By: The Polish Prince
Just when you thought this team couldn’t get worse. I actually can’t believe how bad the Lions played on Sunday. They lost to the Bears. THE BEARS! They were without Jay Cutler, Jeremy Langford, and a defense. Yet the offense couldn’t muster up enough fortitude to score a touchdown. Once again, the Lions came out and looked sloppy, uninspired, and unprepared. That falls on the coaching staff. Before this season started, I was in favor of keeping Jim Caldwell. When you look around at the more successful franchises in the NFL, coaching stability is a common denominator. I was under the impression that Caldwell could be a steadying presence in the locker room. Never too high and never too low. And I was right, but that’s a problem. For 14 quarters the Lions have played with close to no emotion. The play calling has been dull, the defense isn’t getting stops when it needs to, and I don’t know what’s going on with our kick returners. I’m a big believer in coaching stability but Caldwell has to go. He has proven that he cant get the team ready to go and the last thing this team needs is to win its last six games of the season when they don’t count (again) and go into the offseason thinking that Caldwell isn’t that bad.
The Good:
The Bad:
The Ugly
What sucks the most about this loss is it sets up the Lions vacuum cleaner to be stronger than ever in 4 weeks. I know that this season is over. There is no way we can make the playoffs at this point. But, the Lions will go 3-1 over the next 4 weeks to get to .500 and I’ll be sucked back in, only to be crushed by 3 straight losses. This team sucks. GO LIONS!!!
Dad’s Thought of the Week: We need to fire Bob Quinn. Try to handle that take folks. Ya can’t.
The Good:
- Kerry Hyder: Really tough to find a good in that mess of a game, but Hyder proved once again that he belongs with another sack. That gives him five sacks through four games.
The Bad:
- Andre Roberts: For the most part, Roberts has been good on punts. He took one to the house on Sunday and gave the Lions a sliver of hope. Kick return is a different story though. He is AWFUL on kick returns. I’m not sure I have seen him take one out past the 20 and with the new rules bringing a touchback to the 25 it makes it really tough justifying any return from the end zone. Keep him on punts, take him off kick return.
The Ugly
- Jim Caldwell: I’m going to just copy and paste the thing I wrote last week. *This loss falls on him. The team didn’t come out ready to play. They looked sloppy, pathetic, uninspired, and simply unprepared. In a game that could turn the season from Same Old Lions to cautiously optimistic, the team looked like they didn’t want to be there. The defensive schematics were awful. Leaving our CBs one-on-one and not bringing any pressure is a bad combination and we didn’t make any adjustments until half time. Caldwell once again did a very poor job of clock management. He started using our final time outs with a little over three and a half minutes in the game. Why did he use them so early? If we get the 3-and-Out after using the timeouts then we probably have about three minutes left with only the two-minute warning. This strategy gives us no wiggle room to give a first down. Say we get the stop with out using our time outs. Then we get the ball back with two minutes and three time outs to use. That’s just as good of a scenario as the ball with three minutes and no time outs. BUT, if we saved our time outs, we could have given up a first down to Green Bay, and still had a chance at stopping them on another set of downs. Granted there wouldn’t be much time left but using our time outs early mortgaged our opportunities to win this game. If this team wants to succeed we need a coach who can get the troops fired up for big games and knows how to manage the clock. I’m not calling for Caldwell’s job just yet but anything short of a playoff win should spell the end of his time here in Detroit*
- Matt Stafford: Matt looked ugly this week. 23-36, 213 yards, 0 TDs, 2 INT. I will say that I don’t think that either of those interceptions were his fault because I feel the receiver ran the wrong route but as the QB you have to make sure everyone is on the same page. Also, he just wasn’t sharp. He was overthrowing guys, not finding the open receiver, and didn’t look through all his progressions. I thought there was times when forced it into coverage when he should of took what the defense gave him and just checked down. Once again, the Stafford H8erz win again this week.
- Defense: No pressure, bad coverage, and couldn’t stop the run. That leads to the Bears having 114 rushing yards and 294 passing yards. Not a bad defensive day except for the fact that it was done by Jordan Howard and Brian Hoyer. Just pathetic all the way around.
- Golden Tate: He has to be hurt to play that bad. He was awful. No sugar coating it. Stafford’s first interception was solely on Tate running the wrong route and that interception took points off the board. He has dropped more balls in his first 4 games this year than all of last season. He has seemed to lose his ability to run after the catch too. Last year we would throw it out to him on a screen and let him work one-on–one and most of the time it worked. This year, not so much.
What sucks the most about this loss is it sets up the Lions vacuum cleaner to be stronger than ever in 4 weeks. I know that this season is over. There is no way we can make the playoffs at this point. But, the Lions will go 3-1 over the next 4 weeks to get to .500 and I’ll be sucked back in, only to be crushed by 3 straight losses. This team sucks. GO LIONS!!!
Dad’s Thought of the Week: We need to fire Bob Quinn. Try to handle that take folks. Ya can’t.