Even though there’s one more game left, the Detroit Lions’ 2025 season is ostensibly over. The playoffs are no longer a possibility, and fans and media alike are already trying ot pick up the pieces of what went wrong in a season so filled with hope and expectation.
While it is never hard watching the Green Bay Packers get beaten up on their home turf, I’ll admit it was hard to watch the Ravens run all over them with ease. It was also tough to swallow that if the Lions had beaten either of their past very mediocre opponents—the Steelers and Vikings—Detroit would still have their playoff hopes alive. If they had taken care of both, they’d be sitting in a playoff spot right now.
The word disappointing doesn’t really even seem to completely convey how this season has played out, but let’s stick with it anyway for today’s Question of the Day:
What is the most disappointing part of the 2025 Lions season?
My answer: The offense regressing as the season went on.
We all expected some bumps in the road along the way. With a change of offensive coordinator and the offensive line loss of Frank Ragnow and Kevin Zeitler, it wasn’t all that surprising to see Detroit come out of the gate extremely slow against what would turn out to be a somewhat decent Packers defense in Week 1. But when the Lions came out the next week and put a hurting on the defenses of the Bears (52 points), Ravens (38), Browns (34), and Bengals (37), it seemed like the Lions were going to be just fine.
Unfortunately, they were not. After offensive struggles for the next three weeks, the Lions made a change at play caller. And while Dan Campbell gave a nice bump against the Commanders, Detroit didn’t have an answer for the Eagles’ defense. They would have promising games against the Packers and Cowboys—and played a great half of football against the Rams—the last two weeks have been pitiful.
It’s all been underscored by a running game that has quietly underwhelmed all season. If you just box score scout, it doesn’t look bad at all. In fact, it looks great.
2024: 534 carries, 2,488 yards (4.7 YPC), 29 TDs
2025: 415 carries, 1,919 yards (4.6 YPC), 21 TDs
The amount of carries are way down, which is to be expected for a team who trailed far more often in 2025, but the efficiency was nearly the same.
… except it wasn’t. The Lions’ 2025 rushing starts are largely swayed by explosive runs that happened early in the season. Their down-to-down success was extremely poor and a huge step down from last year. Just look at the overall success rate each year (per RBSDM):
2024: 44.8% success rate, 4th in NFL
2025: 39.1% success rate, 25th in NFL
This year, the Lions currently lead the NFL with nine rushes of 30+ yards. If we play the Kelvin Sheppard game and remove all nine of those rushes, the Lions’ overall stats plummet:
406 carries, 1,451 yards, 3.6 yards per carry
Now, let’s take away the top nine rushes from the 2024 team:
525 carries, 2,173 yards, 4.1 yards per carry
This offense was supposed to improve as the season went on. The offensive line would settle in, John Morton would get a better feel of the players around him, and as we’ve seen just about every year under Campbell, the team would save its best football for December.
Instead, the Lions have been completely dominated in the trenches three weeks in a row. In the past three games, they have 153 total rushing yards on 63 carries for a pathetic average of 2.4 yards per carry. Over that span, they have the lowest rush EPA in football (-0.486) and the second-lowest success rate (25.8%).
That is a complete loss of this team’s identity on offense, and for that to happen at the end of the season—when things were supposed to look figured out—is a massive disappointment.
Sure, there are other confounding factors—injuries to the offensive line room and tight end room haven’t helped—but good teams can keep things steady with a few injuries, and great coaching staffs adjust and find solutions. Detroit did none of that, and it’s left me massively disappointed in the offensive staff this year.
What have you been most disappointed in this year?
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