Rookie running back D’Andre Swift will miss his second straight practice Saturday with a leg injury.
Swift appeared to tweak a muscle in his left leg early in practice Thursday. He finished the workout, but sat out practice Friday and Lions coach Matt Patricia said he will not be available again today.
Bo Scarbrough also is out with an undisclosed injury, leaving the Lions with five healthy running backs.
“Just feel that (they’re) not ready for maybe the tempo of what we’re doing here today,” Patricia said.
After four straight padded practices, with an off day in between, the Lions will practice without pads today in order to get a “more up-tempo practice,” Patricia said.
If not for the coronavirus pandemic, the Lions would have played two preseason games and likely held two sets of joint practices.
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Patricia said he still designed camp to crescendo next weekend, when the Lions would have been playing their third preseason game against the Miami Dolphins.
The Lions host the Bears in their regular-season opener three weeks from Sunday.
“That’s definitely was one of the target points for us when we put the calendar together through the course of training camp was to get ready for let’s call it next weekend, to be able to do kind of a very intense, high-tempo practice, game-like simulation,” Patricia said. “So we took it from there, and we did a lot of the install based on making sure that we would have enough of the installation and the situational football in by then so we could actually go out and play in a as-real-to-a-third-preseason type of mode as we could.”
Wide receiver Marvin Hall, who walked off with a trainer late in practice Friday, will practice today, Patricia said.
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