GREEN BAY, Wis. -- Growing pains were to be expected with two new coordinators and a remade interior offensive line.
But, holy smokes, it’s hard to imagine the high-powered Detroit Lions opening the season in worse fashion on the offensive side of the ball. The Lions lost 27-13 to the Green Bay Packers in Week 1, while their interior offensive line was wrecked, the running game was bottled up with a tight seal, and the passing attack was forced into checkdown after checkdown after checkdown at Lambeau Field.
The Lions needed a last-minute one-handed touchdown catch from a third-round rookie wide receiver to avoid going a full game without a touchdown for the first time since 2022.
Not great!
While it was far from acceptable, it’s just one game amid a long season. But it’s hard to ignore all of the concerns about this team heading into the new year getting exposed by the Packers out of the gates.
The offense lacked creativity and explosive plays, garnering just one play of more than 20 yards in the loss. Detroit’s offensive line was a far cry from the dominating, tone-setting group we’ve all grown accustomed to watching. And while the defense played much better outside of the first quarter, the pass rush was completely non-existent, with Packers quarterback Jordan Love able to sit in the pocket, do a little dance and pick his spots.
It was a rough showing in offensive coordinator John Morton’s first go-round calling the shots. And with former offensive coordinator Ben Johnson and the Chicago Bears coming to town next week, the pressure is turned all the way up for the offense.
Seriously, shield your eyes because some of these stats from the loss to the Packers are jarring. Jahmyr Gibbs had 19 total touches while gaining only 50 yards, joining dubious territory for having the least amount of receiving yards (31) in NFL history while catching double-digit passes.
The team’s one-two punch of Gibbs and David Montgomery gained just 44 yards on 20 rush attempts. However, the most jarring aspect of those rushing numbers is the fact that the Packers hit Detroit’s ball carriers in the backfield on 16 of its total 22 rush attempts.
What’s that mean? Well, it means Gibbs and Montgomery didn’t stand much of a chance while the Packers and their defensive front dominated the battle in the trenches. Perhaps most surprising was the Lions’ inability to run the ball against a defense with a limited Micah Parsons and no Kenny Clark.
And it wasn’t any better for the offensive line in pass protection. The Packers sacked Lions quarterback Jared Goff four times, landing nine quarterback hits. They made Goff’s life hard despite blitzing only five times across his 43 dropbacks. They dropped the rest of their defense into coverage, kept everything in front of them to limit explosives, while letting the D-line handle their business in what turned out to be a home-run plan.
So much outside attention was spent on the addition of Parsons to the defensive edges this past week. And while Parsons is truly one of the best in the league, he was limited to 29 snaps, notching four pressures and a fourth-quarter sack. The Packers relied on others to pick up the slack.
Goff completed 31 of 39 passes for 225 yards with one touchdown and one interception. More than 60 of those yards came on Detroit’s final drive, though, with the Packers leading by three scores. Goff averaged only 3.3 air yards per completion, his fifth-lowest mark since joining the franchise in 2021, per NFL Next Gen Stats. Eight of Goff’s completions came behind the line of scrimmage, highlighting a checkdown-heavy and non-threatening day for the passing attack.
In a game that ended 27-13, with the Lions still having multiple chances to close the gap, it sure felt like a true blowout every step of the way.
For an offense with so many mouths to feed, everyone left the table starving for another serving after the first game of the Morton-led offense. Gibbs was left fighting for his life, seeming to get hit in the backfield every time he touched the ball. And the Lions struggled to get the ball into the hands of their dynamic one-two punch at receiver in Amon-Ra St. Brown and Jameson Williams.
“We should be great right now, but there are hurdles obviously that you are going to have to face and get over and improve on,” Goff said. “I think that the urgency to improve on some of those things needs to be there, and I intend to lead that.”
Green Bay smelled blood in the water with its rowdy home crowd forcing the Lions into silent counts, moving its defensive line around to challenge the communication of Detroit’s remade offensive line.
It was the first career game for rookie right guard Tate Ratledge and just the third game for starting left guard Christian Mahogany. Graham Glasgow was also back in the middle, starting at center as the first to try to replace All-Pro Frank Ragnow.
Taylor Decker, the team’s longest-tenured player, said it will take a couple of games to get closer to more seamless communication. Decker and the rest of the team’s players and coaches had a unified front after the game, saying the sky isn’t falling and there is plenty of time to get things humming again despite the ugly outcome.
While the Lions are absolutely right about that, and none of this is meant to signal a white flag on the team’s chances this year. There is quite a lot to fix on the offensive line after the ugly opener, and many of those red flags were highlighted as potential areas of concern since last season’s end.
Decker said it would be easy to overreact and act like the world is falling and there are nothing but problems. That’s the right tone to take. But he and Penei Sewell need to be better, too, especially if the Lions have to find ways to rush off the tackles and avoid leaning on the interior until they find an answer or Mahogany and Ratledge find their footing.
On top of that, the schedule doesn’t leave much breathing room to sit back and hope these problems fix themselves. The inexperienced starting guards simply need more time on the field together, and the defense needs to find ways to generate pressure.
Lions general manager Brad Holmes brushed off questions about the team’s edge rusher depth for months. The opened with only three pure edge rushers active in Week 1, with one of the team’s most glaring weaknesses continuing to look like one of its most glaring weaknesses.
The Packers were able to force a ton of attention Aidan Hutchinson’s way, limiting the pass rusher to only three pressures in his first game back since last year’s season-ending injury. It’s one of the main concerns about this defense, even when Hutchinson was on the field last season -- If he’s not getting home, then who is?
The Za’Darius Smith reunion hopes are gone. Ahmed Hassanein isn’t even currently on the roster, and new addition Tyrus Wheat was a healthy scratch. That puts even more pressure on Hutchinson and Marcus Davenport to make noise and lead the way.
That said, there are 16 games left on the schedule. Perhaps we all, including yours truly, overlooked the challenge of replacing two coordinators, two starters on the offensive line and the defenders who were injured last season returning rust-free.
These Lions still have one of the most enviable rosters in the NFL, not to mention Dan Campbell leading the show from the big chair. Campbell hasn’t lost back-to-back regular-season games since Weeks 7 and 8 back in 2022, and if anyone has earned patience and trust in the Detroit sports world to right the ship, it’s the Lions head coach.
Take a deep breath, it’s just one game, and the Packers have a talented roster and are as well-coached as NFL teams come. But let’s find some middle ground and realize that the weaknesses we all pointed to through the offseason were put under the microscope and attacked in Green Bay.
Detroit’s offensive line has been its superpower through its ascent from the NFL’s cellar to back-to-back NFC North champions. Everything runs through the offensive line, and if this group’s young guards continue to perform the way they did in the opener, then there could be even more growing pains ahead for this offense and team with Super Bowl dreams.
“Yeah, I thought we would be (cleaner),” Campbell said. “I thought we’d be cleaner than we were. I thought we’d be much cleaner than we were, and it wasn’t as clean. But there again, you’re talking about a few plays that were critical, you know.
“But like I told the team, these are all so correctable. Everything that showed up is so correctable, and we will, we’ll hit it head on, our players are accountable, man, they’re ready. And nobody takes it worse than they do, so that’s the good news, we got the right dudes.”
Growing pains are one thing. However, offensive outings like this are unacceptable, especially for a group with so many weapons after three straight seasons as a top-five scoring unit. Morton needs to find more creative ways to beat defenses when they drop so many in coverage, and to find the right run fits for the two new starting guards, or this could be a problem that changes the operation even further.
For now, we’ll treat this for what it really was -- a disastrous opener against a very good team on the road. Still, with the lofty goals that this team has this season, the offensive line and Morton need to get it clicking to avoid all of those national voices calling for regression from being right in the end.
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