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Editor’s note: This is an opinion piece from MLive.com reporter Kyle Meinke.
DETROIT — What if I told you Snacks Harrison would rack up seven tackles in his Lions debut? And that two of those tackles would be for a loss? What if I told you one would be for a sack, and another a goal-line stand on third down?
What would you have thought?
Certainly, not this.
Harrison lived up to his billing as one of the premier interior run-stuffers in the league, yet the Detroit Lions (3-4) were still trashed for 176 yards rushing in a 28-14 loss Sunday against the Seattle Seahawks.
Seattle (4-3) was so dominant on the ground, Russell Wilson had to attempt just 17 passes, the fewest of any game he has ever played from start to finish. And he still racked up a perfect quarterback rating for the first time in his career.
Yeah. That’s not great.
Even though Harrison, acquired in a trade last week, played great in his Lions debut.
He ate up double-teams on most of his snaps, which allowed the linebackers to flow to the ball. And he made a bunch of plays himself. He didn’t start, but gummed up the middle on his first snap, then was in on the tackle on his second play to set up a third-and-long. He sacked Wilson once and had the TFL at the goal line in the second half.
Not bad for a guy with two practices under his belt in Detroit, eh?
“I think we did some things well,” he told me after the game. “But overall, we have a lot to work on.”
Exactly.
Harrison was good. At times, he was unblockable. When he was in the game in the first quarter, for example, Seattle’s runs went for 1, 2 and 2 yards. But when he departed, the Seahawks did whatever they wanted. They still piled up 95 rushing yards in the first half, and 176 for the game.
“It’s a full-team effort in the run game, and we have to get everybody executing better,” coach Matt Patricia said. “I have to coach it better. We need to get our fundamentals better. It’s not one player. It starts with me.”
The Lions are a better team after the trade for Harrison, that much is clear. They’re a little closer to legitimacy. But he’s no panacea either.
He’s not going to do anything about the shoddy play on the outside flanks of the defense, where Ezekiel Ansah is clearly missed. He’s not going to do anything about Matthew Stafford’s two turnovers while trailing by two scores in the fourth quarter. And he’s definitely not going to do anything about the growing mess on special teams.
Detroit is allowing nearly twice as many yards per punt return as any other team in the league, and the seventh-most yards per kick return. They’re the only team that has allowed multiple 40-yard kick returns and punt returns. And none of that accounts for the pile of yellow flags picked up along the way.
The Lions’ special teams have been flagged at least once in six straight games, the longest active streak in the league, and 11 times overall. Against Seattle, they were flagged three more times, a big reason they started four of their nine drive inside their own 10-yard line.
Against a defense like Seattle’s, that is foreboding.
Ameer Abdullah also fumbled a kick return, which led to Seattle’s go-ahead touchdown in the second quarter, and Sam Martin shanked a punt 28 yards to set up another.
You could acquire 10 All-Pro defensive tackles, and it wouldn’t have mattered in a game like this.
“Football is a three-phase game,” Patricia said. “We speak about it every single week. We have to go out, we have to do our job in all three phases. Right now, I’m not really pleased with any phase. Certainly, I think all three of them today weren’t good enough and we have to do a better job of coaching.”
Ah, the coaching. That wasn’t great either. There’s no other conclusion to draw when a player nukes his own team for its effort, as Ricky Jean Francois did after the game.
“We came out flat with no focus,” Francois said. “We just weren’t ready to go again. That team came off that bus ready to go. They were ready to execute everything, they were ready to put their skills on display. We just came out there and weren’t focused at all.”
The Lions have enough talent to beat everybody left on their schedule except the Rams. We know this because they already beat the Patriots and the Packers. And in a wide-open division like the NFC North, where everybody is separated by just one game, they remain very much capable of winning the whole thing if they sort themselves out.
Harrison’s monster debut shows the Lions are closer today than they were last week, and a single loss against the red-hot Seahawks doesn’t change that. He’s going to make them better. But he alone cannot make them good either.
These guys still got problems, and with divisional road games on deck against Minnesota and Chicago, the time is now to figure ’em out.
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