Injury Report: Detroit Lions, Questionable (Thorn in Paw)
The 2024 Detroit Lions are 13-2. They have clinched a playoff spot. They are favored by Vegas to not just reach the Super Bowl but to win it. They are also hopelessly doomed. I don’t like to give gambling advice, but take the field.
It’s not that they’ve been extremely lucky and their luck is drying up. It’s not that their offense relies on a gimmick that the opposition has figured out. It’s not that they’ve been bribing all the referees but the Ford family’s run out of F-150 money.
The problem is the defense looks like the inside of a MASH Field Hospital. Of the 23 players that started the season in the rotation, 12 are injured. Nearly half of the starters are down. The injuries to the two most important players on that side of the ball, pass rusher Aiden Hutchinson and cornerback Carlton Davis, are functionally season ending.
The Athletic included the table below in a December 16 article. Players in red are injured. Players in the darker red sustained their injury in the most recent game, a 48-42 loss against the Buffalo Bills.
It’s difficult to imagine how the Lions will remain functional when over half of their main contributors are banged up. They’ve hung their hat on their ability to stop the run, but with three-quarters of their starting linemen out and their original linebacker corp down to a sole survivor, it is, at best, unlikely that reputation will hold up.
While the defense has managed to keep points off the board, they allow a surprising amount of production. In terms of passing yards allowed, the Lions ranked 24th in the league coming into the most recent game. I suspect this is also a statistical anomaly—the Lions have a prolific offense, so opponents are in a position where they have to pass—but it still feels like a nasty defensive line spearheaded by Hutchinson let the Lions paper over so-so man-to-man coverage.
With Hutchinson out, the team’s had to embrace blitzing to generate pass rush. That works against the NFL’s prima donna pocket passers who whine in a mid-atlantic accent, “excuse me, excuse me, I cannot work under these conditions,” every time a light breeze has the gall to blow in their general direction.
But it doesn’t work against Buffalo’s Josh Allen, a 240-pound certifiable lunatic who can run through a linebacker’s face. And it doesn’t work against the Jalen Hurts and Patrick Mahomes of the world, whose slippery style of quarterback play makes them look like greased up fifth graders who just got into the pixie sticks. These guys are the cream of the crop, and the Lions will have to beat at least two quarterbacks of this caliber to reach a Super Bowl.
I don’t know how you do that when your defensive roster is brought to you by Footlocker. I don’t mean they’re sponsors, I mean the Lions found them working at Footlocker and were like, “hey, you ever play linebacker?!”
They’ll have to lean on their offense to stay competitive. An anonymous coach said in The Athletic: “If [the head coach] wants to juice it and beat somebody 51-45, hats off to him if he can do that, too. It’s just hard to do that 2-3 times in the playoffs to go all the way.”
The thing is, the Lions seem equipped to do that. Last week’s game against Buffalo saw Jared Goff throw for nearly 500 yards and for 5 touchdowns. He is the only quarterback to do that in a loss (I don’t have to look that up; I just know). And just yesterday against the Bears, he became the first quarterback to successfully execute a fake-stumble-fake-handoff-real-post-route.
So are the Lions doomed? Yes. Probably. I am not relieved that they handily beat the Chicago Bears. The Bears are not a professional football organization, they are an experiment in psychological torture conducted by the University of Chicago.
As a franchise, the Detroit Lions have found new and innovative ways to disappoint and embarrass the region for 75 years. It feels very fitting that the best roster in that stretch of time would be upended by injury.
But it also would be extremely funny if they won the Super Bowl with a lineup of guys whose biggest concern in October was remembering what aisle the Sketchers go in.
A good heuristic for prognostication in the 21st century has been “what is funniest is most likely to come to pass,” so I suppose anything is possible.