Lions vs. Packers: What I learned from film review of Detroit’s Thanksgiving loss

From the very first snap from scrimmage in the game, the Lions defense wasn’t right. The Packers knew what to expect and how to manipulate the Detroit defensive package.

Green Bay opens in 11 personnel, with twins right and the TE motioning to the left in front of a pistol formation with the RB to Jordan Love’s right. The Lions are in a 4-2-5 with a single-high safety (Tracy Walker) and Kerby Joseph aligned as the WILL.

Right off the bat, there is a problem here. Walker is a great blitzer but is not the quickest or most responsible in deep coverage. Joseph is a better deep player but a poor blitzer and not a very good run defender in general.

As it plays out, Joseph is easily stonewalled by the RB on his pass rush. Because he rushes, it leaves rookie LB Jack Campbell in the underneath coverage help role, with MIKE Alex Anzalone responsible for honoring the play-action.

Everything about this coverage idea and alignment for the LBs and safeties is bizarre. I wrote several more inflammatory words before editing to “bizarre,” too.

The Packers (smartly) hold Anzalone shallow with the play-fake as both outside receivers run vertical routes.

Outside CBs Cam Sutton (top) and Jerry Jacobs (bottom) are playing outside technique, which is designed to funnel the WR release inside to where the help is. But the help for both is the same guy — Walker. Slot CB Brian Branch has to honor his mark, and Campbell does a good job picking him up on a square-in route.

Love directs Walker to Jacobs’ side with nice eyes and set. That receiver breaks outside just before the pass with his mission accomplished, but Walker is still facing and shading his way. Again, he’s not nearly as savvy in single-high coverage as Joseph is and is a better blitzer. Aaron Glenn chose this. The design of the defense leaves both Anzalone and Branch — the back 7s two best players — effectively doing nothing. Anzalone technically has cover responsibility on the TE, but he stayed in to block.

Sutton holds his outside ground but also gets beaten by speed on the release. In theory, Walker should be there to help him. But Walker is lost, trying to gauge the ball in the air and never looking where the receiver is. He’s just not comfortable here, misjudging the ball in the air relative to his own closing speed.

The pass rush, or lack thereof, factors here as well.

Aidan Hutchinson is aligned Wide-9 to the left. The Packers slide their protection his way and devote both the RT and RG to stopping him. The design here is for Alim McNeill (54) to loop around the two DLs to his right and hit the hole that Joseph’s blitz should create.

Except Joseph’s meek blitz is too far outside. The tight end doesn’t need to honor it because it’s so wide, and he’s there to stymie McNeill, which he does quite well. Hutchinson has four hands on him. The other DL are two-on-three and both lose, though that’s expected.

If Joseph goes more inside, he might draw the TE away just a smidge and allow McNeill to get a better path. If Anzalone is also blitzing here, the Packers have a real problem, but he’s not. It’s a poorly executed rush with a design that has a very low probability of generating quick pressure even if it’s done right; this is a slow-developing rush scheme that basically needs Hutchinson to beat his two blockers instantly to be effective.

Love steps into the throw with the clean pocket and delivers an absolute strike to Christian Watson. For all the Lions’ foibles on this play, the Packers deserve some credit for executing it very well on their part. There are a lot of moving pieces/parts to what they’re doing here and they all pull it off expertly. The opposite is true for Detroit.

And that, in a nutshell, is what I learned about the Lions defense for the the game. It didn’t get better until the Packers got more conservative on offense. Aaron Glenn’s plan of attack and personnel usage was poor, and the players also didn’t execute nearly well enough. It was true in the entire first half.

The strength of the Lions offense is the line. Everything OC Ben Johnson creates is dependent upon the line being better than the defenders they’re blocking.

Against Green Bay, that did not happen nearly often enough. And it was every single lineman, not just rookie Colby Sorsdal thrust into replacement action for an injured Jonah Jackson at left guard.

Sorsdal was overmatched and it was clear from Detroit’s second drive. He was on the hook for the strip-sack of Goff that wound up being six points for Green Bay. He’s a fifth-round rookie from an FCS school playing out of position; that’s to be expected. It would have been nice for him to play better, of course. But the two normal standouts, the Pro Bowlers on the line in C Frank Ragnow and RT Penei Sewell, also did not play anywhere close to their standards (no matter what PFF might tell you).

Ragnow left for a play after what looked like a groin or upper leg injury. When he came back, his mobility and burst were clearly inhibited. That one rep out coincided with Sorsdal getting benched for Kayode Awosika. The replacement worked for exactly two plays and then Awosika was even worse than Sorsdal in pass protection. Between the hole to his left (and right–more on that in a sec) and his limited range, Ragnow just wasn’t very good. Nor was Sewell.

Penei might very well be the best right tackle in football, but he had a bad game. Not just a bad game by his standards; he had a bad game, period. On Goff’s second fumble, he was thrown aside on a wicked spin move by Preston Smith. Sewell struggled all afternoon to stay in contact with Smith specifically; Sewell often did fine on the initial contact but then couldn’t stay with him. It was never more evident than Smith’s forced fumble on Goff where Sewell got badly off-balance and was on all fours while his blocking mark hit his quarterback. That was in spite of the fact I counted at least six uncalled holds on Sewell. Bad day for a great player. It happens to the best of them.

The run blocking was rough, especially from the interior line. The Packers LBs and DL serve some credit here, for certain. But the Lions line as a whole really struggled to sustain run blocks and it cramped their offensive style. The zone-blocking concepts, which constituted roughly half the reps, were an abject disaster against the disciplined, quick Packers defense.

Jared Goff is having a very good year in Detroit. Goff did not have a good game against Green Bay, which smartly understood what the veteran QB can and cannot do and out-schemed Ben Johnson in forcing Goff into more of what he cannot do.

Green Bay did what Baltimore was so successful at, and to a lesser extent what Chicago did pretty well to Goff. They took away the middle of the field and dared him to make outside throws and deep throws. Goff is fantastic over the middle and in the intermediate range, but he’s not so great outside the numbers and down the field. The way the Packers safeties and LBs crowded his bread-and-butter throws, they forced Goff to make tougher choices. Even with single coverage and good weapons outside, Goff didn’t challenge it often and was inconsistent when he did. Being under heavier pressure than normal exacerbated Goff’s limitations here, too.

The fumbling is what it is. Goff has struggled with ball security his entire career, going back to his college days at Cal. Only Derek Carr and Daniel Jones lost more fumbles between 2018 and 2022 than Goff. The Packers (smartly) went after the ball instead of just trying to get Goff on the ground and it worked.

The complete lack of Goff as a running threat played into Green Bay’s hands, too. Take this play, a 3rd-and-2 in the second quarter…

The Lions go empty backfield. There isn’t even a 3T on the defense, let alone a nose tackle. Moreover, look at the LBs (7 and 58) completely ignoring Goff as a potential threat. This is an easy conversion, a simple check-read for the QB to plow ahead behind three offensive linemen into open space. But it’s either not on the table for Goff, or he just doesn’t believe he can do it. Either reason is a problem. Again, it’s two yards.

Goff sailed the throw here over the middle to Sam LaPorta, who was open in a small window. The Lions punted from their own 48-yard line, perhaps the only time in the game they should have actually gone for it on fourth down, but I digress…

The one area where Goff really got it going was when the Lions went up-tempo late in the game. That also coincided with the Packers defense being less aggressive, so there’s a chicken vs. egg debate about credit there, but Goff appeared more in control and confident when the Packers defense didn’t have time to communicate their adjustments or coverages. Ben Johnson would be wise to try more of that, especially against a youthful team like the Packers.

–For the second game in a row, first-round rookie LB Jack Campbell was awful in the first half. Just as he did against Chicago, Campbell played much better after a few drives. But man, he was a colossal liability in the passing game and not an asset against the run in Green Bay’s first handful of drives.

The Packers’ first touchdown was a potential pick-six for Campbell if he read the play at all, but he stood flat-footed as the throw went right through the window where the coverage dictated he was supposed to be. The Packers clearly planned for that, too.

–The fake punt. What. The. Hell!?!

–I hinted at it in the above section on the OL, but there are way too many run plays where RG Graham Glasgow isn’t close to blocking anyone as the tackle happens. If he’s not blocking the defender directly in front of him in the run game, Glasgow is not making the block very often.

–LB Malcolm Rodriguez has a legit future as a fullback if he wants it. He’s already better than Jason Cabinda at both lead blocking and receiving.

–Jahmyr Gibbs went down on first contact on nine of his 11 runs. That’s not good. By contrast, David Montgomery did that just five times on his 16 runs.

–Underappreciated stat that really helped Green Bay: the Packers punted four times. All four pinned the Lions inside their own 20-yard line. It only mattered on one of them, but the blocking for return man Kalif Raymond was not up to snuff either.

–It was also bad special teams execution on Khalil Dorsey’s first kick return, where Chase Lucas completely whiffed on his block. If Lucas hits his block, Dorsey has yards of free room to run. Lucas is normally very good in that capacity. Another case of a good player having a bad game…

–Looking for a bright spot? The defense tackled well overall. Cam Sutton had a bad miss and Jerry Jacobs flubbed one, but beyond that the unit was effective at terminating plays.