Detroit Lions defensive coordinator Kelvin Sheppard spoke in the front of the media on Thursday after the team’s 41-34 loss to the Los Angeles Rams and admitted his unit’s performance was nowhere near acceptable. Any time the offense scores 34 points, in his opinion, the team should win the game.
Sheppard was quick to point to the team’s inefficient pass defense over the past month as the primary culprit of the team’s struggles, which is pretty obvious. In the past four weeks, the Lions have allowed the most passing yards per game (328.8), most passing touchdowns (10), and eight-worst passer rating (101.2) in the NFL.
“Everything started to point to our pass game, pass defense,” Sheppard said upon his monthly self-review. “That obviously showed up in LA in a bad way against the Rams.”
But Sheppard got oddly defensive when it came to the team’s run defense against the Rams. Detroit allowed 29 rushes for 159 yards and three touchdowns against Los Angeles—an average of 5.5 yards per carry. That’s the most rushing yards, yards per carry, and rushing touchdowns they’ve allowed all season.
Yet Sheppard insists that when you take out a few errors on big runs—notably on 24, 19, and 11-yard runs—the picture is a lot rosier. Erase those three carries for 54 yards and Detroit only allowed 105 yards on 26 carries—an average of 4.04 yards per carry.
“You can’t play this game of taking plays away, but nobody, and I can stand on the table behind this, nobody has just lined up and ran the ball down our throats or made us like the run game,” Sheppard said. “They popped an explosive run here and there that’ll generate that big number, but that 24, 19 yarder, take that out alone, they’re standing at 4.0 a carry, which is—around this league in the NFL—that’ll sit you right around the top-10 and right where you want to be.”
Unfortunately, that explanation doesn’t really pass the smell test. Of the Rams’ 29 carries, over half (15) went for 6 yards or more.
One of the more complicated measures of rushing efficiency is success rate. A “successful” run is defined as:
- On first down: At least 4 yards on first down
- On second down: At least half the yardage remaining to go
- On third down: a first down or touchdown
The Rams’ rushing success rate against the Lions was 58.6%, the 22nd-best performance of any single team this year, and it was Detroit’s worst performance of the year by far (next closest: vs. Vikings at 44.8%).
When presented with this information, Sheppard still insisted the performance was good enough.
“I thought outside of three, four plays in the game, I liked where we stood as far as fitting the run,” Sheppard said.
On the season, the Lions rank 13th in rushing yards allowed, ninth in yards per carry, and 16th in success rate.
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