The 4-1 Green Bay Packers host the 2-1-1 Detroit Lions on Monday Night Football in Lambeau Field. First place in the NFC North and ongoing bragging rights for Detroit, which had beaten the Packers four straight times entering the game.
Pregame notes
This was the Lions return from their bye week. Detroit wore road blue jerseys with the silver pants accented with blue piping stripes. Temp was 43 degrees at kickoff and the field was somewhat slick after it had rained during the day.
Starters Quandre Diggs, Da’Shawn Hand and Mike Daniels were all out for Detroit. The Packers were missing top WR Davante Adams and starting safety Darnell Savage.
First quarter
The Lions come out firing with a flea-flicker that works perfectly. Kerryon Johnson sells the run fake before flipping the ball back to Matthew Stafford. Kenny Golladay pulls away from Kevin King in man coverage with the safety sucked up to defend the run. Golladay eventually gets caught from behind at the Packers’ 11-yard line. Nick Bawden sold the run fake beautifully too. Huge play.
The very next snap, Bawden brushes into Stafford as he drops back for a handoff to Johnson. Stafford falls on the ball but it’s a wasted down. The Packers have very good coverage on the next two plays and force a short Matt Prater field goal. None of the Lions’ targets (WR or TE) do anything to try and get free after their initial route is covered while Stafford buys time. Pass protection is good enough that Stafford slips and falls down but still can get up and deliver a throw. 3-0 Lions.
Trey Flowers is playing right DE outside the OT’s shoulders and he blows up a nice misdirection run. Justin Coleman helps break up a contested-catch opportunity for WR Geronimo Allison on third down. Jahlani Tavai had a nice zone coverage drop, taking away the underneath route Aaron Rodgers wanted on the play.
The Lions next play is another deep strike, this time from Stafford to Marvin Hall. Kerryon Johnson has a great pass protection pickup and it allows Hall to run past Kevin King (recurring game theme) in coverage. Perfect throw that travels 48 yards in the air.
Kerryon Johnson eventually scores on a goal-line dive play where he barely broke the plane. The run blocking through the first two drives is consistently terrible, exacerbated by the Packers loading up the line and the box without worry of being beaten in single coverage outside. All the momentum remains with the visiting Lions, up 10-0 after less than five minutes off the clock.
A’Shawn Robinson ends the next Packers drive with a brilliant strip tackle that Christian Jones recovers. Lambeau Field is in shaken silence.
Second quarter
Stafford remains red-hot, the run game remains ice-cold. The drive stalls in the red zone as (recurring theme) the Packers load the box and middle-of-field and the Lions’ uncreative receivers cannot get any room without the threat of the deep ball. Graham Glasgow is getting worked at right guard, LT Taylor Decker cannot sustain his blocks either. All three TEs (Jesse James, T.J. Hockenson, Logan Thomas) have been worthless in the run game thus far. Hockenson dropped a difficult contested catch in the zone on this one, too. Another Prater FG makes it 13-0.
To recap: the Lions get 1st-and-goal inside the Packers 8-yard line on all three possessions but come away with just 13 points. Johnson has five carries for three yards in the red zone and was contacted behind the line on every attempt.
Sam Martin’s kickoff goes out of bounds and the Packers finally string together some positive plays. It’s aided by some terrible officiating; on the very first play, Romeo Okwara is held, facemasked and deliberately tripped all in very plain and obvious view but doesn’t get a flag. Twice the umpire reaches for his flag but decides against it.
Lions are playing more zone defense in coverage, showing man and sugaring the box pre-snap but then dropping into Cover-1. Rodgers burns it with a perfect throw to an uncovered Aaron Jones (Christian Jones and Jarrad Davis mix-up) on an RB wheel but the pass hits Jones in the face and falls incomplete in the end zone. Everything is coming up Lions!
A sketchy defensive holding call on Tracy Walker extends the Packers drive. The coverage is holding up well but the run defense keeps getting gashed, as the Packers smartly keep attacking the hole where Davis and/or Tavai show their rush before dropping. Running right at a dropping LB is a prudent strategy but the Lions maintain the look on every rep.
Eventually a Lions illegal substitution penalty (a good call) on 4th down overcomes a poor series from Rodgers and the Packers cash in for a touchdown to cut it to 13-7. Tavon Wilson misses a potential tackle for loss, Jarrad Davis badly overruns the point of attack on the touchdown shovel pass/jet sweep.
The right side of the Lions OL (Wagner/Glasgow) foils a drive with genuine ineptitude. Packers methodically drive for a field goal just before the half to tighten the score to 13-10. The Lions downfield coverage is excellent once again, the up-the-gut run defense remains terrible.
Third quarter
The Packers first drive starts out with controversy. Rodgers throws a hospital ball towards Allison that Tracy Walker has a direct line to intercept. Walker dives to catch the low throw and in the process, his helmet collides with Allison’s helmet. Allison is knocked out, Walker gets a 15-yard penalty for playing defense. It’s instantly judged a terrible call by the MNF booth.
A really nice blitz call and execution by Davis salvages a stop and forces a Mason Crosby field goal to tie the game at 13. Darius Slay and Justin Coleman continue to play very well in man coverage against an unimpressive Packers receiving corps.
Rick Wagner continues to have a rotten game at right tackle. The rest of the line and RBs nicely picks up a 7-man rush, but Wagner gets cleanly beaten for the 3rd-down sack by Kyler Fackrell, who did nothing special to beat him.
Phenomenal play by Dee Virgin on the punt coverage. He gets illegally blocked out of bounds (initial block was legal but it continued with both players out of bounds, a penalty that doesn’t get called), recovers and rushes down to put a licking on the return man, Darrius Shepherd. The ball pops away and Tavon Wilson dives on it to capitalize on yet another Packers error. Great play by Virgin.
The Lions keep rolling with the 2 TE set and it’s not at all effective. Green Bay knows it can cover James/Thomas with an LB and is bringing the safety well up on every play. It absolutely kills the Lions run game and gives lesser options in the passing game for Stafford. Prater kicks another field goal, Lions up 16-13.
Damon Harrison sacks Rodgers on the very next play, a coverage sack off a 4-man rush. Two plays later Okwara is quite obviously held while chasing Rodgers in the end zone by center Corey Linsley, who he easily bulled backward five yards. No call, but the Packers still have 4th-and-16 and punt it away.
Random Packers observation: it’s embarrassing to see Jimmy Graham play this poorly. He appears to have absolutely nothing left in the tank.
Stafford-to-Golladay continues to thrive, but everything else on the offense is completely futile. The right side of the line is getting soundly beaten on nearly every rep and it’s made Kerryon Johnson a very timid runner. Prater bombs another long FG and it’s 19-13.
The Packers think they have something with Aaron Jones running a wheel route on Okwara but the DE covers him better than Davis or Tavai have. Good 3-and-out stand by the defense but Jamal Agnew makes a bad mistake by not fielding the punt. It costs 10-12 yards and gets Agnew an on-field chewing out from Christian Jones.
Fourth quarter
The Lions defense dodges a bullet with a fluke bit of good fortune. Rodgers is about to cap an impressive drive when he throws a poor, low ball behind Shepherd. It bounces off the receiver’s face and into Coleman’s opportunistic hands. The return sets up the Lions in Packers territory. After an ugly, quick 3-and-out, Prater nails a 54-yard field goal to push the lead to 22-13 with 12 minutes to go.
Detroit’s defense holds after a couple of nice Rodgers completions. KEvin Strong sacks the QB on 3rd-and-long, but Trey Flowers gets called for illegal hands to the face. It is an obviously terrible call. It’s a bad enough call that the entire MNF booth is still talking about how awful it was two plays later.
On that rep, Packers WR Allan Lazard makes a great TD catch over Coleman on a picture-perfect throw from Rodgers. After scoring, Lazard absolutely deserved a taunting penalty that was not thrown, spiking the ball directly at Coleman (who was hurt on the play) and flexing and taunting him as he sauntered away in celebration. No matter, it’s 22-20 after the Mason Crosby conversion.
Stafford comes out sharp with an outstanding 3rd-down pass to Hockenson to keep the drive going. On the next 2nd down, Stafford has Marvin Jones down the left sideline. The ball clunks away thanks to obvious pass interference on Will Redmond. The MNF booth is once again apoplectic that there was not a flag thrown on Redmond, who hooked Jones across the arms one full count before the ball arrived. To quote booth official John Parry, a retired NFL official, “There was definite and deliberate contact before the ball arrived without intent to play the ball.”
The missed call is still buzzing in the booth as Sam Martin punts the ball away. Lions still up by two with six minutes to play, Packers take over inside their own 20.
It’s an admittedly great drive by Rodgers and the Packers offense. The Lions aren’t getting pressure and Rodgers has basically decided to abandon challenging down the field out of a combination of good Lions coverage and a (well-earned) lack of trust in his own receivers.
Lazard makes a dalliance with another should-be taunting penalty after making a nice catch just inside the 2:00 warning. Still, the Lions defense holds on 3rd-and-14 and 1:46 to go, setting up a Crosby field goal attempt. But wait, Blakeman and his crew cannot possibly give the Lions a light from the officiating tunnel of inept shame.
Flowers gets called for another completely mythical hands-to-face foul. This one is worse than the last, though the Packers did sell the flop better this time around. Booger McFarland weighs in,
“They (meaning the NFL) cannot justify this. These bad calls are costing teams games with the wrong call.”
The Packers bleed the clock expertly. Crosby nails the game-winner. Nice kick. Packers prevail 23-22. Sigh.
Good games: Stafford, Golladay, Hall, Frank Ragnow (the only OL who didn’t have a bad game), Walker, Harrison, Prater, Slay, Coleman, Okwara
Bad games: Wagner but really the entire OL outside of Ragnow, Marvin Jones, Jarrad Davis, all three TEs, Kerryon Johnson, Darrell Bevell after the first quarter, the officiating crew and anyone who cares about a fair playing field and application of the rules
I’ve been covering the NFL professionally since 2004 and watching football since the mid-1970s. I have never seen a single instance of the officials deciding the outcome of a game at any level of football more than this one. The Lions absolutely got hosed by Clete Blakeman and his clueless, biased crew. Blakeman effectively admitting he didn’t know what was going on in his postgame press conference–which he abruptly stopped–only reinforces my position.
That doesn’t absolve a dreadful final three quarters of offense, brutal run blocking, wasted chances and missed opportunities from a Lions team that was poised for a blowout road win.
