I'm like you Detroit Lions fans. I've sat in amazement while Brad Holmes and Dan Campbell built this team from the ground up. It seemed like there was just no way they could ever miss. Maybe they started to believe in themselves just a little too much this offseason and now it's burning them.
We all knew that the cornerback room needed to be rebuilt and the Lions did that. For that we commend them becasue it's starting to come along, even if a couple guys could use some time to fine tune things. They did well there. Getting Kevin Zietler and DJ Reader were big too.
The problem is that they ignored everything else that needed to be done or put cheap band-aid's over it because they were overly confident in what they had there.
For starters, the Lions struggled to get to the quarterback last year. Everyone expected them to get a pass rusher at some point and they rightly skipped out on the most expensive guys, but they didn't have to skip out on that second tier guys.
The Lions grabbed Marcus Davenport. A player that is really good when he's healthy. The problem is that he never is. He's been in the NFL since 2018 and he's yet to play a full season. This season he already missed Week 2 with an injury and now he's likely to be out for the rest of year with an injury he suffered on Sunday against the Cardinals.
Then they just neglected to draft one. It's fair to say that the Lions got too confident here. Now Josh Paschal is struggling, James Houston is a healthy scratch every week and John Cominsky probably won't be back until the end of the season. Why didn't they take this more seriously?
We've already beaten the receiver thing to death, but that's another one. They assumed they'd get Josh Reynolds back and they didn't. Then the Lions did nothing to make up for that because they said they were confident in what they had . Then they cut everyone they had beyond Amon-Ra St. Brown, Jameson Williams and Kalif Raymond. Maybe Tim Patrick, who the team picked up at the cutdown, works out. But so far he's not a difference maker and he's about to turn 31-years-old.
The Lions may need to dial back some of the sureness they have about their roster going forward. All this stuff can be fixed and the team is winning games, but right now they're a team trying to win a Super Bowl and it's going to be hard to do that when things they were confident in keep falling through.
