Lions Must Find Way To Avoid Slow Starts
Sooner or later, the Lions are going to pay for their slow starts.
"We can't keep doing this every week," center Dominic Raiola said. "We've been winning, but we're making it too hard on ourselves. We have to figure this thing out."
The Lions were down 20 at the half and came back to beat Minnesota. They were down 24 in the third quarter in Dallas on Sunday and came back to win. It's the first time in NFL history a team has rallied from 20-point deficits in back-to-back road wins.
But it's not the intended approach.
"There's a little bit there to the adjustments made at the beginning of the game," coach Jim Schwartz said. "But that's not the whole thing. The game is played for 60 minutes and you have to be able to play all 60 minutes. We've had some where we started well and not finished well. And we've had others where we didn't start well but finished well.
"We have yet to play a complete game. We have a lot of work to do."
The slow starts on offense might be at least partially attributable to some unintended cautiousness.
"It seems like we've been just feeling our way through instead of just playing," Raiola said. "We just have to go out and play."
The Lions have been steadfast in trying to establish a traditional run game early and that hasn't happened. They start moving the ball when they operate through quarterback Matthew Stafford and the passing game.
That didn't get cooking until the final quarter in Dallas.
Defensively, all four teams have given the Lions looks they hadn't previously put on tape. It's taken some time in each game to adjust.
"It's both game plan adjustments and just us settling down," said defensive end Kyle Vanden Bosch. "What we had to do (Sunday) was keep our patience. We had to simplify things a little and not do too much. We pretty much just had to get back to basic stuff."
Still, it's pretty remarkable that the Lions are 4-0, having won three of the four on the road, and still have so much to talk about on Monday.
"You are never going to have every play go right," Schwartz said. "It's the NFL and other teams are going to make plays and you are going to make mistakes. We just need to be consistent for four quarters. Nobody plays perfectly. That's foolishness to think so. But we can chase that."
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