Detroit Lions Are the Walking Wounded

The Detroit Lions enter Week 18 tied for the best record in the NFC at 14-2, with a game against the Vikings on Sunday night to determine who gets the bye week. They have the highest DVOA in the conference at 33.1%, a conference-high seven Pro Bowlers, and high-level contenders for Coach of the Year (Dan Campbell) and Defensive Player of the Year (Kerby Joseph). It’s been quite the season for Detroit, as they look to top their conference for the first time since … well, for the first time since conferences were a thing. You must go back to 1952 to find a Lions team atop what we now would recognize as the NFC at the end of the regular season.

Unfortunately, the Lions also rank very highly in another stat: the walking wounded.

The Lions currently have $81.4 million in APY on the various injured lists – injured reserve, PUP or NFI. That’s not quite the highest in the league, but the teams behind them are all long since eliminated from the postseason and are incentivized to stick people on injured reserve with minor injuries that will keep them out for a couple weeks. Not Detroit – it’s all hands on deck for playoff teams, only most of those hands are bruised and beaten. The only other potential playoff team with more than $50 million on injured reserve right now are the longshot Miami Dolphins, and the average for the 17 teams still alive entering Week 18 is just $27.2 million.

A conservative count of that list includes six projected starters and four more rotational pieces, all on IR. And yes, while Kalif Raymond and Alex Anzalone may return for the postseason, the list also doesn’t include the currently injured David Montgomery, Jack Campbell or Amik Robertson Detroit is limping to and through the finish line, and the Lions could really stand to earn the bye week just to get a moment to breathe and tape together whatever limbs remain even partially intact.

The effect of the injuries has been most notable on defense, where the Lions peaked in Week 11 and have been tumbling down the DVOA tables ever since. They’ve had five straight weeks with a below-average defensive DVOA, with three weeks being worse than 20% as Josh Allen, Caleb Williams and Brock Purdy carved them up. The offense has been explosive enough to overcome some of these defensive struggles, but it’s been getting harder and harder as the lineup has been getting thinner and thinner.

One of the best features of FTN StatsHub is its ability to filter by weeks, so we can see how the Lions looked before and after their injury plague. Because it’s been a gradual thing of players dropping throughout the course of the season, there’s not a clean and obvious starting point for healthy Lions versus injured Lions, but going back to Week 12 and Anzalone being out is as good a middle point as any. Let’s compare the Lions pre-injury stats to their post-injury stats and see just how far they’ve dropped off.

Something that jumps out to me is the increase in blitz rate over the last month and a half, and the relatively small increase in pressure rate that has come with it. Without Hutchinson and now McNeill, the Lions have been trying to manufacture pressure in any way they can. The Lions weren’t astounding at generating pressure without the blitz in the first half of the year – just a 23.1% pressure rate, 20th in the league. But over the last month and a half, that’s dropped further, and Aaron Glenn is doing whatever he can to try to generate pressure. Credit where credit is due – it’s working. But more rushers crossing the line means fewer defenders back in coverage, and that’s where we’re seeing the Lions fall apart.

Opposing passing games are finding more wide-open receivers, and those receivers are finding plenty of room to run. They’re still solid enough at covering the short passes, but it’s those intermediate and deep shots that have suddenly become daggers. When the blitz doesn’t get home, they’re getting picked apart. And when they hold off and don’t blitz, they’re also getting picked apart. When they fail to get pressure, they have an EPA/play of 0.39 over the last six weeks, which ranks 27th. And yet they’re only getting pressure on 34.8% of their blitzes, which ranks 19th. It’s not good if the only path to consistent defensive success is to blitz, and you’re not particularly good at blitzing, but that’s where the Lions find themselves. They’re allowing safe, deep shots on a regular basis, which has put them in shootout territory over and over and over again.

The fall off in the run game doesn’t show up as much in the individual stats, but both DVOA and success rate have seen the Lions drop over the last few weeks as well. The big change there appears to be yards before contact – the Lions aren’t getting to ballcarriers as quickly as they did in the first half of the season, and when you’re granting rushers nearly an extra yard before the first defender gets there, you’re going to have trouble.

Most of the drop-off in run defense appears to be situational, especially on second down – they’ve fallen from a 43% success rate to a 63% on second down, in large part because opposing offenses are running on an average of second-and-4 rather than second-and-7. Being consistently in better downs and distances has opened up opposing rushing games, so while the raw yardage isn’t that different from what it was to start the season, the more favorable situations mean those runs are moving the chains, keeping drives alive, and keeping Detroit’s shorthanded defense on the field. It’s a death by a thousand papercuts situation, rather than the catch-22 the pass defense faces, but the results are similar – a massive drop in efficiency.

At the moment, the biggest second-half defensive drop in DVOA history belongs to the 2019 New England Patriots, who fell from -43.5% DVOA through eight games to -21.1% DVOA at the end of the year. Detroit won’t come close to breaking that record; they were at -16.0% through eight games and are still holding at -6.9%;. Their drop-off happened too late in the season to completely destroy their DVOA. But that would still be the 98th-biggest drop-off out of 1,397 team seasons in our database, or in the bottom 7% of all defenses, and that’s not counting any further drop-off they’ll see against Minnesota in Week 18. Usually when we see drop-offs this big, it’s from unsustainable all-time greatness down to just regular good, not an injury-led nightmare!

There is some hope on the horizon, mind you. There’s a chance that Alex Anzalone could play as early as this week, though there’s a good chance he’ll be held out until the playoffs proper. Aidan Hutchinson has made noise about potentially returning for the Super Bowl, should the Lions get there. Carlton Davis has an outside chance to be back for the NFC Championship Game. If the Lions can hold for just a little bit longer, they may get enough reinforcements to at least stop the complete and utter collapse of the defense.

As it stands, though, the Lions may have to win shootout after shootout if they’re going to turn their best DVOA season in franchise history into a championship. That makes Sunday’s game against Minnesota so crucial – it’s much easier to win two shootouts at home and then the Super Bowl than to win four straight road games. The first-round bye is always crucial, but the banged-up Lions may need it as much as any team ever has.