rough one. Josh Allen had Detroit on skates from the start, and defensive coordinator Kelvin Sheppard never seemed to find the answer. The Bills scored on each of their first four possessions and on six of their eight drives while the game was still in doubt, excluding the kneel-down sequence with about 1:30 left.
The numbers through two games are ugly. Detroit has given up 915 total yards and 71 points, and it has already allowed 13 plays of 20 or more yards. Seven of those chunk gains came Thursday night alone.
That kind of start leaves little room for optimism, and Sheppard’s group has earned the criticism. The defense has turned in two bad performances to open the season, and there’s no way around that.
But the problems don’t sit with Sheppard alone. General manager Brad Holmes also comes under the microscope for how the roster was handled this offseason.
The source of the issue goes back to the secondary, where Terrion Arnold’s legal issues were expected to force an early cut and no replacement was brought in. Holmes also left the team exposed at safety, where Brian Branch and Kerby Joseph were both unavailable for at least the first quarter of the 2026 campaign.
That left Detroit thin in the back end, and it has shown up fast. The secondary has become a glaring weakness, one that’s hard to mask week after week.
Still, the roster isn’t void of talent. The Lions have impact players on defense, including EDGE Aidan Hutchinson and linebacker Jack Campbell. A fully healthy Alim McNeill, who handles the interior of the defensive line, is also described as capable of playing at a high level.
That’s why the first two weeks land so heavily on Sheppard. Good coordinators are supposed to squeeze production out of whatever they have, even when the roster isn’t perfect.
Instead, Detroit’s defense has looked poorly adjusted and poorly directed. The source also points out that the same issues showed up a year ago, too.
Sheppard got more patience in 2025 because it was his first season as a coordinator. That explanation is gone now. He’s no longer getting the benefit of the doubt, and the pressure is on him to show he belongs in the job.
“We were on our heels for the majority of the game,” Hutchinson told reporters after the game. “We’ll evolve.
We have to. If we don’t evolve - we’re not going to be doing this all season.
That’s for sure.”
For now, the film and the results tell the same story: Sheppard hasn’t put the defense in position to get off the field, and Detroit’s struggles on that side of the ball are becoming impossible to ignore.
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