Three reasons Detroit Lions fans should calm down
By Ash Thompson
The Detroit Lions first preseason game doesn’t mean anything, in a good or bad way. Nothing is fixed, there is no crisis. It is time to calm down and turn the page.
The Detroit Lions did not look good against the Raiders. It was clear from the first snap that one coach wanted to test his players, and the other coach wanted to win a game. It was very clear that we were not looking at the Lions starters on offense or defense. There was no effort from the coaching staff to win the game prior to a final two-minute drill in which the team was moving the ball before they turned it over.
The Lions played nicked defense against obvious running formations. They even went so far as to line DeShawn Shead up as a linebacker on multiple occasions. If you see that in the regular season, it better be fourth and 35.
The coaching staff was clearly using the game as an opportunity to assess players, as opposed to an opportunity to test themselves. Because of that, reading too much into anything, positive or negative, is a huge mistake. Here are three things that the Detroit Lions fanbase needs to stop getting overly excited about.
The backup quarterbacks
The Lions quarterbacks did not fare well on Thursday night in Oakland. That doesn’t mean the Lions should be in on the Teddy Bridgewater sweepstakes. It doesn’t mean they should be any more interested in signing Colin Kaepernick than they were Thursday morning.
There was no reason to expect anything other than exactly what happened at the quarterback position. Matt Cassel is a journeyman veteran quarterback, but he is learning a new offense. He was playing with the starters.
They are a group that knows what they’re doing far better than he does. They are a group of receivers he likely almost never gets to work with in practice. There is no reason, in the first preseason game of the year, that there was going to be anything good accomplished by a Lions offense that did not have Matthew Stafford on the field for even a single snap.
Jake Rudock also had a bad game. The reason that doesn’t matter is even more simple. He is not going to make the team. Rudock has still not mastered basic strategies like: “throwing the ball away when you get outside the pocket” or “not staring at the guy you are throwing to immediately after the snap” His NFL career is about to end so his poor play is irrelevant.
If Cassel looks like trash in the final pre-season game, that will be the time to have minor concerns. Even then, it doesn’t really matter. Lions backup quarterbacks don’t play meaningful snaps.