Detroit Lions: Benefits of controlling games and the impact of ties
The Detroit Lions tied the Arizona Cardinals last Sunday, after playing three and a half quarters of good football. The offense was scoring in a variety of ways, and the defense did its job. The wheels inevitably came off, however, and the Lions had to fight just to earn a tie.
Although the Detroit Lions did not lose their season opener, the consensus is this tie might as well be a loss. After a week of reading every permutation of such a headline, it is easy to forget some of the positives of the game and get lost only in the last six minutes of regulation. To be fair, those six minutes decided the game, but still, a tie is not the most ruinous outcome. The season is far from over.
Historically, ties do not actually hurt a team’s outlook all that much. Since 1970, 54 NFL games have ended in ties. In those games, 29 of the teams involved (27%) eventually made the playoffs. In that same time, given that roughly a third of the teams (depending on the size of the league) make the playoffs anyway, one tie does not make or break a season. There are just so many other mitigating factors in a year’s worth of games.
Not that this is entirely excusable, though. The Lions still tied a team one year removed from being the worst in the league. They tied a quarterback in his very first professional game, despite holding a commanding lead for much of it. They tied a team after giving up 21 unanswered points. Good teams do not allow bad teams back into games.
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This game was not without its positives. T.J. Hockenson had the best start for a rookie tight end in NFL history, with 131 yards and a score. Matthew Stafford found other receivers as well, with 385 yards in the air and three touchdowns. The defense did not allow a touchdown until 5:56 to go in the game. Unfortunately for the Lions, these positives, on both sides of the ball, were limited to the first fifty-plus minutes of the game.
Rather, most of the game was actually encouraging. Last year—the last several years, really—the Lions famously won games by mounting incredible last-minute comebacks, doing just enough to win. This first game showed a mostly dominating performance. Against a subpar opponent, maybe, but dominant all the same. This is the next step of improvement: becoming a fifty-minute team.
Michael Lombardi, former NFL executive, and analyst likes to classify teams by the amount of time they are confidently in a game. Obviously, a “fifteen-minute team” struggles in the first quarter, while a “sixty-minute team” is nearly complete. By this logic, the Lions showed they could take control early and maintain for most of the game. The final step is extending that commanding play for the entire sixty minutes.
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Like every other team, the Detroit Lions still have fifteen games to play in 2019. While they have a difficult schedule ahead—remaining opponents finished with a combined record of 122-114 (.516) last season—and they did not beat one of their on-paper wins, there were some hopeful signs on the field. A single tie is undoubtedly not season-ending.