Lions Report 11/02/2025

My daughter Jordan and I at the game.

Lions Report: Welcome back, denizens of the Lionsverse. I’ve obviously taken a few weeks off, with one of those weeks being the Lions bye week. I’d apologize but since I do this for free, I don’t feel too bad. I had hoped this first game back against the Viqueens (credit to Doug Lyon) would have been more positive. Unfortunately, it was not. What went wrong? Well, let’s start with what went right.

Terrion Arnold was back this week. I frankly hadn’t been paying attention to the injury report, so I was surprised to see he was in the starting lineup. He actually looked pretty good, nabbing his first interception as a Lion and looking more confident in coverage. He also made some nice tackles. Overall, that’s about as good as I’ve seen him play.

What else was good? Sam LaPorta. He gashed the Vikings for 97 yards on 6 receptions. He started out on fire, but the Lions strangely moved away from calling his number in the 2nd and 3rd quarters. He did make a big 4th down conversion in the 4th quarter, which makes you wonder why they didn’t keep feeding him the ball during the middle of the game.

What else was good? Not much. Goff didn’t throw an interception, but he did get sacked 5 times. Most of that was due to the offensive line playing like crap. See below. However, Goff held on to the ball too long at times. Did he play badly? No. Did he play great? No to that as well.

What was bad? Where do we start?

Offensive line - The Vikings defense was coming up field hard all game. They were getting penetration, disrupting Goff’s throws, or sacking him. I don’t know what was going on there, but it was the biggest issue of the game in my opinion.

John Morton - Just when I warmed up to Morton, he has a game like this one. I did not like his play calling. As mentioned previously, the Vikings defensive line was coming up field hard. The Vikings were also covering the flat well all game. So, where were the crossing routes? That’s the bread and butter play for Amon-Ra St. Brown and LaPorta. He finally started calling those in the 4th quarter and they were effective. It was too little, too late. Also, how about some occasional play calls to keep the Vikings off balance? How about a reverse or some other junk play to loosen them up? It didn’t happen.

The officiating - I won’t blame the refs for the loss. However, they had a pretty poor game. I was at Ford Field and it was hard to hear, but I assumed they flagged Aiden Hutchinson for trying to trip someone. That seemed thin. The roughing the passer call on Jack Campbell was worse in my opinion. What was he supposed to do? He hit JJ McCarthy just after he threw the ball and there isn’t a way to pull back from that. They did give Arnold his interception after reviewing it on replay, so I was happy with that result.

Ground game - See the offensive line above. The Lions had 65 yards on 20 rushing attempts for a 3.3 yards per carry average. That won’t get it done in most games.

Lions rushing defense - What rushing defense? Aaron Jones trampled the Lions for 78 yards on just 9 carries. The only thing that stopped him from getting 100 yards was getting hurt.

Penalties - The Lions were uncharacteristically undisciplined this game with 10 penalties for 76 yards. Even if you throw out the Campell and Hutchinson penalties, that’s still 8 penalties, which is too high.

So, the Packers lose to the Panthers but we gain no ground on them. And the Bears and Vikings win to tighten up the NFC North race. Great.

I was disappointed with the Lions preparation coming off a bye week. That’s my biggest complaint. Hopefully, next week will look better.

On a positive note, I had fun attending the game with my daughter Jordan. Credit to Nancy Dye for the picture.