The Detroit Lions offense isn’t playing very well right now, and is coming off a terrible all-around game in Week 14. But in listening to Lions head coach Dan Campbell, you’d think everything is going pretty well with Ben Johnson’s unit.
Campbell stood up for Johnson in the wake of a brutal offensive game in Detroit’s 28-13 loss to the Chicago Bears. Other than two drives in the second quarter, it was an abject embarrassment of offensive football.
There were ponderous play calls and sequencing, poor adaptations to Chicago’s defense, undisciplined penalties, misuse of assets, lousy performances by key players and no sense of urgency to stop the failure. The finger of blame should point directly at Johnson as the unit’s overseer and director, but Campbell let him off the hook.
Here’s what Campbell said about Johnson’s game plan and play-calling,
“I thought Ben called a great game. I loved what he called. It was exactly what I wanted him to call. It was a hell of a job.”
If we’re going to hold defensive coordinator Aaron Glenn responsible for the mistakes on his unit, from the poor schematic choices to blown assignments by the players, the same needs to be done with Johnson. Campbell publicly letting his top offensive lieutenant off the hook for a bad game doesn’t do much to engender confidence that things will be better on Saturday against a better Denver defense than the Chicago one that just flattened Johnson’s poorly conceived, horribly executed game plan.