RedRamage

Assuming football is around for the next 20-30 years, I'd say yes we will. I think there's always a lot of shifting in philosophies and strategies and honestly any sport has a lot of copy cats. If you see a team being super successful doing X, lots of teams will copy that. Eventually Pocket Passers will come back in vogue.

The obvious difference being that in baseball you draft ~15 pitchers per year and they spend 3-5 years working their way through the minors and the average fan only really hears or cares about <5 of them who show some promise and they forget about the other 10+ who flamed out. In football you don't load up on 3-5 QBs per year and spend the new few season developing them.

Yep... Campbell is now has the 8th most wins of any Lions head coach with the 6th highest winning percentage (minimum of 10 coaches games)

I read somewhere that Goff's passer ratings are somewhat negatively effected because much of his passing yards are YAC. To quote myself from just above: If true this is an incomplete picture because football is so inter-dependent. If you have great receivers who can tack on massive YAC each game, you don't need to throw as many passes overall. If you have a great offensive scheme that gets you large early leads so you're more conservative with plays later in the game, you don't necessary get as many deep ball chances. Anyone know if there's a place that keeps stats of JUST the yards through the air?

Football is one area where I think stats can very easily paint the wrong picture. Between the short season and the heavy dependence of each facet of the game on the others, it's never as simple as Player A = bigger number than Player B, therefore Player A better. I don't think there's a football fan out there who would argue that Goff is a better runner/scrambler than Mahomes. Why is Mahomes lower then in yards per attempt? Lions OL is better... opposing defenses plan more for Mahomes to run... Mahomes gets sacked more (22 vs. 18)... There are all obvious factors and combined with a sprinkle of random chance of a short season and it's not shocking that Goff might have better ypa running. Now, just to be 100% abundantly clear: I am NOT saying that Mahomes is a better QB than Goff or that I'd prefer Mahomes or that I'm questioning Goff or any other nonsense.

How much you wanna bet Rodgers retires after this year because he doesn't want to be part of a rebuild. He wanted to go to a contender and now the Jets aren't that so...

Lions need to win by at least 5 points on Sunday. If they do that they will have as high a point differential against the AFC South as the rest of the NFC North combined.

True... again, as long as we keep winning there's no issue. But the other problem with the Eagles is that we can zero control over them. For example, let's say we lose of our games between before week 18 and the Vikings win out. We still face them in week 18 and a win gets us the division so obviously the Vikings couldn't leap frog us to the #1 seed. But if we lose a game in the division and the Eagles win out that we don't have the option of playing them to knock 'em down.

The Lions are in complete control of their own destiny right now... just keep winning and the #1 seed is there for the taking. That said I certainly won't mind seeing some other NFC teams lose to give ourselves some cushion. Our biggest threat right now are the Eagles at 8-2. They're in a weak division with the 'Boys and the Giants. They are playing at the LA Rams for the Sunday Night game. This'll be easy to root for Stafford to win here. At 5-5 the Rams are not a real threat. Right behind the Eagles are of course the Vikings at 8-2. I consider the Vikings a lesser threat than the Eagles because we beat them once already and the next game is in our house. Plus is seems to me the Vikings are dropping down a bit. Yes they've won three straight but it was just an 8 pt win at home over the Colts. At Jacksonville won by just 5 and didn't score a TD. At Tennessee they got a solid 10 point win... but the Titans are bad so just 10 points doesn't seem like a convincing win. Vikings face the Bears in Chicago Sunday at 1. Threat #3 on the list is the Packers at 7-3. Packers host the 49ers Sunday at 4:25. Rounding out the rest of the "danger" list imho are: Commanders at 7-4: They host the 'Boy Sunday at 1:00. Falcons at 6-5: Bye this week. Cardinals at 6-4: Traveling to Seattle, 4:25 on Sunday. So, who to root for this week? Rams, Bears, 49ers, _____ , Seahawks (Sorry, I just can't root for the Cowboys right now... even knowing that it would help us.)

In somewhat fairness to the 'Boys... they've had a lot of injury issues. Especially with Prescott out now you can't expect them to be very successful. I imagine that without all the injury problems they'd be twice as good... yeah... 4-6 sounds right.

Apparently there is a name for this effect now: The Honolulu Flu.

I heard those rumors too... but I dunno. Obviously I'm not privy to any back of the house conversations or general knowledge but I feel like the Bears are not a solid organization. I don't think Poles is generally regarded as that great of a GM. Now, obviously "not a solid organization" would be putting it mildly if you were describing the Lions prior to 2020 so yeah, a lot of change in a few years. Maybe Williams is all he cracked up to be and 'Flos is what's keeping him from success. It's not the franchise I would pick to go to.

Wow! An SMR sighting in the football forums! And all Lions fans agree: Being a Jets fan right now is about the worst thing you can be.

I just discovered this sub and holy cow is it good. Of course, it's probably good that I discovered it NOW vs. like 10 years ago. Anyway, if you haven't been there yet, check it out: https://www.reddit.com/r/NFCNorthMemeWar/ And if you find any really good ones, please share them here. Ya know... stuff like:

Hmm... yeah, that's a valid argument. Well, more Rodrigo then? That one tackle yesterday was killer!

It's a major bummer... but it's also the one position where I'm not too bother if we never get him playing this season. We've got arguably the best two safeties in the league right now.

I know that at some point reading stuff like this in other team's Reddit pages will be old news and boring... but after all the decades I'm still 100% in the zone of enjoying the hell out of stuff like this.

It's very hard to say... He certainly doesn't have the same aura as Glenn or Campbell from what we see as fans. I'd be curious what the players say about him.

And I don't think there is anything wrong with that. If Johnson is happy where he is then I'm all for it. I had a similar thing myself earlier in my life where the head of my operation retired some people were wondering if I was going to go for that spot, but I didn't want it. Sure the added pay would've been nice but the skill set that that position needed was NOT my skill set and I would have been unhappy and would have struggled massively in that role. So if that's what Johnson is doing... I'm 100% fine with that. That said, I don't think that's what's going on. I think Ben is waiting for the right situation for him. I think it's possible that he may have said no initially because he wanted more experience, but he's at the top of his game right now. I don't think there's a person around right now that doesn't figure the Lions are the favorite to get to the SB in the NFC (obviously don't mean it will happen, but they are the leaders). He's got nothing more to prove. So if he finds the right situation... the right owner, the right GM, the right roster... I think he'll jump.

I can't see Schwartz and Campbell being compatible unless Schwartz has changed a lot. Don't get me wrong, I think Schwartz has done a good job as a DC and certainly has skills there, but I don't see his style as being on that would mesh with Campbell.

I had a whole long reply to this typed up that I should have saved because I knew the server migration was coming, but I didn't. 😞 The short version is that the Spartan/Lions had a part to play in the NFL Championship game even existing. Prior to 1933 the NFL Champion was the team with the best record. In 1932 the Bears and Spartans both finished with the same winning percentage and the normal tiebreakers didn't work, so the league and the teams agreed to an additional game to decide the ultimate winner. This was officially a regular season game so doesn't count at a post season game. 1933 would see the first official playoff/Championship game. That 1932 "playoff" game is actually a wild story. If you haven't heard about it ready the wikipedia page here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1932_NFL_Playoff_Game The game had to be moved inside due to weather and was played on a "field" that just a few days earlier was used for a circus. Special rule changes had to be made, some of which persist through today!

Historically about this time of year is when we start looking at the draft, but we can't do that this year. Next add in such a lopsided game that there's virtually nothing negative to talk about... so what are we to discuss for the next week? Well, why not who our OC and DC are going to be next year? I best option is that it's Ben Johnson and Aaron Glenn... but I think it's very likely we'll need to replace one and I I'd say there's probably a 40% chance we'll need to replace both. So, if we assume they're both gone... who do we get as replacements? Do we look outside of the org or do we look at promoting within? On the offensive side of the ball I think the likely promotion from within guys are Mark Brunell and maybe Scottie Montgomery. Scottie has HC and OC history in college and he's currently listed as Assistant HC/RB coach, but Brunell has been here longer and has a relationship with Goff of course. Defensively there's been some talk about Kelvin Sheppard being the guy most likely to get the nod. Sheppard has very little experience though. He was director of players development at LSU for one year, then became linebackers coach for the Lions in 2021. I don't know if there are any others on the defense that are decent candidates.

I know I'm talking like it was ages ago when this happened... but do you remember when he first was our HC and there were so many talking heads who talked about how his aggressiveness was a poor coaching quality and how he needed to mature and understand when it's smart to not go for it? Now Campbell is a trend setter.

I wasn't really trying to make any specific point... just found it interesting that three games counted for so much. AND even if we took out those three games we'd still be 10th in point differential... that's pretty dang good. And your numbers with the Packers just re-enforces that. You take out our three best games and we're still in the top 3rd of the league. You take out the Packers best three games and you end up in the negatives. Just for the fun of it I looked at the Bills, who are second in point different with +106. Take out their top three and they fall to +24... which would be 12th in the league. The Eagles (3rd with +80) would drop to +7, tied for 14th. So it definitely isn't a case of the Lions being that statistically odd with three big wins totally skewing things.

Just out of curiosity, what would have been the payout on a win? I avoid gambling like crazy because I KNOW I have weak will power and could easily get addicted to it, so I know very little about it.