Seven bold predictions for the Detroit Lions in 2018

Davis in a more suitable scheme and Jones added

Jarrad Davis can’t be worse than he was in 2017. He was bad enough that he got himself benched. Not fully benched, but he wasn’t playing most nickel downs for the Lions in the second half of the year. Davis was miscast in a defensive scheme that leaned heavily on its linebackers in pass coverage. He was asked to cover seasoned NFL veterans in single coverage with little help.

Coach Patricia has not historically done that unless he has linebackers who could handle it. Last year the Lions relied on Davis to be their best coverage linebacker from day one. That was a flawed concept from the start. The player who seemed to have difficulty with certain zone concepts and took bad pursuit angles at Florida, still had those flaws in his first season a Lion.

Teryl Austin seemed to love matching linebackers up on slot receivers in coverage. At the very least his defensive scheme was not adaptable enough to counter offensive coordinators efforts to arrange it. Davis was not that guy, and Matt Patricia has made a career of not asking players to do that which is clearly outside their skill set.

Perhaps we can not expect better out of Davis than he gave us as a rookie. We can reasonably expect the same level of performance with a decreased level of responsibility. To expect less than that is to ignore the case study of Kyle Van Noy.

He was not a better player in New England than he was in Detroit. He was a much better utilized, and therefore more productive player for a team that made it to two consecutive Superbowls despite his presence on the field.

Christian Jones is a consistently middling coverage linebacker at the NFL level. I know, that does not sound like a ringing endorsement by any means. Recall though, that the bar he needs to jump to constitute an improvement is set at the Paul Worrilow and Tahir Whitehead level.

Jones, much like Ragnow, Blount, Hyder, and Decker need only be better than god awful to represent an improvement over 2017’s result at his position.

There is also the possibility of improvement from Jalen Reeves-Maybin, but I do not believe that we need to count on it for improved performance from the linebacker group. The linebackers, much like the line and running backs just need to rise above their inadequate predecessors to constitute an improvement.