GREEN BAY, Wis. — Remember what New York Jets head coach Robert Saleh said after they throttled the Green Bay Packers 27-10 in Week 6 last season? After the Jets turned a 3-3 halftime deadlock into a decisive 17-point win?
“We felt like if we just keep taking them down to deeper water, they’ll find out they can’t swim,” Saleh said.
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Saleh, Packers head coach Matt LaFleur’s best friend in the business, essentially called his buddy’s team soft. Here we are, almost a full year later, and LaFleur and his team have done little to dispel that notion.
Manhandled in every phase. Whooped. Ass kicked. Humbled. That is how LaFleur himself described what the Lions did to the Packers on Thursday night in Detroit’s (3-1) 34-20 thrashing of Green Bay (2-2). Even after the Packers overcame a 17-0 fourth-quarter deficit in an 18-17 win over the New Orleans Saints last Sunday, we can’t reasonably say their DNA is much different right now than that of the team Saleh buried with that quote. What we can say for certain, however, is that there’s a new team to beat in the NFC North. Quarterback Jordan Love was asked if that team was the Lions.
“Yeah,” he said, agreeing with what’s obvious to any outside observers. “For sure.”
Matt LaFleur: “They whooped us pretty good.”
Said the Packers got “manhandled” in every phrase. pic.twitter.com/deYmkAkAcB
— Matt Schneidman (@mattschneidman) September 29, 2023
If you want to gauge a team’s toughness, look no further than how they run the ball and stop the run. On Thursday, the Packers averaged 2.3 yards per carry on 12 rushes. Behind a hobbled offensive line and without their star running back for almost two and a half games, the Packers rank 22nd in the NFL in offensive expected points added (EPA) per rush, according to TruMedia. We can at least in part excuse that deficiency since the running game has suffered without running back Aaron Jones (returned Thursday but ran only five times for 18 yards), left tackle David Bakhtiari (missed Weeks 2 and 3 and is out until at least Week 9) and left guard Elgton Jenkins (missed three quarters in Week 2 and the two games since), but it’s the hand the Packers have been dealt nonetheless and they’ve failed to deliver on the ground.
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Packers place Bakhtiari on injured reserve
What’s far more inexcusable is allowing 4.9 yards per rush on 43 Lions carries for 211 yards on the ground.
“I think any time you go out there and you can’t effectively run the football and conversely can’t stop the run, that’s a recipe for losing football,” LaFleur said.
Two weeks ago, the Atlanta Falcons ran the ball 45 times at 4.7 yards per carry for another 211 rushing yards against the Packers. Granted, the Packers held the Chicago Bears in Week 1 to 4.2 yards per carry on 29 rushes after they led the league with 5.4 yards per carry last season, but that’s still over 4 yards per carry. The outlier is the Saints running for only 3.5 yards per carry on 22 rushes last week, but that was without either of their top two running backs, Alvin Kamara and Jamaal Williams.
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Teams know how to beat the Packers. Run. The. Ball. It’s no secret. Take them to the deep end, like Saleh said, and the likelihood is they won’t come up. The Packers rank 27th in defensive rush EPA per snap with what was supposed to be a much-improved defensive interior with an infusion of young talent to complement Kenny Clark and a deep edge rusher group behind Rashan Gary and Preston Smith. As it turns out, not much has changed since Raheem Mostert and the San Francisco 49ers gashed the Packers for 285 rushing yards in the 2019 NFC Championship Game.
Since LaFleur became head coach, do you know how many teams have a defensive rush EPA per snap above zero? Thirty-one. The one team that doesn’t? The Packers. Dead last in run defense effectiveness since LaFleur became head coach, and dead last since general manager Brian Gutekunst officially became GM in 2018. Gutekunst hasn’t stocked his roster with good enough run defenders. LaFleur and his staff haven’t coached them well enough to stop the run. And the players aren’t executing. Everyone deserves blame.
“We’re going to have to do something different,” LaFleur said Thursday night when told the Packers have allowed more than 200 rushing yards in both losses this season. “Because it’s insane to do the same things over and over again and expect a different result.”
David Montgomery finds the end zone for the second time tonight, this time on a 2-yard run behind his center Frank Ragnow (#77).
The @Lions lead the @packers 24-3 with 10+ minutes to go in the second quarter. Tune in LIVE to @TNFPrimeVision for more!
📺: https://t.co/1OMRlplD2C pic.twitter.com/9xmh9NTy4K
— Next Gen Stats (@NextGenStats) September 29, 2023
What exactly LaFleur means and who he’s targeting is up for interpretation. Fans want the target to be third-year defensive coordinator Joe Barry — it might be — but LaFleur likely thinks, and would certainly say publicly, that the issues up front on defense are far more widespread than just one person.
According to TruMedia, the Lions averaged 2.12 yards before contact per rush on Thursday. Only three teams in the NFL have a higher average in that category this season. That’s how badly the Lions manhandled Green Bay’s defense up front. And according to Next Gen Stats, 113 of running back David Montgomery’s 121 rushing yards came after contact. Not only could the Packers not get off blocks in the run game, but they also couldn’t tackle adequately when they managed to disengage.
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“When you get the run going and then you’re able to play action off it and all that stuff, then you got everything open for you after that,” Clark said.
In Week 18 last season, the Lions marched into Lambeau Field with nothing to play for, the Packers needing a win to make the playoffs, and grinded out a 20-16 win. In Week 4 this season, with an early lead in the NFC North at stake, the Lions straight-up punked the Packers. Their 27 first-half points were the most Detroit has ever scored against Green Bay in a single half. The Lions had six more points in the first half than the Packers had total net yards (they averaged 1 yard per play in the opening 30 minutes). Every Packers offensive lineman allowed a pressure in the opening 30 minutes without the Lions blitzing, according to Next Gen Stats, and the defense collapsed after an early interception, in part because it barely got a breather with the offense still in the locker room.
LaFleur was asked after the game, “What do you think happens to cause a first half like that, where you got nothing?”
“I mean, you saw it,” LaFleur said. “I mean, we got our ass kicked. If I knew, it wouldn’t have happened.”
Another reporter began asking an unrelated question and LaFleur interjected with one last thought on the prior one. He snapped, in a way LaFleur rarely does.
“That’s a BS question, man.”
It just. Keeps. Going.
💙💙💙#OnePride pic.twitter.com/DcBt5PB7Wr
— Detroit Lions (@Lions) September 29, 2023
This hole, unlike last week’s, was too steep to overcome. The Packers made it interesting, cutting their deficit to 10 points with 14:52 remaining — they trailed by 17 with a smidge more than 11 minutes left against the Saints and won. But a backward pass out of bounds that lost 10 yards on first down in the third quarter down 16 after a Lions punt, a defense more leaky than the one that pitched a second-half shutout four days prior, and a leaping penalty while defending a 30-yard field-goal attempt that led to four more Lions points and milked 2:10 off the clock in the process crushed any second-half comeback.
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“This is not how we want to do it,” wide receiver Christian Watson said. “We’ve got to come out fighting and clawing and scratching at the beginning of the game. We just can’t put ourselves in that position every week.”
If there was any doubt who the top dog in the division is right now, Lions head coach Dan Campbell went for it on fourth-and-3 from the Packers’ 24-yard line with just more than a minute left in the game, the Lions leading by 14. With cornerback Rasul Douglas lined up almost three yards behind the first down marker, wide receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown ran a stop route and scooted into space to his right in front of Douglas for an easy conversion. Ballgame. Just like in Week 18 last season, when Campbell faced a fourth-and-1 from the Packers’ 15-yard line with just more than a minute left, up 20-16 and a chance to stick the dagger in Green Bay’s playoff hopes. Wide receiver D.J. Chark ran a similar stop route, sat down in an open spot in the zone and corralled an easy nine-yard completion to end the Packers’ season.
We saw in January what a Lions team with nothing to play for was made of. They reminded us of the same on Thursday, this time displaying a supreme resolve in the trenches, that true Midwest grit and an alpha mentality their head coach has instilled — all things the Packers still appear to lack.
(Photo: Patrick McDermott / Getty Images)
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