The Detroit Lions are the best team in football. They’re first in DVOA by being the league’s most well-rounded team. Detroit is fourth in DVOA and EPA per play on offense. On defense, the Lions rank third in DVOA and second in EPA per play.
That defensive success stands out, not just because the offense tends to get most of the attention but also because so much has changed on that side of the ball throughout the season.
Last year, the Lions also started out this way. Detroit had a top-10 defense by EPA per play through the first six weeks of the season, per TruMedia. By the time they hit their Week 9 bye, the Lions still ranked 11th. However, with injuries plaguing the defense, the Lions were 28th in EPA per play on defense and last against the pass from Week 10 through the end of the regular season.
By the time the Lions got into the playoffs, they were giving significant playing time to players like Kindle Vildor, who was in coverage on the pass that bounced off his helmet and into the hands of Brandon Aiyuk against the San Francisco 49ers in the NFC Championship Game.
The Lions wanted to be a strong and aggressive man coverage team but couldn’t do that with the personnel available to them by the end of the season. During Detroit’s hot start to the year, the Lions were 16th in the rate of plays they used man coverage and fifth in EPA per play in man.
During the second half of the season, the Lions leaned harder into man coverage, ranking ninth in usage rate, while blitzing more and trying to create some chaos up front to make things harder on opposing offenses. But the Lions ranked last in EPA per play, by a significant margin, when playing man coverage from Week 10 on.
At the end of the season, the Lions didn’t have the players capable of playing the style they wanted, so they spent the offseason trying to prevent that from happening again. That mostly happened in the secondary. Detroit traded for Carlton Davis, drafted Terrion Arnold in the first round, and signed Amik Robertson to play the slot.
While the improvements in coverage were based on the idea of having enough depth at those spots in case there were more injuries; it turned out to be protection from the injuries suffered along the defensive front.
Surviving A Big Loss
Aidan Hutchinson suffered a broken tibia and fibula in Detroit’s Week 6 game against the Dallas Cowboys. To that point, Hutchinson had been the league’s most dominant pass rusher. Through Week 6, he accounted for 53.6 percent of the team’s pressures, which easily led the league.