My Take on lions from yesterday

These are my observations
1)Stafford has no excuse to be upset at the time out, he had one chance at the end of 4 th quarter and one at the end of over time, both times he blewed it, he is not a clutch player,stats doesn’t matter.Also he almost gifted cardinals in the last play
2) Agnew looked like a joke.
3)Amendola use side line unless you had a concussion from miami days.
4)Commetator making mistakes after mistakes, caling melvin as diggs and calling walker with wrong names in 2 plays.Commentator was doing his home work on staffords and kershaw(rocket arm which dont matter to lions, coordinator calling time out proved that), but commentator has no clue on lions players

Didn’t know where to park this, but a solo espnbaby thread seems the most logical. Yeah, it sucks. But SOL would have lost, we tied…baby steps.

Seriously, most were not worried at 8:52 (4th), up 24-9. Two plays sums up this game, the 2:39 brainfart TO & Flower’s phantom facemask @ 0:48.

Overall, I liked 80% of what I saw today. Feel better going forward…

Oh, my third rewatch…kill me…

Holy crap! He lives!
Welcome back, ESPNBABY.

Whether a team wins, loses, or ties, everybody involved who coached or played deserves some credit or blame. Consider: for 3 qtrs the Lions had the Cards by the nuts, and a lot of people deserve some credit for that. Then the Cards came back from 18 down and almost won the game, so give them some credit but also assign some blame to our side too, again a lot of people.

Question: Did the Lions change the defense to go ‘prevent’, or did they have to adjust because their big guys (Harrison, Flowers, Daniels, among others maybe) were gassed? I don’t know the truth about that, maybe nobody but the Lions do and they ain’t talking. Maybe the Lions should have blitzed more to put pressure on Murray, it worked in the 1st half. What I do know is that Murray got hot when our pass rush evaporated. How many times have you seen an opposing QB sit back there and pick our secondary apart? After yesterday, plus 1.

Good question.
Also how much did they have too tweek the defensive plan without Davis? I think he could have sacked Murray more than once.
It was still a plan that was working well against a dual threat QB that they had zero film on.
Why it changed late is a good question.
Edge rushers really might have been assigned to stay home for contain too. So yeah, pass rush probably was up to the LBs.
We’ll face different challenges every week. Learn and move on.
A tie still beats a loss at season’s end. 9-6-1 beats 9-7 in a wildcard race. If it comes down to that.
Lets hope we at least get that far.
There was some positive play.

The 3rd quarter was bad.

2 consecutive 3 and outs is not how you seal the deal.

Opposing team gains momentum. Defense gets tired. We didn’t need scores then, we needed first downs. Maybe 2 first downs, one for each drive, kills another 2-3 minutes.

I think that’s where we lost it.

Decker can single handedly be blamed for both 3 & outs. KJ busts a 13yd run for first down, holding decker moves us back and we end up 4yds short and punt. Next drive pass play for first and again holding. You can’t expect the offense to make plays only to see them wiped out and then expect them to make even bigger plays. I hate decker…f’n tha osu

The ones in the 3rd?

Ragnow was the guilty holder according to the play by play I’m looking at. 1st down. Decker was at fault for the sack on the next play.

The second 3 and out, the hold was on Decker.

But, but, Stafford…
Oh, nevermind.

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Flowers face-mask call was real and was a good call, you can’t grab a guys facemask and push and pull it back and forth, watch the replay, that’s what happened and he got caught.

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Legalizing Pot would be a good thing for some.

Consider this:

The first wave of criticism blamed play calling. The Lions got too conservative, gave Murray too much time and let him pick apart the secondary that had spent the first half knocking every ball in the vicinity of a receiver away.

But Lions head coach Matt Patricia pushed back on that criticism during his Monday afternoon press conference.

“We definitely didn’t back off from a standpoint of playcalls or anything like that,” Patricia said. “Not at all. We know how dangerous (Murray) is. He’s, obviously, a great player. He was a great college player and he finished off the game really well last night.”

Even some analysts started to buck the narrative that the Lions fell back into a prevent defense in the crucial moments of the game. PFF’s Brett Whitefield tweeted this on Monday morning, well after the “prevent” narrative was off and running:

Brett Whitefield
@PFF_Brett
The Lions didn’t play a single snap of prevent defense/coverage in the 4th or OT. They stuck with mostly man until the bitter end. Coverage was pretty tight also. DL was just gassed.

So if the Lions didn’t fall back into a conservative game plan, what went wrong? How did the Lions defense go from dominant to defeated in the blink of an eye.

It appears some of it simply has to do with fatigue. The Lions defense played a total of 89 snaps—where the league average is around the mid-60s. Patricia said he liked the overall conditioning of his players, but admitted not everyone was up to speed.

“Conditioning for us is something that we build and we go through,” Patricia said. “There was some good guys out there that were in really good shape and running around and playing fast and all the way through, and some guys that still need to work on some of their conditioning and reps.”

The Lions’ game plan under Patricia has always been the exact opposite of what happened Sunday: draw out plays, limit possessions, keep your offense out there to give your defense some rest. But in the fourth quarter, the Cardinals dictated the tempo, and it clearly caught up with some players.

That is to be expected at the beginning of the year, especially with specific players that didn’t get a lot of reps in training camp and the preseason. Guys like Damon Harrison Sr., Trey Flowers, and Mike Daniels—among others—didn’t get the opportunity to go through all of training camp and could be still getting their conditioning in season form.

“It is a build-up process through the course of September where we’re trying to get guys acclimated to trying to play a full football game,” Patricia said. “We got caught in a situation last night where both sides of the ball played a lot of snaps and that’s probably a lot more than what most teams did at this point this week.”

But Patricia admitted the Cardinals made good adjustments that gave the Lions trouble late, and that, ultimately, falls on the coaches.

“It’s just coaching and execution,” Patricia said. “That’s the bottom line with it as far as that’s concerned. All that’s got to be better in the fourth quarter and we’ve got to go out, and we’ve got to find a way to win.”

https://www.prideofdetroit.com/2019/9/9/20857789/matt-patricia-4th-quarter-defense-detroit-lions-prevent-defense-cardinals

The part about this that bothers me is that the Lions had to know what the Cards were trying to do, run as many plays as possible and tire out the Lions Defense. And it worked. They did try to sub guys in and out, but IMHO they should have had one more DL guy on the roster, maybe Loewen, but they should have been better prepared and they weren’t. Plus, our offense should have been slowing the game down and staying in-bounds as much as possible to keep that clock running.

We agree to disagree

If that wasn’t a Prevent defense, we’re screwed!

Not sure how you can disagree when we have visual proof of Flowers grabbing the guys facemask and pushing and then pulling his head with it!!!..but ok.

Didn’t watch the game, don’t plan to, we have no excuse for losing that game.

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