The Lions walked out of Ford Field with a win on Sunday, but the kind of sloppiness they showed against the New Orleans Saints is the sort that can turn a comfortable afternoon into a stress test in a hurry.
Detroit built a three-score lead, then spent a long stretch making life unnecessarily difficult on itself. The first half was clunky enough - just seven points and four punts - before a strip-sack fumble forced by Roger McCreary and recovered by DJ Wonnum suddenly changed the feel of the game. For a moment, the Lions looked like the team everyone expected them to be as a full-touchdown favorite.
That feeling didn’t last.
New Orleans answered with a 47-yard gain to Chris Olave, then punched in its first points of the day. Detroit’s offense followed with another three-and-out, the third of the game, and Jack Fox’s punt gave the Saints a short field after a shaky coverage sequence. The Lions defense had been excellent early, piling up a sack, an interception, and holding New Orleans under 115 total net yards in the first half - the first time Detroit had done that since December of 2015 - but that didn’t stop the Saints from getting back on the board seven plays later, or eight if you count the 21-yard defensive pass interference penalty on Rock Ya-Sin.
The mess kept growing. Detroit couldn’t convert its second third-and-short of the day after Kool-Aid McKinstry broke up a pass to Amon-Ra St.
Brown, and Fox was forced to punt from the Lions’ 45-yard line, sending it just 31 yards to the 24. New Orleans then put together an 11-play, 66-yard drive for a field goal and trimmed the margin to 21-17 with plenty of time left.
For nearly 16 minutes, nothing was working the way it should have. Offense, defense, special teams - all of it had issues. That’s why Dan Campbell’s postgame message landed the way it did.
“We did not play our cleanest, but when we had to have it, all three phases-it’s what we talked about last night, man-when we needed somebody to pull us back out of the water-our head’s underwater-we did that. In all three phases, and your teammates, one by one. That was the difference, men.”
Campbell’s point was simple: the Lions found a way to win. But that’s not the same thing as playing clean football, and Sunday was proof of how thin the line can be.
The good stretch came early in the third quarter, when Detroit turned an interception into points and then cashed in after the defense forced another turnover. For about six minutes of game time, everything looked connected.
Then the Saints kept coming.
Tyler Shough looked comfortable beyond his starts, and Kellen Moore kept finding explosive plays. It was the kind of sequence that had a familiar feel for Detroit, even with a defense that was supposed to be better equipped to create pressure.
The Lions finished Week 1 as the fourth-fastest team to pressure, getting there in 2.40 seconds across 61 pass plays, a sharp jump from last year’s 30th-place finish at 2.86 seconds. Even so, the questions are still there, especially with Brian Branch at least a month away, uncertainty around Kerby Joseph, and Ennis Rakestraw apparently a healthy inactive.
“The biggest thing right now, guys, is you find a way to get the win,” Campbell said. “It’s Week 1 and then you clean [expletive] up, because it feels a hell of a lot better than the loss to have to clean it up. That’s the thing: we found a way to win, we will clean this up, and there’s a lot to clean up.”
And there is. This wasn’t just a defensive issue.
Detroit’s offense was mostly unable to sustain drives outside of the two short-field touchdowns to open the second half. The Lions finished 5-of-13 on third down, worse than their 38.7% mark from last season, when they ranked 19th in the NFL.
Nine of their 14 drives lasted five plays or fewer, and that included one three-play touchdown march.
The win matters. The cleanup matters, too. The Lions have four days before their Thursday night trip to Buffalo to sort out which part of Sunday was the real story: the ability to survive, or the self-inflicted mess that made survival necessary in the first place.
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