Lions Lose In A Special Way

Well it turns out that I was both wrong and right in my prediction of the Bears and Lions game. It turns out that neither quarterback reverted back to their multiple interception selves, Stafford did throw one interception but it was more bad luck than anything. Stafford didn't see Tommy Harris who had fallen down and when he got up the ball fell right into his lap. Stafford torched the Bears mighty defense for 298 yards passing with 1 touchdown and two rushes for 20 yards.

However those numbers don't mean that much when you have no running game to go along with it and are continuously starting drives within your own 20 yard line. Aaron Brown, Dennis Northcutt, and Adam Jennings failed miserably in the return game in a week were Schwartz stated they needed to be more productive. On the flip side of that, the Detroit Lion's cover units also fell flat on their faces when it came to keeping Johnny Knox, Devin Hester, Earl Bennett, and Daniel Manning in check on kick returns. We put our average defense out on the field all day and asked them to defend a shortened field.

Meanwhile we handicapped our offense by asking them to drive nearly 90 yards in order to score every time they got on the field. The result, a game that really started to get out of hand towards the end when the defense finally started to break down and the offense struggled in the shadow of their own end zone. We either need to release Jennings again and find a real kick returner or somebody needs to dropkick Stan Kwan so maybe he'll have the special teams units ready to play.

This was a winable game and the next time we play Chicago that one will be winable too, all of our division games are. We aren't a good enough team to do what we did against Chicago today and expect to win, its just not going to happen. The passing game looked good all day, Stafford overthrew some guys but he'll get better with that. There was no excuse for what the running game did, Smith was hurting and you could tell, he probably shouldn't have played. Still, the coaches should have pulled him, that or get some screens with Aaron Brown going to pick up the slack from the run game because they were teeing off on us every time we tried to run. Speaking of that, its not a rule that we have to run on first down, its okay to mix it up every now and then.

I guess we can chalk this one up to a learning experience, hopefully it will lead to us learning that we don't have a real kick returner and we need to get one. That or we just need to drop the only coaching holdover from our 0-16 season, Stan Kwan.