If you were having trouble putting your finger on what’s wrong with the Detroit Lions offense, you weren’t alone. Everyone and their mother watching this football game was wondering the same thing, maybe even wondering out loud: “What’s going on?! This isn’t the Lions team we know!”
It’s the running game, folks. Detroit’s bread and butter, their identity for the past couple of seasons, it’s just not the same. It doesn’t look the same, it doesn’t feel the same, and it’s completely changing the dynamic of this offense for the worse. The way worse.
Obviously, it starts with how different the Lions look up front after the retirement of Frank Ragnow and Kevin Zeitler signing with the Tennessee Titans. After an offseason with so much change along the offensive line, more shuffling is set to happen now that Christian Mahogany, the team’s starting left guard, is expected to miss an extended period of time with a leg injury. Through nine weeks of the 2025 season, the starting guards for the Detroit Lions have a combined 18 starts of experience in the NFL. Their starting center, Graham Glasgow, was expecting to return to right guard after the departure of Zeitler. Only after the team pulled the plug on the Tate Ratledge experiment at center in training camp was Glasgow moved to the middle.
We’re seeing those struggles up front trickle down to the running backs, who have taken a significant step back this season in their effectiveness. Jahmyr Gibbs has a 47.8% success rate this year—a significant step back from last year’s mark of 53.6%—while his running partner, David Montgomery, has seen his success rate dip from 55.1% in 2024 to a career-low of 42.7% this year.
If Detroit is going to do anything at the trade deadline, forget about adding an edge rusher or a cornerback—the Lions need help under the hood on offense. If you saw the running game stall out yet again, you surely must have also seen what happened to Goff against all that interior pressure. Mahogany allowed five pressures and two quarterback hits, and Glasgow was charged with allowing three pressures as well according to PFF. But there’s more to the constant duress Goff was under against Minnesota than simply poor offensive line play.
If Goff is going to get all this credit for having ownership and command of the offense, he’s not going to skirt the criticism for what happened against the Vikings. Sunday was a reminder that quarterback pressures aren’t only a measure of an offensive lines effectiveness, it’s also a quarterback stat. Those dropbacks where Goff faced immediate pressure weren’t only a breakdown from the guys up front, it’s also a failure to make adjustments to protection and identifying reads for where the ball needs to get out to after the snap. Of the 20 pressures Goff faced against the Vikings, 15 came in under 2.5 seconds, and that’s the most quick pressures Goff has faced since being traded to the Lions in 2021 according to NFL Pro.
Goff has virtually no ability to navigate a collapsing pocket, and on the rare occasion where he makes a pass rusher miss in the backfield, that defender should only feel shame and dishonor. So if Goff fails to make those adjustments and doesn’t know where the ball needs to go at the line of scrimmage, there’s a close-to-zero-percent chance the play will amount to anything positive.
But when you can’t justify your best running back, Gibbs, being on the field for passing downs because he allowed seven pressures on 16 pass-blocking snaps—tied for the most pressures allowed by a running back in a game since at least 2018 according to NFL Pro—you start to wonder how you got into this spot in the first place. When you see yet another bubble or tunnel screen get blown up for less than a yard or two to knock the offense off schedule, you start to turn your concern to the person up in the booth calling the shots. When you consider the Lions had two weeks to prepare for this game and the seven possessions after an opening-drive touchdown resulted in 2.27 yards per play and five three-and-outs—four punts and a fumble—it’s hard to draw any other conclusion than John Morton got his lunch money stolen by Brian Flores.
For all the talk about this offense being turnkey, this Morton guy sure does seem more concerned with trying to make his imprint. Forget about getting Jameson Williams more involved, get back to what made this football team a force to be reckoned with: put together a gameplan to run the football effectively. Get back to the play-action stuff that made Goff more effective than he’s ever been and everything else will follow. But if they don’t sort through and correct these issues up front, this Lions offense will remain a shell of its former self.
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