Those are fantastic improvements, but they must be considered against our opponents as well. The only offense that is really clicking right now from our previous 4 opponents would be Green Bay, and we definitely got some help from favorable calls in that one. I’m not saying the defense hasn’t improved, but sampling is important.
That is what the last chart is for. That is the delta between our performance and all of the other opponents of our opponents. It takes strength of opponent out of the equation.
It Goes both ways though. We can come up with reasons/excuses all day to get to the narrative we want. For example, The Lions were up 21-0 midway through the 3rd quarter in the opener against the Saints. Score ends up 31-30 after we go into prevent and its “man this defense sucks!’’ totally ignoring that the shut them down for over 2/3rds that game. Vs the Jets we were up 24-10 into the 4th quarter giving up less than 175 yards total in the game. We again go into prevent and the defense gets torched making it a close finish, 31-24 final.
The defense has actually been solid for the majority of the NFL season. basically 2 bad 4th quarters against NO/NYJ, bad Games against BUF/CAR and the rest really good honestly. Roughly 10 bad quarters vs 22 really good quarters.
I think there is every reason to assume this defense can be at least average. And if that is the case, this team is absolutely a SB contender.
Sample size does matter without question. And over the course of the whole season, the Lions defense has actually been solid
There is likely an element of complimentary football here as well. The defense has faced considerably less plays during its hot streak. The offense is scoring less but it is possessing the ball, resting the defense and coming through when necessary.
I am impressed with the turn around.
I’d also be curious to see what our offensive drive chart looks like in comparison to the first 4 games. I suspect our drives are more time consuming, giving the D some rest between series.
Sometimes when you live by the explosive plays, yon can also kill the defense.
Yes thats true. And to snowball off that…its nice to know that we can still win games in a shootout if we have to. Because not always are we going to be able to control the game. Another sign of a really good team.
Some point to the low scoring total and basically say our offense is not as good as it has been in the past. Well i disagree. Sure it might not be the best offense ever assembled anymore, but its still among the leagues best. We can win games in multiple ways…its encouraging to see.
It’s a good breakdown and paints a good picture overall. It’s very hard to get quantitative measurements to account for qualitative variations and some of that is done there. Some of it will never be. We ran into a Carolina team hitting on all cylinders on offense but they don’t look nearly as good as that now, and the same stands true for the Saints when we played them they looked better than they do today.
Regardless, if this team can play to those numbers against the upcoming opponents then we’re going to finish with at least 11 wins probably 12. I’m going to hope and pray that the amount of time has passed for guys to get their feet under them in new roles and for Kerby and Branch to be 100% by the time the playoffs roll around because we will be facing much better teams and we will over this middle 50% of our season which we are getting record healthy on
Even before I dig into the context, I know the Packers have been great against everyone except us. So the “shitty opponent” argument doesn’t wholly hold up.
