Below is a transcript from The Simple Handicap podcast (listen here), presented by Right Angle Sports. We’ll be doing a first-look preview of all 32 NFL teams, followed by more complete team previews prior to the season. Interested in signing up for the RAS NFL service? Join here.
Everybody is circling the Detroit Lions as a team to take yet another leap forward. It’s hard to fully understand where that comes from.
Yes, they’re coming off a 9-8 season, a six-win improvement over the prior season. But they likely weren’t as good as their record suggested. The Lions played 65 percent of their offensive snaps trailing in games. Think about that for a second. Nearly 7 out of 10 snaps.
The main reason: An atrocious defense.
The Lions’ defense last year, which put them in so many situations where they were facing a deficit, was second-worst in the league. They were a horrible defense. They did very little in terms of offseason talent acquisition to change their trajectory.
Despite that, well-respected preview sites are projecting the Lions’ defense in a window that’s on average 18th to 22nd. That’s a significant leap forward. Where does that justification come from? This should again be a bottom 5 defense in the NFL, and again the Lions’ offense will be playing the majority of the time from behind.
With that said, what do you get from Jared Goff? He was 25th in on-target throws despite having a fortress of an offensive line—Goff was pressured at the third-lowest rate in the league last year—and he was 26th in catchable ball rate. The offense will still be very good, but it was very good a year ago. Are you expecting a team that finished 7th offensively, while having so much go right, to now get to…third? Are you expecting the Lions to be a top-3 offense? Maybe so. But then you’re asking the defense to take an enormous step forward, and that’s hard to see.
So if the defense is as bad, and the offense has minimal room to improve over a year ago, then where is this huge jump coming from? Where are they getting three to four more wins, as some expect? It’s asking too much of this team. The signs from last year, combined with the pedestrian offseason, don’t line up with a team that would typically take a leap forward.
Nine wins looks like the ceiling for the Lions in 2023.