Excitement surrounding the Detroit Lions as the 2023 season begins is higher than it’s been in a very long time. The team’s strong finish in 2022, roster upgrades at several spots and impressive football culture cultivated by head coach Dan Campbell have the Lions favored to win their first-ever NFC North division title.
I’m a believer in the hope. I’m a believer in the Lions winning the division and perhaps even a playoff game (or two). But I’m also a longtime Lions fan who has seen promising offseason expectations crash and burn egregiously.
Buy Lions TicketsOne of the ways to cope with and ultimately conquer fear is to acknowledge the validity of the root. Identify what is plausibly worrisome (clowns) and what is a completely irrational fear (mine is a very strange but very real fear of centrifuges).
In that spirit, here are my biggest fears surrounding the 2023 Detroit Lions. We’ll see which become potential sinkholes (another big fear of mine) and which are ghosts that are really just silly dust bunnies in the breeze.
Injuries to the offensive tackles
Injuries are a general worry for every team, an anxious vagary that plagues every fan base. For the Lions, the focus narrows to the one position where the difference between the starters and the depth is chasmic.
Detroit’s offense, from the run game to Jared Goff being comfortable in the pocket, is highly dependent upon left tackle Taylor Decker and right tackle Penei Sewell being one of the elite tackle tandems in the league.
The Lions could maybe buy a week with Matt Nelson filling in as a short-term replacement. Shuffling starting right guard Halapoulivaati Vaitai to right tackle to replace Sewell, be it for injury or for Sewell moving to the left side to replace an injured Decker, seems more appealing even though Vaitai wasn’t good in his one year as Detroit’s starting RT.
Stay healthy, Penei and Taylor. Please…
The passing game doesn't come to pass
The Lions finished on an 8-2 tear in 2022 and much of the credit goes to an offense that really gelled around QB Jared Goff operating OC Ben Johnson’s creative scheme. Amon-Ra St. Brown emerged as a Pro Bowl wideout, and the relatively healthy offensive line gave Goff time to consistently find the best option to attack the defense. It sure looks like the offense will remain great, but there are some moving parts that could slow it down.
Opponents have had time to study Johnson’s offensive proclivities. We saw it in practices, both against the Lions own defense and in joint practices against both the Giants and Jaguars. Defenses have studied film and applied the lessons into their defenses. I have faith that Johnson and Campbell will have offensive answers to the opposing defensive adjustments, but we do need to see it play out.
And how will it play out with a WR room that lacks a truly proven commodity outside of St. Brown? Josh Reynolds and Kalif Raymond are good, but neither really scares defensive coordinators. Jameson Williams has caught one pass in the last 20 months and won’t even practice with the team until almost October due to his suspension. Rookie TE Sam LaPorta and fellow rookie RB Jahmyr Gibbs are expected to be major parts of the passing offense, but it remains to be seen if either will be truly ready for an instant impact. What if they’re not?
It’s an abstract worry more than a concrete one, but it might also be the one worry that causes me the most lost sleep.
The defense will be too complex
I love the Lions upgrades on defense. I think Cam Sutton quickly emerges as a viable No. 1 CB. I think C.J. Gardner-Johnson instantly becomes the best slot guy the Lions have had in the modern era, as well as being the much-needed provocateur that makes the Detroit defense unpleasant to play against. Brian Branch looks like a home run of a second-round pick. Derrick Barnes is Detroit’s top candidate for most-improved player — if Alim McNeill doesn’t run away with it first. And I didn’t even get to first-round LB Jack Campbell, who looked NFL-ready in coverage and short-yardage in the preseason.
The talent is there for this to be a top-10 defense. Yeah, I said it. Because I firmly believe it. It will take some beneficial health, some fortunate bounces and some savvy blending together.
It’s that last part that scares me. Aaron Glenn’s defense uses a lot of different personnel and pressure packages. Coverage schemes are variable, too; one side might be playing press man, the other side some cloud zone. It’s a complex defense that requires air-tight coordination between the units and even the players within the same secondary or line.
Now add in the fact that so many new players are critically involved. And that they didn’t play a single snap together in the preseason. In the small sample of field testing we did see, in the joint practices with the Giants and (especially) the Jaguars, there were communication and coordination breakdowns. They were infrequent, but in a regular season game, it might only take one or two miscues to cost the team a win.
To put a face on my fear here, a terribly depressing hypothetical: the Lions lose to Seattle 22-21 in Week 2 when a six-man rush featuring two DT/DE twists doesn’t get home on the game-winning 2-pt. conversion and there is a moment’s hesitation between CB Jerry Jacobs, rookie LB Jack Campbell and slot newcomer Gardner-Johnson on who carries the TE to the shallow corner and who sticks on the slot receiver setting the rub route, and Geon Smith waltzes in because Campbell also had to account for the RB slipping out the back door after his pass protection chip.
My 11th-grade English teacher feared run-on sentences like that. Sorry, Mrs. Taylor…
The Jared Goff of 2019-2021 reemerges
Goff was fantastic in the 8-2 run to complete the 2022 season, a worthy Pro Bowler. He was the guy Rams fans would’ve recognized back in 2017-2018, his Pro Bowl years in Los Angeles and the main conductor of Sean McVay’s exciting offensive train. That Jared Goff, the one we loved in 2022, erases a whole lot of fears about this team.
It’s those years in between, the Goff from his final two years in L.A. and his first season in Detroit, that is fear-inducing. That Goff lacked confidence in himself, didn’t engender confidence from his teammates or coaching staff and didn’t play anything close to Pro Bowl-caliber football.
There are two areas where the lacking manifested: yards per attempt and turnovers. Both were stellar in 2022; Goff was 5th in adjusted yards per pass attempt and currently holds the NFL’s longest streak of pass attempts without an INT at 324.
Flashback to 2017, his second season in L.A. and first with McVay as his head coach. Goff finished 4th with an INT rate of just 1.5 percent and 2nd in adjusted yards per pass. He was both aggressive and risk-averse at the same time — exactly what we saw in Detroit in his outstanding 2022.
In the down years, Goff’s completion percentage upticked but his interception rate also skyrocketed. That happened while his average yard per attempt plummeted from over 8.0 to under 6.8. He was simultaneously more error-prone while also being less aggressive. That’s a brutal combination.
There are any number of theories why that happened. I don’t expect a repeat of the falloff from Goff, for any number of reasons as well. But I’m not going to ignore the possibility that it happens to Goff again, just as it unpredictably did in Los Angeles. It’s a lower-level fear, akin to the trepidation of taking off the warm-up pants in pick-up hoops and briefly not remembering if you are wearing shorts underneath. And yes, I still worry about that every single time…
Nothing to fear but fear itself
This is more of a generalized anxiety of being “Lionized,” the experience of being a 50-something Lions fan who has seen heightened expectations in the past explode like the Hindenburg.
What will it be this year? I have no idea. I’m a believer in Dan Campbell. I’m a believer in Jared Goff and Ben Johnson. I’m a believer in the talent on the defense. I’m a believer in special teams coordinator Dave Fipp. I’m a believer in owner Sheila Hamp and GM Brad Holmes pulling the right strings. There’s no reason to have fear about this team beyond fear itself.
I comfort myself from this abstraction with the wise words of Keanu Reeves in his portrayal of Neo in The Matrix. When told that nobody’s ever done anything like this before, he calmly deadpans,
“That’s why it’s going to work.”
